Lessig would step down after fixing campaign finance corruption | Hacker News Reader

Lessig would step down after fixing campaign finance corruption

lessigforpresident.com

30 pointsgetrdone20 comments

Lessig's proposal, per https://lessigforpresident.com/the-act/:

    1. Make election day a national holiday

    2. Implement ranked-choice voting[1], and draw districts for equal
       representation[2]

    3. Give voters campaign donation vouchers and limit lobbying, described as a
       hybrid between the Government By the People Act[3] and the American
       Anti-Corruption Act[4]

[1] http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/instant-runoff-voting/

[2] http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/fair-representation-voting/

[3] https://sarbanes.house.gov/bythepeople

[4] http://anticorruptionact.org

Larry puts forth a number of very wise points. I think we need to go further by eliminating PACSs altogether and that limited donations may come from named individuals and must go to a specific candidate only; neither organizations, issue PACs, super PACs nor "personhood" corporations.

I find it honestly surprising that people can both lament the state of campaign corruption in the U.S., and then dismiss someone who displays -- by all appearances -- a genuine intent on fixing the problem.

I swear I see comments endorsing constitutional amendments to this effect daily on HN. You can question the likelihood that Lessig gets elected, but you certainly can't fault his program.

A program doesn't have to fix everything in order to be a significant step in the right direction. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you people don't actually want to fix anything.

Amen (and I'm an atheist). Two sources probably: I think people get acclimatized to the situation and fear big improvements because it involves change, and change is scary. And also, there is an amount of jealousy and resentment directed towards anyone whom may have a real shot at successfully fixing things because they won't get credit in history books. (This last one is also commonly experienced by anyone whom becomes much more successful in whatever they're doing. It sucks, but friends and peers fear being left behind.)

Larry listened to Aaron Schwartz'es clear insight... the political operating system must be fixed before any other meaningful issue reforms can be discussed.

His singular focus on that specific, hard issue combined with a pledge to step down after fixing just that is interesting, in a George Washington-revivalist manner. I think he needs a lot of coordinated "muscle" from broad support in order to push this massive "boulder" up and over the "mountain" of institutionalized resistance (the rich, lobbyists and entrenched politicians will fight this one to the death, so he needs to prepare to fight World Wars III, IV & V).

I think it's great that Lessig is interested in running, but I think the intent of being a single-issue "referendum president" is, to be polite, misguided.

It's not actually the choice of the president whether a single issue is the only issue, regardless of how much he might want that to be the case. If elected, he would have to run the executive branch, which means he would need to select a cabinet, unless he is planning on just hanging on to the previous guy's choices until he has finished his quest. We're going to judge him on his perceived ability to do that, as well as everything else a president has to do.

Further, if he is perceived as competent enough to do all that, why would I vote to hire him as chief executive of the nation when he has stated he is going to quit soon after he is elected? His running mate will have be chosen far more carefully than normal. Also, why would I be willing to leave the decision about the replacement vice president to a bunch of people in Washington? By pledging to quit, he is effectively eliminating our direct voice on half of the ticket.

Mr. Lessig, if you want a chance at my vote you have to run for real and commit to serving your full term to the best of your abilities. I hope you do—I think you are up to the task.

I'm not sure I follow. If Lessig were to step down and hand power over to the vice president, then couldn't the vice president freely appoint a new cabinet?

Even if we got stuck with a crappy cabinet for four years, it would be survivable (see 2000 - 2004) and the good that would come out of fixing campaign corruption would be immeasurable.

>Further, if he is perceived as competent enough to do all that, why would I vote to hire him as chief executive of the nation when he has stated he is going to quit soon after he is elected?

Because he doesn't think he is competent to run the country; he thinks he's competent to fix a specific problem.

I just found out about this guy 10 minutes ago, but I very much welcome this kind of discourse and honestly wish there were more of it.

   If Lessig were to step down and hand power over
   to the vice president, then couldn't the vice
   president freely appoint a new cabinet?

Lessig would have to govern until he finished enacting his agenda. That could take years. Plus, selecting a good cabinet would off-load distractions from him, allowing him to focus more on his core objectives.

  Even if we got stuck with a crappy cabinet for
  four years, it would be survivable

A "survivable" term isn't the threshold I personally use when voting for candidates. :)

>A "survivable" term isn't the criteria I personally use for choosing presidents. :)

That's fair enough, but I would counter that:

1. We've been settling for "survivable" terms for the past 10 years

2. Some people will take a hit for the greater good. I really wish you would be willing to do that too. That said, maybe you don't think Lessig's agenda would be serving the greater good, in which case I'd be interested in knowing why.

I think his agenda is great. (I might quibble about things like ranked-choice versus approval voting, but that's immaterial for the moment.) I just think he's going to have to govern while trying to achieve that agenda, and I suspect he can do that successfully, so I'd like him to run for real rather than planning to quit after he's done.

Those seem like procedural issues -- the sort of things that, if it were a technical proposal, I would write up in a detailed RFC or spec but not in the blog post. The campaign website is basically the blog post.

I'm obviously not Lessig, but those issues sound pretty straightforwardly solvable:

1. Allow your VP to appoint the cabinet members they want, and have them continue to run the executive branches as usual. Delegate everything other than the signature of bills from Congress to your VP: since the duties of the president are "decide whether" or "decide who" unless you're at war, delegation doesn't need a formal mechanism. Veto everything except the reform bills, then wait, like, two days for the Senate to realize they can't get 67 of themselves to agree on anything.

2. You want to vote for him because while you and I might be enthusiastic about Lessig as a person, the country is not. Lessig->Clinton is much more likely to win the Democratic nomination than Lessig/Kerr or whatever, and I'd rather have Lessig get to be president for a day than never.

3. Run with the future-VP's name on the ticket, and get a promise from your VP, during the campaign, to appoint them. Make that a condition of stepping down. Obviously the VP technically can lie until the day they become president, but if you have a president who's willing to lie that much to the country and the party, you have bigger problems.

3a. (You never had a direct voice anyway. If you wanted Obama but not Biden, or McCain without Palin, or Lincoln without Johnson, you never really had an effective choice in the matter. All you could do is vote for another ticket entirely. This isn't making the situation any worse.)

It's a great idea, but it would take two terms just to make that proposal stick. It's going to take a lot more work to take money out of politics. Signing some papers and walking away won't work.

Some people call it the "Green Lantern theory of presidential power" -- that for one person with sufficient purity of intent and force of will, anything is possible. But the President doesn't get a magic ring of cosmic power, and the American political system was specifically designed to prevent rapid, radical change without comprehensive and unified support from all three branches.

Larry Lessig, George Washington and all other figures are/were human beings like the rest of us; it's only other people which catapult them onto pedestals. I think we should take stock in the coming socio-political fight for social justice, which needs a strong and wise torchbearer, so that it does not devolve into a French Revolution, but instead an insurrection in the spirit of democracy's promise of continual revolution. Because without a equality functioning across-the-board, history has shown time-and-time-again, that people inevitably seek country justice if city justice doesn't work for them. (It's not "right," but it's human nature.)

What motivation would Congress possibly have to cooperate with an intentionally lame-duck President? The President is not able to unilaterally push through legislation, and the idea of using a presidential election as a referendum is deeply flawed.

However, his platform is admirable and I hope he draws more attention to electoral and campaign finance reform. Perhaps this movement could be redirected toward a constitutional amendment? That would be both more feasible and more effective (since it wouldn't be vulnerable to repeal at any time).

I've always understood his position as implying that he'll pocket-veto anything else that passes his desk, and nothing interesting (like, oh, passing a budget) can get through today's Congress with a supermajority. It's in Congress's interest to get the stupid reform bill passed as quickly as possible so that a normal president can sign the rest of their bills. (Presumably this would be most effectively paired with an establishment candidate as VP who intends to run for re-election, so that he/she is answerable to the party bosses as usual.) And they have pretty good political cover for voting in favor of these bills: they can tell their constituents that it's all the fault of this ridiculous Harvard academic that the outgroup voted for.

Rolling Stone did an interview where they asked him what happens if something goes wrong in the timeframe between when he takes office and when Congress realizes they should just pass the bills: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-president...

RS: But what happens if you get elected president, and then — before your big bill gets passed — Iran goes crazy? Who, then, deals with the ayatollahs, or ISIS, or whatever the crisis is?

LL: The person who is elected the president. That person has to convince the public that, in the case of something extraordinary, they could act as a kind of leader that the nation needs at the time of crisis.

RS: You're saying you've got the qualifications to make those kinds of decisions in the interim?

LL: Absolutely. If I'm not qualified to be that person, I shouldn't be president.

I trust Lessig to be a reasonable-enough person that in the event of war or some other national emergency, he'll suspend his pocket-veto policy, and either act like a real president or resign unconditionally and let the VP take over. I agree with him that if you don't trust him to do that, you shouldn't vote for him.

This is all assuming that Congress wouldn't (with some justification, frankly) view the maneuver as an unconscionable assault on the constitutional separation of powers and adopt a total war stance against Lessig. I have no trouble believing that it would be easier to get a veto-proof majority of Congress to pass enough funding to keep the government running than it would to get a simple majority to pass Lessig's platform.

You'd end up with only bills that represented the bipartisan "center" in DC, which means lots of money for the security state and cuts for social services. No appointed offices that would require congressional approval would be filled (and would Lessig even appoint anyone?). It could very well be the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, if things went badly.

I don't see what's to stop special-interest-funded candidates from using their already existing money to advertise to the people and get as many My Voice Tax Credits from them as possible (if only to dry up money for the other candidates).

And I also think the Anti-Corruption Act he's promoting will eventually be gutted by the Supreme Court, as they've done to similar laws in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...

A Constitutional amendment would at least trump the Supreme Court. I wish Lessig would just insist on getting Congress to pass an Amendment he wants. But the states are already on their way, bypassing Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_PAC#Progress_in_particula...

I like the other solutions Lessig is promoting, especially FairVote.

Lessig is the embodiment of the great ignorance that a lot of people in tech have for politics. This comment is going to come off as nothing more than an ad hominem, but it would take multiple paragraphs to fully explain everything that is misguided about this plan.

Then please write the several paragraphs, else:

1. Your comment serves no purpose

2. I might be tempted to vote for the guy out of ignorance

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