Alan Khazei on our "Great Awakening"

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of the podcast Another Way. This is season four. Our focus this season is candidates for Congress, both the House and Senate, as well as members of the media and their relationship to this question of reform. I'm incredibly happy today to be able to talk to a friend, a friend for more than 20 some years. I can't remember the exact day. Something 1999 we first knew each other, but someone I knew of before I knew him as a friend. This is Alan Casey. Alan Casey's bio announces himself as a social entrepreneur. And what's cool about that phrase is that in some sense, Alan was one of the first, first generation social entrepreneurs creating this term. He and his friends and roommates at Harvard Law School. Michael Brown started City Year immediately after he graduated from law school. Most graduates of the Harvard Law School don't go off and start really important social movements and social organizations. They go to big law firms and make lots of money. But Alan and Michael started City Year. And City Year, of course, is a program to take kids between high school and college and give them up to a year to do work in their communities or communities around the United States for the public service of that work. And now it employs more than 1,000 core members in 29 cities across America, as well as in Johannesburg, South Africa and the United Kingdom. There are more than 30,000 people who have started their jobs working in City Year. And together there's more than 50 million hours of service that were done to serve the public and to tutor more than 2 million children. This program inspired Bill Clinton. And Bill Clinton used this inspiration to launch something called AmeriCorps. And AmeriCorps became a critical complement to the work of Citicorp. And of course, it was attacked by Republicans after it was established. And as you'll hear in the interview with Alan, Alan was instrumental in defending AmeriCorps against the defunding that was brought about in the early 2000s and successfully rallied Republicans to support that program and to support its growth over the time. But Alan's work as a social entrepreneur did not end with City Year. He has become a leader in a project called the Democracy Entrepreneurs Program, which is a program to bring together an incredible diversity of people who are trying new ways to engage in democracy and to make democracy work better. And also part of the be the change movement, which has been instrumental in drawing together people in this movement for democracy reform. He's a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Don't hold that against him. I didn't get into either of those two places, but I have the privilege of teaching at the law school. He was a candidate in the special election in 2010 for Senate in Massachusetts after his mentor Edward Kennedy passed away. And then in 2012, although he stepped aside when the extraordinary Elizabeth Warren stepped into the race, and she, of course, ultimately prevailed in that race. He's been an incredible inspiration to me his whole life, or at least the part of his life I've known of. He's an extraordinarily sweet person. His wife and kids are friends to mine. So I don't pretend to be neutral in this conversation, but I'm so happy to bring Alan to this community, and credibly so, because he has worked in democracy reform for as long as I've known him. He's been an ally and supporter of the work that we've done. And I am hopeful that his words, at least will help advance the movement, regardless of whatever happens in the extraordinary primary that we will face face in this district to replace Joe Kennedy, who has stepped aside to work to become senator in the state of Massachusetts. So, Alan, thank you so much for joining us. So, Alan, really great to speak to you. As I've just explained in our introduction, we've known each other for a long time. That's because we're both very old, although I'll say you're five days older than I am, so I've always celebrated that fact. I'm really excited to talk to you today because you've just released on Politico, really, an extraordinary democracy reform package. And this podcast, as you know, has been focused on candidates for Congress and for the Senate who have tried to make democracy reform a fundamental part of why they're running for Congress. And so I just want to start by inviting you to tell us something I've heard you tell me many, many times about exactly why this is part of what you're fighting for in your fight to become representative in our district.

Well, Larry, it's wonderful to be with you, and thank you for your extraordinary leadership on democracy reform.

Okay, so I'm going to interrupt you because, I mean, this interruption will be on the thing. I decided I need to put a new rule in on this podcast, and that rule is you can't praise me at all. There can be no nice words about me or anything that I've done. All right? So ideas that I've talked about, please praise, because they're all obviously true, but no nice words about me. So let's Take it from there.

Okay, I got it. So. Well, Larry, it's great to be with you. And you know, I believe that at our root we have to fix democracy first. Our democracy is fundamentally broken because special interests dominate Washington. The lobbyists, the money that goes in. It's ridiculous how much time members of Congress spend having to raise money. They're in the room, the lobbyists are in the room writing the legislation. So the will of the people is thwarted. So I think basically I felt for a long time that we need two major reforms to our system. We need universal voluntary national service as a way to bring everyone together, turn on their justice nerves and give them a chance to be full time active duty participants in our democracy, improving our communities and our country. And we need fundamental democracy reform. That means getting the money out of politics and that means ending lobbying. I would like to have a lifetime ban on lobbying for all members of Congress and all senior government officials. When our founders created the Constitution, they saw people going into government for a period from their private lives, going into government for a period of time and then going home. It's ridiculous that people serve in Congress doing the people's will, it's a privilege. But then become high priced lobbyists, get paid millions of dollars. I believe we need that. I believe we should go even further. I believe in public financing of campaigns. I love the ideas that you have put out in others around vouchers so that people could have dollars to spend and that they would be matched so that rather than just big time bundlers, an individual could be a bundler because they could have $50 or $100 to contribute and get their friends together. I believe that we should go even further. I think there should be term limits on the Supreme Court. 18 years. Frederick Schwartz has written a brilliant essay for the Brennan center making this argument so that we depoliticize the process for the Supreme Court. I think we need to abandon the electoral college. It's 225 years since we passed the Constitution. I don't think it's. I think we need to look at our whole system and how we make our democracy work so that it truly is of, by and for the people. One person, one vote. I also think we have to deal with voter suppression, which is a serious issue, as we recently saw in Kentucky. And we have to make sure, especially now with this election coming up, that there is vote by mail for everyone and early voting so that people can vote while also being safe.

So it's of course wonderful for all of these to be on the table, and I want to work through some of them. But I'm going to start with really what we should consider to be an astonishing opportunity that sits before us. You know, four years ago, if you had said to me that Congress could be on the cusp of passing fundamental democracy reform of the form of HR1, which Nancy Pelosi delivered on her promise to pass HR1 in the House last year. And HR1, of course, as listeners to this podcast know, is the most ambitious democracy reform package passed by the House of representatives since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The idea that we could be on the cusp of an opportunity to pass that reform four years ago would literally have been unimaginable. But if we can get through the storm of the current crises, whether that's the health crisis of the pandemic, or the economic crisis of the Trump induced depression, or the political crisis of this election with Donald Trump and the threats that are presented, if we get through that and the fog clears, there's this amazing moment where if the Democrats capture the Senate and they hold the House and they take the presidency, there's a opportunity in the first hundred days of the next administration, as Joe Biden has promised, to pass HR1 or HR1 better. Now, I think I'd love you to pause and just reflect on what that says about what has happened in democracy reform over the last decade.

Well, you're absolutely right. And I would add to those crises you articulately stated, the racial justice crisis. You know, we've just passed Independence Day and we need to make sure that our country includes everyone. And thankfully, there's a great awakening happening now with more than 36 days straight of peaceful protests, a multiracial coalition coming together to say we need to deal with the systemic racism we've had in America for 400 years. There is a huge opportunity, as you said, I am strongly for HR1. I'm proud to call John Sarbanes, who's a principal author, a good friend of mine going back to Life law school. We've been working together on these issues for years. And I think that what's happened is that the American people have recognized because of the great work of a lot of grassroots organizations from the ground up represent Us Issue One and others, both of which I've been very involved with, to say we must have democracy reform to make everything else work. We won't get climate change until we get the fossil fuel economy money out of politics. We won't get universal health care until we deal with the pharmaceutical Companies and the big drunk companies, we won't get many things that we want. And just like in other great times. So people, during the Civil War, we did the Morrill act, the land grant colleges in 1862, when it looked like the north might lose the war. And yet we did that during the Depression. We did Social Security and we did the Wagner act for labor rights, and we did the Civilian Conservation Corps the last time we had true national service at scale. So there's always opportunities. And I think that we are going to enter, as you said, a new New Deal, period. I think we need a people's New Deal. And fundamental to that is comprehensive democracy reform. The bill's been passed by the House. A Democratic Senate will take it up and a President Biden will sign it, and it will be transformational.

So those wills are big words because you know as well as I that many people were cynical when the House passed HR1. And they said, yeah, yeah, they passed HR1 because they're counting on Mitch McConnell killing it in the Senate. But if it's not Mitch McConnell, if it's Chuck Schumer in the Senate, then there's no guarantee that this is gonna fail. And so the question I wanna push you on is what would you do if you were a new representative taking Joe Kennedy's seat in Congress to make sure that in those first hundred days, HR1 was the new HR1, maybe even HR1 better was taken up and passed by the House of Representatives?

Well, what I would do is what I've done my whole life, Larry, which is I would tap the energy of the democracy reform movement and the people behind it. So I know the leaders. I know the folks that represent us. I work with them. I know the leadership of issue one. I know NC ufot, who runs the New Georgia Project, Stacey Abrams, first organization to fight voter suppression, Jolt Texas. I created an organization called Democracy Entrepreneurs to support all these groups, as you know. So what I would do is what I did with the service movement. One of the first things I would do after getting elected, even before taking office, is I would convene them for a strategy meeting. And I would also go to friends of mine like Jamie Raskin, who's supporting me, and John Sarbanes, who I've known since law school. And I'd say, folks, here's how we guarantee this gets through the Senate. We don't do it alone. We bring all these groups together and we say, okay, folks, what's our strategy? It's going to go through the House because Nancy Pelosi has already promised it, and she's provided extraordinary leadership. So how do we make sure the Senate passes it the way you always get big things done? Tap the energy of the people, bring the groups in that have been working on this for decades and say, let's agree on a strategy. I did this with the service movement. I learned this from Senator Kennedy. The last bill he worked on, I worked on with him was a Serve America Act. And he made a deal with me. He said, alan, if you can get all of your service groups aligned on a strategy and what you want as an agenda, and you get them to agree that once you agree, you won't have an individual group go to their favorite senator or congressperson to get an amendment if they don't get what they want. I will guarantee you 95% of what you want, because what kills legislation is when you have death by amendments. So we organized 100 service groups in 2008 for the Service Nation Summit that reached 100 million people, and we got 95% of what we wanted. That's the strategy I would use. And I honestly believe, Larry, it will work because there is a great uprising in our country for fundamental democracy reform. People get it now.

Okay, so at a minimum, day one, you would co sponsor something like HR1. But what you're describing, you're describing something more than that, which is exciting, which is really the formation of a reform caucus. You would take a leadership role in pulling together a caucus, both inside of Congress and outside of Congress, of people who are committed to making sure that this reform actually happens.

Absolutely. And I've already been doing that work. And the caucus outside of caucus is even more important than the caucus inside of Congress. There are literally millions of people already mobilizing on this. I don't remember the current number, but I think in the last election, 19 states passed reform laws, major reform laws. So there's. And this is how change happens. It often starts in a state and then goes to think about gay marriage, which started right here in Massachusetts, and then it spread to other states and then ultimately became the law of the land, for example. Extraordinary. And again, it was the same kind of thing where in 2004, Karl Rove said, we're going to run against gay marriage as a way to get Bush elected. And eight years later, in 2012, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who came out for this first, said, we're going to run four gay marriages. So we get eight years. And people thought the same thing. We're at the same moment now. So I would be forming right away, the Reform Caucus from the country. And I would say to them, okay, folks, let's literally have a war room. Other senators we think might not be for this. Well, let's get the people in their states. Tip o', Neill, all politics is local. To make sure we're doing the phone calls, the visits, we'll do actions in Congress, we'll have demonstrations, we'll go door to door within the building. This is stuff I've already done. And I think I know that by tapping this energy, if there's a Democratic Senate, which is very likely now, and President Biden, we'll get this done, and it will be transformational. It will make everything else possible, and more importantly, it will restore confidence to the American people that our government can work for them, that we truly are of, by, and for the American people.

Okay, so one of the striking things about your career is that you've forced yourself to be in a context where you need to persuade lots of different types of people to join what, you know, my view looks like common sense movements. So City Year was an extraordinary innovation that pulled together people from all political stripes to the idea of service, especially service among young people. And so what that experience, I think primes you for is the capacity to understand where the other side's coming from. So now I want to put a really hard question to you because I frankly don't understand it. One of your planks in your democracy reform program says you're going to push for electoral reform, including automatic voter registration, making voting easier, elimination of the Electoral College, outlawing vote suppression, outlawing gerrymandering. I want to focus on the suppression part. You know, we live in a democracy right now where at the highest level, at the federal level, the kind of cynical Republican view is that whatever means are possible to make it hard for the other side to vote are okay. It's totally okay. Like, we can throw people off the voting rolls, we can eliminate voting booths, we can restrict hours, we can restrict early voting. All of that is okay so long as the effect is to bring about our victory. That is an idea that is literally unimaginable to me that anybody in a democracy would in a certain way, openly defend tactics whose sole purpose is to rig the system against the challengers to the party that's in power. So I'm not imagining you're gonna persuade Mitch McConnell or his equivalent to be pro Democratic. But what I'm asking is, when you talk to, or think about talking to ordinary citizens who are Republicans, what is it in their mentality that leads them to agree with this type of strategy or do you think that they just don't agree with it? It's just not something that's coming from the grassroots. It's something coming from the top down.

I have a broad coalition that's supporting me. I have Republicans that are supporting me, which I'm very proud of. Like my dear friend John Bridgeland, who ran domestic policy for George W. Bush. We worked together to save the AmeriCorps program. We've been working together for 20 years. This is not coming from the grassroots. This is from the top. And it's evil what they just did in Kentucky to go from 3,000 precincts to a few hundred. But how did people respond? They still voted en masse. What they've done in Georgia where Stacey Abrams the election was stolen from her. The secretary of state was running the election rules. The was clear voter suppression. But what's the response in the recent primary in Georgia, even during COVID unbelievable turnout. People waiting for hours in line. They are fighting for their right to vote. And I think what you have to do is you have to beat them on this one. You have to have a coalition that says we are not going to stand for this. We need a new 21st century voting rights Act. We have to do that. The Supreme Court. I forget the decision. You'll know where Robert said, well, you know, we can't just, you know, citing based on race is wrong. I mean, it was unbelievable. And we have to. So in Congress, I will also introduce that where work with with fellow congresspeople to say we must have voting rights across the country and the federal government has to guarantee it. But the answer here again is I think there are many independents and Republicans who are also appalled when they see people being denied this fundamental right to vote. And we can build a broad base. In fact, I know you've worked with some of the original founders of the Tea Party. Their motivation was anti corruption. There actually is a broad coalition to come together here around corruption. I don't agree with a lot of the stuff that did most of it. But when it comes to getting the corruption out of Washington and restoring government of, by and for the people, there is a broad coalition to be built because everybody understands this is fundamentally what American democracy means. One person, one vote, every voice counting.

Yeah, I mean I've often thought, and we've spoken to some of our colleagues who are Republicans in this movement that it would be extraordinarily valuable to have a. I'm a Republican and I Believe in an equal freedom to vote movement. Like people just sign up, say I'm a Republican and I believe everybody should have an equal freedom to vote. Because the idea that the party at the top is allowed to presume that they speak for Republicans when they adopt this fundamentally anti Democratic strategy is outrageous. And yet there's no opportunity to call them out on it. I also agree with you, of course. You know, you and I have talked about this forever, that there's a broad agreement about the need to address the corruption inside of our government. I mean, you know, it was an amazing moment five years ago when Donald Trump, you know, stood on the stage in the first Democratic Republican debate and called out his other competitors as all being owned by him because they all take money. He was the only one that wasn't going to take money. He, he called out the corrupting influence of super PACs. He said super PACs were a, quote, abomination. And it was, you know, and obviously this slogan, which even he didn't believe when he first uttered it and never has lived up to, but the drain the swamp slogan triggered a huge chunk of that party, got them excited about the idea that we would have a president who would take on what everybody perceives to be that corruption. So you're right, there's this cross partisan build. But what's important is to find a strategy to divide the inside from the outside. Because we often think about politics as being Republicans versus Democrats and of course Independents, which are more than Republicans and Democrats in Massachusetts. But put that aside for a second. But the real division is inside versus outside. Inside the Beltway there's a certain mentality and outside the Beltway there's a very different mentality. If you want to talk about polarization, I get inside the beltway polarization. But what's so exciting is the level of agreement outside the beltway between Democrats and Republicans and Independents about what democracy should be like, how it should work. And if you framed this issue as an issue about political equality, I mean, there's. Racial equality is of course shot through this fight. Georgia was of course explicitly framed in racial terms, and understandably so. But if you think generically across the country, the real motivation for this game playing is just purely political. The party in power adopts strategies to make it harder for the party out of power to compete. And of course this happens more with Republicans just because Republicans control more states. But it's a political motivation that we ought to be able to find a common agreement about, even if the Supreme Court has clouded the waters in the Shelby county case about whether Congress can do anything about it if it believes that it's a racial motivation. Bizarre. But that's where we are.

Well, I think you're absolutely right. I think we have to. I'm running on a platform to put people before politics. And yes, it's inside versus outside. It's also the people overcoming the special interests and the corrupt politics. And I believe there, if you poll this, 80% of the American people believe that we need to deal with the corruption in Washington. It has tipped. People are smart. They see this stuff. They see Mitch McConnell steal a Supreme Court nomination. He stole one. Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a very reasonable nominee, by the way, 11 months before the election, in an unprecedented move, Mitch McConnell wouldn't even allow a hearing, let alone a vote. This stuff, you know, Martin Luther King says the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. It bends when we push it to bend. The people have to rise up, and that's what's happening. And so I think you're absolutely right. There is a broad coalition to be built. And part of the reason I'm excited about the potential to serve in Congress is this has been my life's work. I've used this strategy to get major legislation done in the service movement. I used it to be Tom Delay. There was a similar situation in 2003. You remember, you were part of the group that I helped to organize where Tom Delay decided he wanted to get rid of the AmeriCorps program. Not because it wasn't valid. People actually loved it across the country, including a lot of Republican governors who implemented it, but because it was Bill Clinton's favorite program. So There was an 80% funding cut overnight with no warning. And so I organized. And people said, alan, you can't succeed. There's a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican president. And this was Bill Clinton's favorite program, the Democrat. And I said, well, if we organize a coalition and if we tap the people, maybe we can. And so we put together a broad grassroots and grass tops coalition. We got 44 governors, Republicans and Democrats. We got 150 mayors. We had demonstrations around the country. And then I came up with what some people said, Here's a crazy entrepreneurial political tactic, something unprecedented. I said, we have to go inside the Congress, literally bring the people in, bust down the doors and hold a people's hearing to save AmeriCorps. And I said, let's just two hours or four. Let's go for 100 hours. Let's go straight through the night for four and a half days as a way to call attention to this. And hundreds of people came from 47 states. We did that testimony. And then people went to their members of Congress and they let them know, here's what's happening. Young people had already signed up to serve. Schools would be, the AmeriCorps members would be canceled. People doing anti poverty work. Business leaders came to say, hey, we're putting our money behind this. You got to do your part. And that worked. Larry, as you know, we went from, not only did we beat Tom Delay, we went from an 80% funding cut to a 50% increase. We saved the Corporation for National Service, a billion, billion dollar agency. And now 1.1 million people have had a chance to serve through AmeriCorps. This can be, and honestly, the, the awakening around political corruption is much stronger than the support for AmeriCorps was back in 2003. So you're absolutely right. It is inside versus outside. It's the people versus the special interest. And we have to say, enough, we are not going to stand for this. And there are Republicans, Zach Wump, who I know, you know, from Tennessee, a conservative Republican, is on the forefront of political reform. So there is a base that can be tapped across the country. You're right. It's not Republican versus Democrat. It's the people versus the special interests and the political players like MC McConnell who just want to stay in power.

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about my favorite evil figure in Washington, the dark Lord, Mitch McConnell. I mean, you mentioned, you know, his astonishing and unprecedented decision not to allow a president to even have his nominee considered. I mean, the insult added to that injury was his repeated representation that even now, if a justice were to retire, he would bring a justice before the Senate and have senator and have the Senate vote on a Trump nominee. I mean, you know, when Justice Scalia died in February, at least people thought, you know, well, if at least we get past February, we're safe. But no, Mitch McConnell has said that his rule only applies when it's a Democratic president, maybe just a black Democratic president who is nominating with a Republican Sen. Republican president nominating with the Republican Senate, then the rule doesn't apply. So, I mean, it's completely unlawful, completely unjustified, unprincipled. But the question of how we deal with the Supreme Court is a really hard question because, I mean, you know, you're a graduate of a law school I didn't get into, but which I teach Harvard Law School. You know that the institution of the court is a very, very delicate institution and it's not done itself any favors in its actions which have led people to believe that it's deeply political. But it does lead people like me to at least worry about what we should do in response to this bad behavior to avoid making it seem even more political. So this idea that you've echoed of term limits is a very interesting idea. So the basic structure though requires an amendment. I wonder whether you'd think also about another idea which is also I think similarly not inflammatory or not politically inflammatory. You know, Congress could direct that judges appointed serve for a certain amount of time on the Supreme Court and then they go serve on some other court. So you could have an 18 year term on the Supreme Court and then after You've done your 18 year term on the Supreme Court, you're assigned to the circuit of your circuit court of your hometown. So you come back to the first circuit or you go to the ninth Circuit or something like that. We give, you keep the pay, you don't lose your pay, same privileges, maybe you get an extra clerk will be very nice to you. But it achieves the same thing without the hurdle, really incredibly difficult hurdle of a constitutional amendment. I take it you'd have no reason to argue oppose something like this.

I support that. In fact, that's what I, that's what I proposed is that you can still have a lifetime apartment you're absolutely right. You can serve 18 years on the Supreme Court and then you can go to a circuit court. You can serve for life. But you know, so when the Constitution was passed, the average lifespan of this country was 35 to 40 years old. Now my kids and your kids, God willing, are going to live to be over a hundred. So theoretically you could be appointed to the court and when you're 45 and write the laws of the land for 60 years for three generations. And this is not what was intended by the founders. And in fact when they the reason they had lifetime appointment was so that it would depoliticize the court, it's actually had the opposite effect. Increasingly we put younger and younger people who have no record so that they can squeak through with 52 or 51 votes. I think if you said 18 years, every two years there's a nominee so that people know when they're voting that okay, whoever you're voting for president, they're going to get two picks. Keep that in mind. And then as the people vote, you'll reflect the will of the people and then they can go serve on a circuit court. That's plenty of time. It's also plenty of time to be not influenced by a particular election. You have 18 years. And the court does not reflect the country as we see. It's not as diverse as the country. And the court and judges appointed now by two presidents who did not win the popular vote are writing the laws of the land. George Bush lost the popular vote and Donald Trump lost the popular vote. When you have Bush v. Gore, a clearly political decision, when you have Citizens United, that has completely corrupted our system and I believe you can build. Look, I, you know, some people are saying, pack the court. FDR tried that. That didn't work. And again, this would apply equally. This would not be a Democratic move or a Republican move. It's like, okay, let's just look at where we are now, 244 years since the Declaration of Independence. And it's not working. And it's clearly not working. And you see Roberts, I think strategically citing because he doesn't want to lose the legitimacy, because he knows the court's legitimacy is at risk because they have become so political.

Yeah, he's playing this institutional role, I think, in a very smart way. And let's hope that he can preserve the institutional capacity of the court even while we might criticize the particular decisions they make. But I agree with you. This is the, the type of change that I think could have the long term effect of depoliticizing the court. The best example is Germany. I mean, because Germany has a really powerful constitutional court. It is really activist and does all sorts of amazing things all the time. But it's not thought of as political because they have term limits. And so it's a regular turnover. And so there's no thought that if we don't get a point appointment now for 40 years, we're going to lose the chance to affect the direction of the court. It's like built into the ordinary political process and I think that would be a healthy change. Let's talk a little bit about the Electoral College. Obviously, I don't know if you've had a chance to read this piece by Tim Wirth and Tom Rogers in Newsweek, which maps out a scenario where the Electoral College could be hacked to enable Donald Trump to be reelected, even though he would have presumptively lost the popular and the presumptive Electoral College vote. I don't want to go too much into the details about that, but we obviously talking about an ancient institution which has been creaking at its joints for Many, many years and has increasingly produced this bizarre result of minority elected presidents or, or inverted elections like Donald Trump and George Bush. You talked about abolishing the Electoral College. So I'm with you about where we should be if we started from ground zero. But you realize as well as anyone that abolishing the college requires 38 states to agree. And 38 is a huge number. And whereas in the 1970s we came close, a bill passed Congress and came within a couple votes past the House, came a couple votes in the Senate. So maybe it's reversed. I'm forgetting now. Exactly. But the point is we came close because there was a national consensus. What we know after 2016 is that consensus is gone. There's no consensus to abolish the college. So I want to ask you about a kind of interim or a middle position. So the middle position would be this. Most people think the biggest problem with the college is that it elects people who haven't won the popular vote. And that happens. And that's a bad thing, but it doesn't happen every time. The thing that happens every time in every single election is that the presidential candidates care only about the so called swing states. Those swing states, you know, in 2016 there were 14 of them. There might be nine this time. Although this election is blowing up, who knows how many there'll be? But the point is they're always a tiny minority of the United States. They represent, represent a population which is a minority. They don't represent a representative sample of America. They're older, they're whiter, their industry is kind of from the 19th century. So what's every single time infecting the selection of our President is that the President doesn't care about the United States of America. The President cares about swing state America and swing state America. Those swingers don't represent us. So the question is how we could fix that problem. And the answer is, you would fix that problem even within the contours of the existing Electoral College if you just divided the electorals, the electors proportionally and even better at a fractional level. So if you got 45% of the vote in Montana as a Democrat, you get 45% of the three electoral votes. And what that would mean is that every single vote in the country is equally valuable to candidates running for president. Presidential candidates would begin to worry about all of America, not just about the weird, peculiar political interests of swing state America, which explains why we have tariffs for steel. You come from Pittsburgh, so you understand that deeply. Or subsidies for ethanol because of Iowa. But the point is, this would change what I think is the core problem with the court. So the first point with the Electoral College. So the first point is, do you agree that this is the dynamic we ought to find a way to solve?

Absolutely. And I think that's a brilliant idea to say you get a proportion. And you're right. The problem now is there's multiple problems. One problem is the presidential campaign focuses on a very narrow band of states. You know, we're a country of 330 million people, and it focuses on a tiny fraction of who's really important. And so the rest of the country is not as engaged. They never see candidates. They're not really engaged in debate. I think I would fully support that. Part of the reason I've called for abolishing it is to raise the stakes and the awareness of the issue. Sometimes you have to put out big, bold ideas that. And, you know, people may seem. Say that it's not possible. Although we are in as. As we talk about the opening, we are in a transformational moment. It's really a combination of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. I believe we are in this convulsion now where the super majority of America is finally waking up. During the Progressive Era, we got four constitutional amendments done. Three of them people thought were unprecedented. We created a federal income tax. And this was at the height, just like we have massive inequality now. We had massive inequality then. And people thought, well, you can't touch those really rich. Well, we create a federal income tax. We moved to direct election of senators. There was a similar uprising of. Wait a minute, these insiders that are appointed by insiders who then write the laws for the insiders. We're going to get rid of that. That was a major reform to the Constitution and the founding. We gave women finally the right to vote. And again, people felt like what? You know, even Wilson, a Democratic president, resisted that for years until it was Alice Paul and other activists and the grassroots that overwhelmed him. So we also abolished alcohol, which we decided later was not a good idea. But, you know, three out of four ain't bad. And so I. So part of the reason I put that out there is that I do want to raise the stakes so that people understand. And, Larry, I think people are going to look back on this period in history and say we had two presidents who were elected by the Electoral College and they made disastrous decisions. The Iraq war was a disaster. We're still paying for that. We're still literally paying for it, but completely upended America's role in the world, the Middle east, and Donald Trump. Oh, my God, you can just go through a litany of how he is trying to destroy our democracy to this day. And the majority of the American people. People understood who should be president. And because of this anachronism of the Electoral College, we didn't get the president that the people wanted. So I support that. In a nanosecond, anything that's gonna change it so that the candidates actually have to earn the votes of people all over the country and that the will of the people prevails in the election, I'm for.

Okay, so let's talk about the will of the people prevailing. So one way to understand 2000, which I agree with you, was a unbelievable tragedy in the arc of the history of the United States. Even though we look back at George Bush and think kind of fondly about George Bush, we should not forget the fact that his getting us into that war was a catastrophic error in the history of foreign policy in America, and it completely changed the future of that country. And also, you know, if he had not been elected, Al Gore most likely would have gotten his number one request, which was climate change legislation. We would be celebrating 20 years of climate change legislation, which, of course, so it was catastrophic. One way to understand the catastrophe is to blame the Electoral College. A second way to understand the catastrophe is to blame the way we count votes. So you have a election in the state of Florida. The state of Florida, 96,000 people vote for Ralph Nader. George Bush wins the state of Florida by, I think it's what, 524 votes, some ridiculously small number like that. If the state of Florida had adopted ranked choice voting, and they'd said to people in Florida, go ahead, express yourself, vote for Ralph Nader. If you think Ralph Nader would be the best president, if you agree with him, there's not a dime's worth of difference between George Bush and Al Gore. The most astonishing statement to come out of someone's mouth, I think, in the history of American politics. But that's what he believed. Go ahead and do that, but then tell us what your second choice is. And if you had asked those 96,000 people what their second choice would have been, I'm pretty convinced that more than 534 of them would have said, my second choice. A majority would have said, my second choice is Al Gore over George Bush. So if we just knew how to count preferences, we would have avoided this disaster. Now, I know you support ranked choice voting. And here in Massachusetts, we've succeeded. I don't take any responsibility for this, although I supported it, but an incredible coalition led in part by people who had succeeded in getting this in Maine, has now succeeded to get this on the ballot. We're going to be voting for it. I think. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the president. But. Okay, that's a small mistake. But you support ranked choice voting. Should we be pushing ranked choice voting nationally now, especially in the context of these contests for president, where the unintended consequence of voting your mind leads to a disaster for the United States?

Absolutely. I'm strongly in favor of ranked choice voting and. And again, thanks to a coalition, it will be on the ballot in Massachusetts. I very much hope our state votes for it. Look, I'm running an election, Larry, for Congress with nine candidates, theoretically, and actually this happened when Nikki Sangas stepped down. A candidate can win my election with 18% of the vote, meaning 82% of the people didn't vote for them. I don't think that's democracy. I think that you should have to earn a majority of the voters. And with ranked choice voting, you would have to, because people would have their first choice and their second choice. As you said, even in this, in my own election right here, I'd much rather have ranked choice voting because whoever wins is going to win with 18% of the people want them. You want to have a mandate. So nationally, absolutely, because I do think that people, you know, the same thing happened with Hillary Clinton, with Jill Stein. People say there were votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania that Jill Stein got and sure, vote for Jill Stein and then put your second choice on. All those people would have voted for Hillary Clinton. So we should do it nationally. And again, the way these reforms work historically is they start in the states, states start to adopt them, and then there comes. And then. And then people. Oh, actually, that really worked. Like, it was great that Maine, in fact, there was a U.S. house seat that was decided by ranked choice voting in the last election. So they, oh, that worked in Maine, people. So we can try it here in Massachusetts and then we can do it in Wisconsin. And then eventually we say, wait a minute, this is working. Because often people say, well, we can't change. You know, the system is the system. And that's what the founders intended. The founders, you know, were 244 years ago. So absolutely, we should do that. And it would also broaden our discourse because then you would have candidates who may not be among the two parties, but who have important issues like the Green Party. Putting climate change on the agenda early. That would then broaden the discourse without the risk of people feeling, well, if I throw away my vote, or what actually happened in Florida with people voting for Ralph Nader and then Al Gore. But I still think that was a corrupt Supreme Court decision. They stopped the counting of the votes. It wasn't even that Al Gore necessarily lost. They literally stopped the counting. Unprecedented again. So I'm absolutely for that. I'm for anything that's going to get us to a true democracy.

Yeah. And, and the conception of what a true democracy is is really important. There's a real interesting fight in the ranked choice, or let's say the alternative voting movement. Because there are some people who support ranked choice or alternative voting, whether that's balanced ballot or negative voting or whatever these alternatives might look like, because they want to create a multi party system. They're against the two party system. But I think it's important to recognize you can be for the two party system system. You can think that it's a healthy thing to have healthy competition between two healthy parties, but still support something like ranked choice voting for exactly the reason you're talking about. So think about the Democratic nomination for president. I didn't support him ultimately. I was an Elizabeth Warren supporter, but I was a big fan of Andrew Yang. And Yang, of course was pushing this idea of universal basic income. And my view is universal basic income is an idea that we have got to begin to grapple with and understand. And of course the pandemic demonstrated why it would be such an incredibly valuable thing to have. It's just as important and transformative in the debate as Bernie Sanders introducing single payer healthcare or free college for all in 2016 was. So it was critical. But, but if there had been ranked choice, more candidates would have looked at what Andrew Yang was saying and say, let's think about this idea because let's aim for the number two vote of the Andrew Yang supporters so that when they get their first choice to say I'm for Andrew Yang, their second choice, they could say, but you know, Elizabeth Warren has said nice things about universal basic income. So I'm gonna support Elizabeth Warren. So you begin to find a way to bring ideas from the outside side into the center and you force candidates to talk about ideas to build a majority coalition so that in the end the candidates are selected is at least a candidate who we would say a majority of the party it can live with. Like that would be such an accomplishment if we could say at least a majority of us can live with this candidate as opposed to, oh my God, I can't believe 19%. We've now selected candidate X to be our congressperson.

Absolutely. That's why I'm for it. I, I do believe that we have to have an ongoing injection of new ideas and fundamentally new approaches. Again, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I've been a social entrepreneur, a non profit entrepreneur, a reform entrepreneur, and I want to be a political entrepreneur. I have put out a whole swath of ideas that I think are new and different.

Different.

And if we had this, then there would be encouragement of that. Instead of people saying, well, I can't risk that it might be too bold or progressive or instead people will be, well, I can actually put this forward and other candidates may adopt it even if I'm not successful because of ranked choice voting. So I think that's another really strong reason why we should have it.

Okay, so then I want to shift in the final chunk of our time here to an aspect of ranked choice voting that I think separates it and points to a real potential for reform. As you know, in Maine, when ranked choice voting was being pushed, it was part of a movement that was explicitly nonpartisan. They would not permit people to talk in the campaign about how this was going to help the Democrats or help the Republicans. It wasn't about it helping either side. It was about helping people be able to vote. And you know our friend Katie Fahey in Michigan, who launched the movement to get gerrymandering reform in Michigan? She too was militantly nonpartisan. You're not allowed to talk about this from the perspective of how is it going to help the Democrats or how is it going to help the Republicans? We have to talk about this from the perspective of how is it gonna help citizens be better citizens? And what I think these two reform entrepreneurs point us to, these two reform movements point us to, is the extraordinary potential if we can begin to think about issues in a way that doesn't call on supporters to trash the other side. I mean, there's a certain number of Americans who just love to engage in the politics of hate. They just, they live for it. They live for the idea of, like, finding another reason to, to call the other side the devil. And, you know, I love that moment when I get to think about the dark lord in Washington. I love to practice that politics of hate in a certain part of my life. But much more exciting to me are places where we can bring people together who don't agree about substantive policy and we can say look, we disagree about really important things. Let's not be kumbaya about it. There are really important differences in politics in America, but we ought to be able to agree on this. And if we can find issues where we can get that dynamic going, then the energy behind those reform movements would be orders of magnitude bigger than the energy behind the politics of hate movements. And I know you've been at the center of that, but I just wonder. You've had an extraordinary experience being out there as a candidate right now for Congress, and you were a candidate before for the Senate. How have you experienced talking to ordinary voters and getting them into what we could call the politics of love as opposed to the politics of hate? I mean, how has that dynamic played out?

I am. I'm all. I'm all about the politics of love. That's what we need. As Martin Luther King said, darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. And you're absolutely right, Larry. So I'll just tell you about my experience, too. Two weeks ago, I was in Fall River. I started. We've created the Casey Corps to do volunteer service. And we've been doing a lot of thank yous for essential workers. We're now discovering who the true essential workers are. Our healthcare workers, our sanitation workers, our grocery store workers keeping us fed, our teachers who are shifting, you know, online. These are the essential workers. So we started at Angels Anonymous, which was a totally volunteer food bank. Started out of the back of a truck. They've now built it so that they are a food pantry for Fall River. They get food once a month. They do give out food. So we started at nine in the morning, and Larry, there was a line a mile long of cars, 300 cars backed up waiting for food. By 10:30, the food was gone. Every family gets, like, a frozen chicken, some vegetables, some liquids, and two cartons of eggs. I turned to Vanessa and I said, honey, this is for a month. And they've been doing this regularly now during the pandemic. And people, it's just, this is the United States of America. It's unconscionable. And I turned to Vanessa, I said, honey, you know, we could go through two cartons of eggs in a week. We have two kids. We'll make one big breakfast, and we'll use up a carton of eggs just. And two for a month for a family of four, sometimes more. And when I talk to people, they're like, why can't we just work together? Why can't we take care of each other. The people in line were grateful. They were gracious. They're hard working. Who, as you said, the pandemic is showing 40% of the country is $500 away from a disaster while the disaster has hit, and you've got a line of a mile long, and this is happening every month. And then we went to Amaral's, which is a grocery store started by Portuguese immigrants in 1978. I talked to David, who runs it. He lost his mom to the pandemic, to Covid, his sister, who was only 40 years old, and his uncle. We went there just to say thank you, because they were closed for two months and they'd recently reopened. And it's a pillar of the community in Fall River. And it was very emotional. And I understand this. I've lost my mom and my dad. And he, with a tear in his eyes, he said, alan, I know maybe we can't completely eliminate poverty, but can we just learn to take care of each other? Can we come together? Can we have a greater sense of compassion? That's what people want. So you're absolutely right, Larry. People don't want this hatred or this vilification. You know, there are candidates that I disagree with, but you don't have to vilify people. You don't have to promote this. You're evil because you believe in this. The first thing I said to the city of Corps members was the Native American prayer, Great Spirit, grant that I shall not criticize my brother or sister until I've walked a mile in his or her moccasins. It's the Native American version of walk in another person's shoes. We have to restore a sense of empathy in our politics. And I actually think that's what people want. I've been hearing that as I campaign all across the district, similar stories. The American people get it. And this is the strategy of the dark Lord and the evil man in the White House. If he can continue to divide and conquer, if he can put one group against the other, then he wins. But if we can overcome that and say, wait a minute, we're all in this together. It's why I still believe in national services. If everybody served, you'd start with, where do you serve? You might not agree politically. You might be from different faiths, but you'd have a common appreciation. You served our country, I served our country. We can start from there, and then we can talk about what we agree and disagree on. The American people want this, and I think Joe Biden's right. This election is about the soul of America. And we're seeing the soul of America in response to this pandemic and in response to the brutal killing of George Floyd. This extraordinary awakening. It's not like the 60s, which was mostly African Americans with some white allies. This is now a broad coalition led by African Americans, but with many more white and brown and Asian allies coming together, saying brutally killing George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Armaan Arbery and Rayshard Brooks and too many people going back 400 years is not who we are and we will not stand for it. So I completely agree with you. Ultimately, that's what the election is about. We have to restore politics of love and compassion and caring for one another.

Brother, I've loved you for many years and I'm grateful that you would take time to talk to me and to talk to those who've listened to this podcast. Good luck in your race, Alan.

It's mutual, Larry. I love you, too. And I know I'm not allowed to praise you, but we need people like you to stand for justice with integrity and to fight, fight for what's right. And that's what I believe is happening in the country now. It's what gives me so much hope. It's always darkest before the dawn, but I believe after this election, we're going to have a burst of transformational change. It's why I feel so privileged to be able to run for Congress and hope with the support of the people of the 8th district, I'll be in there to fight for all these changes that I know. People, thank you.

As you know, these podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens Us. You find us on the web at, well, you guessed it, Equal Citizens Us. You can find this podcast at Equal Citizens Us. Anotherway, There's a place to share the podcast and to give us your feedback and your ideas. Do both. And as I've said again and again, please, if you have ideas of others we should be speaking to, please suggest them to us through that form. As I said in this podcast, this is a moment of extraordinary optimism. How incredible it is to be able to utter those words. But it is a moment of extraordinary optimism. Because if we can get through this war, this economic catastrophe, this health catastrophe, this political catastrophe, if we can pass through this successfully and achieve elections of people who believe in reform, especially in the United States Senate, but also in the House and in the presidency, then there is a chance, a real chance, an unimaginable five years ago chance, that Congress would pass that reform In a year from now, in a year from now, this problem could be 85% solved. It's not like everything will be fixed by even passing HR1, but at least if we passed HR1 or its equivalent or something better, 85% of the problem will have been taken away and we can focus our energy on the remaining bit. It's astonishing to think about that. It's so hard to get people to think that way right now, so terrified are we about the urgent struggle that we face. But somehow we need to get attention beyond this crisis. And that's the objective of these podcasts. And that's why I'm asking you. When you hear others who speak in this hopeful way, who are getting people to recognize that there is a real chance for something real, then I'd like you to share those names with us to help us find them, to echo what they're saying, to amplify their voice, to give more people a chance to hear this hopefulness. Because hope is the only way we pass through these times. The temptation to the politics of hate is overwhelming. But as Alan reminds us at the end of this podcast, Dr. King told us, darkness does not defeat darkness, only light does. Hate does not defeat hate, only love does. Thank you again for listening. Thanks for your support. The last podcast, I said I was going away. The truth is, that was yesterday. Today is Independence Day Monday. I'm disappearing, and I hope I disappear and come back to an even more hopeful story as we collect even more people who are committed to reform. This is Larry Lessig. Until the next one of these episodes. Thank you very much.