Changing Congress

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to watch Lawrence Lessig give a presentation to Googlers about his new Change Congress movement.  Lessig is renowned for his unique presentation style (he probably uses every Keynote transition and effect there is), and it was indeed a very engaging experience.  I’m embedding the recording of that presentation at the end of this post — you should definitely check it out.

The Change Congress website describes the movement’s purpose thusly:

Right now, special interests have more influence over our political system than regular folks because of our broken campaign finance laws. These special interests pump millions of dollars into congressional campaigns each cycle, and as a result, they block real change on issue after issue.

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

Change Congress is supporting new legislation that will be introduced in the next few weeks to reform campaign finance laws:

Under this legislation, congressional candidates who raise a threshold number of small-dollar donations would qualify for a chunk of funding—several hundred thousand dollars. If they accept this funding, they can’t raise big-dollar donations. But they can raise contributions up to a certain amount (such as $100 or $250), which would be matched several times over by a central fund. This would create an incentive for politicians to opt into this system and run people-powered campaigns.

But while this bill shows more promise than ever of passing (President Obama is reportedly going to advocate for it), Lessig’s new organization is not just pushing legislation; it’s also trying to get people involved.  To kick off its campaign, Change Congress is organizing what it is calling a “donor strike”.  Essentially, it is asking supporters — that is, ordinary Joes and Sallys like you and me — to withhold contributions to politicians who do not explicitly support the hybrid model of campaign financing that Change Congress champions.

At first, I was skeptical and even critical of this idea.  My opinion paralleled that of reader Don Matheson, who commented in a Freakonomics blog Q&A: “The more you get individuals to follow your lead, the easier it will be for the big buyers to make the deal at a lower rate, as the importance of their big donations grows as a percentage of the whole. I hope I am missing something here.”

Well, it turns out Don and I were missing something: not the math, but the overall strategy.  It turns out that Lessig is quite realistic about the minor “quantitative” impact that the strike will level on Congress.  Though it is less evident in his response to Matheson’s concern in the Freakonomics Q&A, he soberly admitted in the Google Q&A that a citizen donor strike won’t make that many representatives shake in their boots.

The goal of the strike is to give citizen a substantive way of demonstrating what polls are showing, and to show Congress that citizens are ready to put (or, I guess, withhold) their money where their mouth is.  In my and Lessig’s district, apparently, 88% of voters think that money buys results in Congress.  That’s pretty sad.  As he puts it in the Freakonomics Q&A: “While most of us don’t want to be giving (large amounts of) money to politicians, Change Congress is now simply offering the public a reason for us all to do what we already want to do.”

The goal of the strike is to tease out the frustration that many of us voiced during the 2008 electoral campaign: that we’re tired of the corruption, tired of special interests buying votes, and tired of feeling unrepresented by our representatives.  Further, it seeks to turn that frustration into action (or, intentional inaction) and make Congress feel and see it.  When you sign up for the strike, all you do is indicate how much money you gave to federal candidates in 2007-2008 under the assumption that you would have given that much again during the next cycle.  On this page, you can see how much cash politicians are allegedly going to be missing out on because they haven’t supported the reforms.

What do you think of this — not just the strike, but the idea of citizen funded elections?  Do you think it will work?  Is it a half-baked idea?  Will campaign finance reform get the special interests out of Congress’s ear, or will they find other (and potentially more nefarious) ways of corrupting the process?  Or do you think there’s a problem at all?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Change Congress.