February 05, 2010
If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress
Lawrence Lessig in The Nation:
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans' faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high--76 percent have a fair or great deal of "trust and confidence" in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high--61 percent.
But consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed--slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have "trust and confidence" in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today.
The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.
This is corruption.
More here. And here's more:
Professor Lawrence Lessig has known Barack Obama for 20 years, and supported all his campaigns. In this video produced for The Nation and FixCongressFirst.org, Lessig outlines his concern over President Obama's limited approach to truly "changing Washington," and his view that Congress is a deeply broken institution in need of need reform:
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:05 AM | Permalink
Comments
Lessig is, as always, a voice of reason. Only now he's a pissed-off voice of reason. I welcome the change in tenor.
Posted by: Cyrus Hall | Feb 5, 2010 5:11:54 AM
It may be my computer but the audio on this is hard for me to hear.
I got more by reading his article in The Nation.
http://bit.ly/9KzMW9
This corruption is not hidden. On the contrary, it is in plain sight, with its practices simply more and more brazen. Consider, for example, the story Robert Kaiser tells in his fantastic book So Damn Much Money, about Senator John Stennis, who served for forty-one years until his retirement in 1989. Stennis, no choirboy himself, was asked by a colleague to host a fundraiser for military contractors while he was chair of the Armed Services Committee. "Would that be proper?" Stennis asked. "I hold life and death over those companies. I don't think it would be proper for me to take money from them."
Is such a norm even imaginable in DC today? Compare Stennis with Max Baucus, who has gladly opened his campaign chest to $3.3 million in contributions from the healthcare and insurance industries since 2005, a time when he has controlled healthcare in the Senate. Or Senators Lieberman, Bayh and Nelson, who took millions from insurance and healthcare interests and then opposed the (in their states) popular public option for healthcare. Or any number of Blue Dog Democrats in the House who did the same, including, most prominently, Alabama's Mike Ross. Or Republican John Campbell, a California landlord who in 2008 received (as ethics reports indicate) between $600,000 and $6 million in rent from used car dealers, who successfully inserted an amendment into the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act to exempt car dealers from financing rules to protect consumers. Or Democrats Melissa Bean and Walter Minnick, who took top-dollar contributions from the financial services sector and then opposed stronger oversight of financial regulations.
The list is endless; the practice open and notorious. Since the time of Rome, historians have taught that while corruption is a part of every society, the only truly dangerous corruption comes when the society has lost any sense of shame. Washington has lost its sense of shame.
And he's just getting warmed up. Later he sketches one of those it-might-have-been-different ponies that never appeared under the Christmas tree...
There was a way Obama might have had this differently. It would have been risky, some might say audacious. And it would have required an imagination far beyond the conventional politics that now controls his administration.
No doubt, 2009 was going to be an extraordinarily difficult year. Our nation was a cancer patient hit by a bus on her way to begin chemotherapy. The first stages of reform thus had to be trauma care, at least to stabilize the patient until more fundamental treatment could begin.
[...]Building on the rhetoric at the core of his campaign, on January 20, 2009, Obama could have said:
"America has spoken. It has demanded a fundamental change in how Washington works, and in the government America delivers. I commit to America to work with Congress to produce that change. But if we fail, if Congress blocks the change that America has demanded--or more precisely, if Congress allows the special interests that control it to block the change that America has demanded--then it will be time to remake Congress. Not by throwing out the Democrats, or by throwing out the Republicans. But by throwing out both, to the extent that both continue to want to work in the old way. If this Congress fails to deliver change, then we will change Congress."
Posted by: John Ballard | Feb 5, 2010 8:18:10 AM
John, I excerpted and linked the article above the video. Did you miss that?
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Feb 5, 2010 2:33:19 PM
How embarrassing. I caught it after posting.
That's what comes from skimming too fast...
Mea culpa. Will pay better attention.
Posted by: John Ballard | Feb 6, 2010 10:28:38 AM
I feel that an even more fundamental problem is the corruption of the American people. They do not take responsibility for how they are governed, and until they do, they will have a corrupt government.
Most of my friends and acquaintances who are politically active have college degrees, and associate with others who have, and so can find lots of reasons why the peoples' will is thwarted. The trouble is, far too many of these people don't want to do much besides shop and watch football games when they're not working. They don't lay awake at night worrying about the country's direction.
I know this sounds like undemocratic blasphemy, but I don't see how we can have rational government when the people don't love knowledge.
Posted by: Alice de Tocqueville | Feb 8, 2010 2:02:24 PM
Lessing is a brilliant man, and his article is a must-read. But, and I know this is juvenile of me, but doesn't he sort of look and sound a lot like Bruno's gay lover. Just saying.
Posted by: Jone45 | Feb 8, 2010 8:02:59 PM
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