Day One Campaign Finance Reform & Senator Michael Bennet on Unclogging A Corrupt Congress [10-10-19]

This is Larry Lessig and this is the third season of the podcast Another Way. The subtitle for this season POTUS 1. Our effort to frame a commitment to fundamental reform and to get the candidates in this race for president to accept it. And today I'm honored to welcome a late entry into the presidential campaign who has made fundamental reform a central part of his campaign. Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado. I want to start by apologizing. We're under a bit of a technical challenge here. Our platform for connecting to Senator Bennett turned out not to be as reliable as it should have been. So we had to use a backup of Skype. And I'm hopeful we can use the technology of audio editing to make this as powerful as his contribution was. But I am grateful to the engineers who are trying to work around our technical challenges. Michael Bennett is the senior senator from Colorado. It's a position he was appointed to after President Obama appointed the then senator Ken Salazar to become his Secretary of the Interior. Bennett was reelected in 2010 and 2016. He's a Democrat in a decidedly purple state. So being reelected, especially in those two elections, was an important success. Before he was senator, he was a managing director of an investment company. He's then chief of staff to the then mayor, maybe possibly future junior Senator John Hickenlooper. And then he was superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. So this was a lot of experience outside of elective politics before he was appointed to to an incredibly important role as senator in Colorado. He's a graduate of the Yale Law School, although he never practiced law in the way that his wife eventually did, also a graduate of that school. But as you know, the focus of this podcast has been reform. So reform will be the topic of this conversation. Specifically, how is it we can make reform a central issue in this debate? So stay tuned for the episode. Before we start the podcast with Senator Bennett, I want to give a call out, as we've done in a number of these podcasts, to two other organizations that have been doing extraordinary work to help make reform fundamental in this presidential election. You can see on our website at the bottom of the podcast here, a link to a video by End Citizens United called reform first 2020, day one. And in that video, they ask a series of presidential candidates to commit to making reform. The first thing that they do. And they have done an extraordinary job getting these candidates on the record, promising that the very first thing they will do on January 21, 2021, is, is to make reform move through Congress. And likewise, Represent US has an extraordinary page Fix Democracy first. I'm not sure where they seems familiar that phrase, but okay, fix democracy first. Where they have done a scorecard on candidates, as we've tried to do on our POTUS one page that asks, in addition to the specifics of their reform, whether they too commit to making reform first fundamental the first thing they do. And they have identified even more candidates than n Citizens United has. These are extraordinary, important efforts by these powerful organizations, and I am incredibly happy to see this flourish in this debate. But there's one point we have to keep central. As I will describe in the context of the podcast with Michael Bennett. As important as it is to talk about constitutional amendments, what I have found in the dozen years that I've been on the road talking about this issue is that for many people, if you say amending the Constitution is what we have to do first, they begin to roll their eyes and say, well, then, okay, this problem is not a problem we can solve. I don't believe that. I believe we can amend the Constitution. I think we must amend the Constitution. But I also believe we need to talk as well about the things that we can do on day one. We can actually get Congress to pass on day one. So as well as getting an amendment out of Congress and into the states where 3/4 of the states will have to rally to ratify that amendment, we should also talk about the change we know would change everything if Congress passed it and the President signed it. And that change that we know would change everything is changing the way Congressional campaigns are funded. That's the objective that we need to make central to this debate. And whether it's the matching fund proposal that HR1 talks about or the much more ambitious idea that Senator Gillibrand raised in the presidential campaign that she ran of democracy vouchers of up to $600 or Andrew Yang has democracy vouchers of up to $100. What we know is that if we follow the model of SE and give every voter the chance to participate in the funding of campaigns that will radically change who congressmen listen to. It will make congressmen adopt the radical position of listening to voters first, not to the funders of their campaigns who happen not in the ordinary case, to be the voters who elect them. So we need to do a better job, all of us, in getting the reformers to talk about the reform we know will matter and could be passed on day one. And that's the change in the way we fund campaigns. I'll talk about that a bit with Senator Bennett in the podcast you're about to hear. But I hope we can find a way, all of us, to get candidates to talk about this as the lead to what they promise they will do on day one. So, Senator Bennett, thank you so much for being with us. You know, I've written more books than I've, than the number of times I've run for president. So I hope you won't mind if I start with your book, which I was incredibly happy to have a chance to read. And it tells an extraordinary story that I think wraps together the problem of our current democracy in a way that I think few people have really appreciated. And this is the way I sort of take the argument of the book. You start with what is a common memory for people, basically our age, the kind of extraordinary moment when Ronald Reagan declared the problem, the government was not the solution to the problem, the government was the problem. But then you remind us of the follow up where Reagan said now. So there will be no misunderstanding. It's not my intention to do away with the government. It's rather to make it work, to work with us, not over us, to stand by our side, not ride on our back. And so when he was aspiring to changing the way the government was going to work, this idea, I think, captured the imagination of many at the time. But in the period since the end of that idea of trying to remake government, the book tells this extraordinary story of how partisan politics has become the number one objective of what the government is doing. You write in your book, it's a commonplace now in America. The political campaigns never end. The less frequently noted corollary to that observation is that governing never begins. And I just wonder, when you got to Congress after a kind of circuitous path to get to the United States Senate, was this fact of the partisan reality of politics the most surprising thing you're tricked upon?

I was shocked at how much time people are willing to waste their own time and the American people's time to sort of fight these ritualistic battles that lead absolutely nowhere. I mean, I spend most of my life outside of politics, but I often think about what we're doing from the vantage point of the the kids I used to work for, who are mostly kids of color, mostly kids living in poverty in this country, who are trying to get ahead and whose families are trying to get ahead. And yet the national government, for the time that I've been there, has mostly wasted their time. And we've done virtually nothing to make their lives better, preserve the democracy, for them to try to at least fight to get to an economy where when it grows, it grows for everybody. And I would say, I think in particular the what's happened since Reagan was kind of a bastardization of Reaganism that turned into first the Tea Party and then the Freedom Caucus, who rode to Washington D.C. under the Tea Party banner, which was, you know, have ever since then immobilized our exercise in self government in large part because they're version of our founding history that, you know, supplied by Sarah Palin, rather than the actual history of how this country was founded and has worked imperfectly to become more democratic, more fair and more free over the last 230 years.

So. But the point that your book the Land of Flickering Lights, makes so crystal clear is that it's probably too broad to say that it's the government that's not working. The thing that's not working is Congress. And the project of politics has become the project of winning the presidency, to become whatever power the president can exercise, but also the job of like filling out the courts. I mean, it seems like at least Mitch McConnell's conception of the job of Congress is just to fill out the courts. And the idea of Congress actually taking on any substantial problem and solving it is just so completely obviously off the table that nobody even seems to try.

It's such an important point because it is the reason this is. We're having a debate right now in the Democratic Party about how to deal with McConnell and the likes of McConnell. And there are people who will say, you know, the answer is to fight fire with fire, to follow him down what I think of as a rat hole of the destruction of our institutions. But the problem is for McConnell, it actually suits his purposes because all he wants to do is put judges on the court, as you just said, and occasionally cut taxes for rich people on a reconciliation bill that requires only 51 votes. By contrast, if you actually want to do something, climate change, I think, is the best example of this. It's not the only one, but it's a very good one. When I'm on the campaign trail, people often say we need to act urgently on climate. And that's true. I share that view. There are a lot of people who believe our generation doesn't do what we're supposed to do. They're not going to have any planet left to do what they need to do. But it's not enough just to act urgently. We need to have a durable solution, one that will endure for a generation or more than a generation, not without change, obviously, but a policy direction that can fill out for the generation, but you can't do it if you've got a broken Congress and if you've got a broken democracy. And that really is the challenge of our day is, is that is the question whether our democracy, can this democratic form of government resolve the big issues that we face or are we not up to the task? And one of the reasons I decided to run for president is I thought that over the last 10 years, there was ample evidence that we're not up to the task and very little evidence that we are. I think if we keep going down this road for another 10 years, we're not going to, you know, my generation is going to be the first generation to leave less opportunity coming after us.

Okay, so that's one really important idea. The second really important idea, I think that you, you, you know, I haven't seen it framed like this, but I think it's so incredibly valuable to see it like this. You distinguish between the corruption of inaction and the corruption of action. And you tell a story, I think, completely accurate, about how after Watergate, the obsession of reformers was to limit what, what you're referring to as corruption of action, which is basically quid pro quo corruption. So we want to limit the contributions to campaigns. We want to make sure that nobody can believe that I'm giving you, you know, $2,000 so that you'll pass my bill. But what that's left is this extraordinary corruption of inaction which is produced by these super PACs. So as you, as you put. Let me just read one passage which I think captures it beautifully. Quiet Intimidation paralyzes Congress across vast areas of policy, from immigration to guns to taxes. It is difficult to detect because it is invisible. But as with a black hole in space, we can see it through the gravitational force it exerts, pulling politicians away from hard choices we do not make, from tough votes we never take, from committee hearings we fail to hold, from bills we can't pass despite an urgent need, and from scientific facts we willfully ignore. Now, help us understand the dynamic of this politics of inaction, what creates it.

So, first of all, it's maybe helpful to say one word about the quid pro quo corruption, which, you know, that's basically the way the Court, Supreme Court's defined corruption for the purposes of their campaign finance holdings, going back to Buckley against Valeo. And the point that I try to make is, you know, they're wrestling with corruption, you know, quid pro quo corruption. They're, they're, they're even, they Even worry about the appearance that quid pro quo corruption would cause. But they say that there is, in fact, no corruption when you're dealing with independent expenditures, because by definition, they're, quote, independent, which is a joke because, you know, there's nothing really independent about these super PACs or the other committees. And they say that the American. With no. No factual finding at all, because it. I think the case came up on a preliminary injunction. They say that the spending of money by these independent organizations will not people lose faith in their democratic institutions, and it won't create the appearance of corruption. And my argument is that what they missed was a fundamental corruption much larger than anything they were contending with, which is the corruption of inaction. You want to know why Congress can't get anything done in the wake of Citizens United? It's because politicians are fearful that if they do something, let's say, have a floor speech on climate or join a bill on climate, that the billionaires will say, well, if you're going to do that, we're going to spend $30 million in your primary election, and then everybody backs off. And over the 10 years that I've been there, you don't even need to see the money to know that it's there. They don't even need to spend the money to threaten it. And that's why it becomes a corruption of inaction, particularly when what we're talking about in the case of the fossil fuel industry is strong interest in the status quo. They're not trying to change anything. They're just trying to keep the buckling under it. And one of the things that I was interested to discover as I went back through the history was that the Republicans actually had a pretty decent environmental record, even a decent climate record, until Citizens United was decided.

Yeah, that's a very important point you make, really clearly. I once saw Evan Bay give a similar account. I mean, he said, you know, somebody was suggesting that money didn't matter in Washington. And he said, you have no idea of the dynamic Citizens United created. He said, after Citizens United, what every incumbent is terrified of is that one week before an election, somebody's gonna drop a million dollars against them. And so what they have to do is, you know, he didn't use these words, but I think this is a nice way to think about it. You have to buy super PAC insurance. And the way you buy super PAC insurance is you pay your premium in advance. And the way you do that is you behave in a way that, you know, will excite somebody to defend you. If somebody steps up and attacks you, so you bend in the favor of the Super PAC's money almost invisibly. It's not like anybody's threatening expressly and you don't acknowledge any shift at all, but you bend in a way to make it so that you will not be attacked or you cannot withstand an attack. And that's the dynamic, this kind of economics of protection racket. That really is why I think what you're talking about, the corruption of inaction,

and what's particularly galling about this situation is that at the end of the majority opinion, Citizens United, they say, listen, there may be, While we don't think these regulations or these. This statute is constitutional, there may be occasions when Congress decides it is too corrupt and it will pass laws to regulate campaign finance. And we'll have to look at those laws in light of the Constitution. But of course, they can't ever be passed in Congress because the billionaires have been given the ability to stop all of that because of the super PACs. You understand what I mean? In other words, the Supreme Court has created a situation where there is no level playing field on which Congress can legislate to fix itself. Itself anymore, because of what it's done.

Yeah. Without building the political revolution, I guess, to create the demand that they do something about it. But the other point in this economy that I think you emphasize, but I think it's important to pull out, is that in some sense, given the broken political system, the most valuable thing a politician can sell these days is inaction. I mean, that's the one thing you can practically guarantee. You can't guarantee to pass a bill, but. But it's pretty easy to, like, guarantee that you can block a bill so that all the interests that are against reform happening are happy to turn over billions of dollars to this system. And the most clearest example is the one that you point to, which is the Koch brothers and climate change. I mean, they pulled together, you know, now it's multiple billion dollars to elect candidates to Congress who have given up the old Republican line that there was a problem to be solved here and the question is just how to solve it. Instead, they've embraced the idea that there's no problem of climate change to be solved here. But that's because what they can do is promise they will never get anything done. And that's all the Koch brothers want or the brother now wants from the system.

That's right. That's exactly right.

So this problem, I mean, you know that I share your view. This is the fundamental problem. And I was incredibly excited when you stepped into the race because I, I, you know, I know both from the outside and your friend Mike Johnston is a very close friend of mine, and he was committed to the view this is the fight that you wanted to take up. What's so frustrating to me, though, about the way this campaign is developed is that the media wants to frame every candidate as if the only question is whether you're a progressive or a moderate, as if it matters, you know, as if, you know, a progressive is going to be able to get into office and actually achieve anything they're talking about before we fix this broken system. What we're talking about is do we want the progressive solutions or the moderate solutions? When it seems to me the real frame that they ought to be helping the American people to understand is, is this a candidate who is going to fix the broken system? Because we're not going to get anything until we fix this broken system. And I just wonder whether you feel this frustration of having to argue about how progressive we should be when it seems clear, you see, it doesn't matter how progressive we are if we don't fix this broken system.

Well, and there are a couple things there. One is that I'm not even sure how to define the terms anymore. You know, and Bernie's running around talking about free college. And that's become kind of, if you asked, if you did a focus group of people in America and asked them, what is the Democratic Party position on education, probably what people would say is free college. Having been a school superintendent, I can tell you that it'd be a lot better for us to have free preschool, not free college. It'd be a lot better for us to figure out how to get the 70% of kids that don't get to go to college into the position to earn a living wage instead of just a minimum wage. And Bernie's policy is actually regressive, not progressive. Another example, I don't want to dwell on this because I know it's not what you want to spend most of your time on. But another example is on, you know, I've got a bill with Sherrod Brown that I've been carrying for years called the American Family act that would dramatically increase the child tax credit in this country, reduce childhood poverty by 40%, end $2 a day poverty for kids in America. You know, I think it's the most important anti poverty proposal anybody's made since Medicaid. But, you know, the question about whether you're really Progressive or not, seems to be turning on whether we're willing to adopt Bernie's Medicare for All plan. So there is, I think there's a difficulty of definition of terms. I also think, I hear people say a lot, especially young people, that it's really important to take bold positions because that's how we're going to excite the base and that's how we're going to. But in the end, what we're going to do is disappoint the base because we won't deliver, because we won't win elections in purple states and we won't be able to make the kind of reforms that you have talked about and that I have talked about to get money out of our politics and put people back in our politics. I mean, when I think about the last Gilded Age, I believe we're living in a Gilded Age today. When I think about the last Gilded Age, it didn't end on its own. It didn't just sort of collapse. You know, you had a combination of elected leadership, but mostly people, mostly local organizations demanding reform from our political system. They went, they amended the Constitution to ensure that women had the right to vote. They amended the Constitution, bribed their way into the Senate by buying their seats through state legislatures that appointed them and went to Washington to dole out railroads to them, rights of way to themselves. You know, there was reform after they busted up the trusts, and we're going to need that now, I think, if this Gilded Age is going to end and if we can put ourselves into a 21st century economy that's actually, well, that when the economy grows, it grows for everybody, which is, I think, an important objective in a democracy.

Okay, but what's interesting in that answer is you gave two different answers at once. And I want to tease them apart because I think it's really important. One answer you gave, the first part, was emphasizing how, look, we're not going to win elections in purple states. You know that personally because you're in a purple state or what used to be a purple state. So you know what it's going to take to convince moderates and even Republicans to vote with you. That might be true, but it's the second part of the answer that seems to me even more compelling. It seems to me you can say to the progressive, look, you might be right. I don't think you're right about Medicare for all, but you might be right. But look, can't we agree that it doesn't matter whether you're right if we don't first, fix the broken system. I mean, let's not argue about the details of something we know won't ever get any progress at all. If we have medical insurance companies and doctors and pharmaceutical companies funding campaigns. I mean, that's the most obvious common ground here. And it's so striking to me, we haven't yet had a campaign that finds a way to build on that common ground. You are the candidate who seems to me closest to being able to do that. You lead with this, you emphasize it, but I just wonder, is there just a reason why we can't find that as the focus as opposed to this, like, tiny arguments about, like, what are the precise policy prescriptions that make sense?

I don't know the answer to that. I think part of it is that the sort of anti government forces that have been arrayed in Washington over these years since the rise of the Tea Party and maybe even before that, have been very effective at separating the American people from their exercise in self government, from turning the federal government against itself and making it kind of appear to be a monstrosity that can't actually be controlled by anybody. And I think there might be a degree to which people have sort of given up on whether they can fix the system. I don't actually think that's true of the voters that I'm meeting in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. I mean, they clearly think Citizens United is corrupting our system. And I think it would be a powerful exercise to organize Americans in every single state around the issue of overturning that terrible decision. So I don't know, it's frustrating because it really is the problem that we need to solve to get to the other problems. But it hasn't been much of this debate. It's true.

Okay, so at the start, at the very top of your policy prescriptions, you embrace this. I mean, you list all the problems we can't solve, but you say because of our broken politics, Washington is doing nothing. The Bennett administration will make fighting this corruption and strengthening our democracy a top priority. So for those of us in the reform movement, let's just be clear on terms. By a top priority, do you mean a day one priority, like, like Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren say the first thing you're going to move is a set of policy reforms to address this corrupted democracy.

Day one priority.

Day one priority.

I have not. I've said also that I want climate to be a day one priority. But for clarity, both of those things. Yes.

So we agree that, you know, I mean, I too think Climate is like a critical thing. But we agree that's not going to be possible if oil companies are funding campaigns. So we got to make.

I do, I do agree that, but I think it's important that when you have a climate denier in the White House, that the next president who's not a climate denier begins that work. And, but it's not. We're going to have to, we're going to have to do both and we can't, we won't ultimately be able to get to climate if we don't fix these other problems. I would agree with that. Yeah.

You are a fixed democracy first reformer. That's not surprising. But it's good to get clear.

It's true.

Okay, so then I'm keen to. We've been talking about this whole, this whole season of this podcast has been called POTUS 1, which is a play on H R1. So it's like, what's the package of reform that you think is critical, but which is the reform we will do on day one? So you agree it's day one. I want to be clear about what are the essential parts, because you're platform is incredibly comprehensive, covering like an extraordinary number of things, and almost every single one of them I think everybody should agree with. But you know, what are the things that, if you had to boil it down, are the two or three essential changes that this bill must include.

So there are two, there are two huge buckets. Before I get to this, in my mind's eye, one is a set of things that are meant to clean up the corruption of a our democracy. And I'll come to what that means. And the other is to strengthen our democracy by promoting the ability of people to vote in this country. One of the things I came to conclude while I was reading my book is writing my book was one of the most important things that we can do is make sure that people have access to the ballot, particularly at a time when people are trying to take that access away. And that's an important thing, too. So I'll come to that in a second. In the first category in my mind, the Citizens United overturning that with a constitutional amendment banning political gerrymandering in this country, which we can do with a statute. And as you know, HR1 included a version of my bill to do that. I think there are things that we could do to restore faith in our government, like a permanent ban on members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. That's a bill that I've had for almost 10 years. And it sounds really political, but I believe in it completely because the majority of people who leave Congress and don't retire become lobbyists. And so there are various things along those lines that I propose. The way money is raised from lobbyists when it's raised from lobby. And then there's a bunch of things that are related to making sure every eligible citizen can vote by having online voter registration, same day voter registration, requiring portable voter registration, allowing for mail ballots, making sure that people have, you know, weeks to cast their ballot, as we do in Colorado with no fraud at all. So those are the types of things. It's a much more comprehensive list than HR1, but it's very kind, consistent with what HR1 was trying to do.

Okay, so I agree with that. And I think that if we separate kind of outside the beltway changes, those seem to be completely clear and unproblematic. And I agree, and I completely agree with you that Congress needs to fix the gerrymandering problem and it has the constitutional authority to do so, at least for federal elections. But what puzzles me in the way you frame it though is, I mean, your summary talks about overturning Citizens United via constitutional amendment. The details of your plan talk about changing the way we fund congressional campaigns through small dollar public funding. Seems to me between the two, I'm as much supporter of overturning Citizens United as anybody. But a constitutional amendment is a pretty heavy lift. Congress can pass changing the way we fund campaigns tomorrow without any constitutional problem. I'm puzzled about why that's not more central to how you talk about what the solution could look look like

you're saying why isn't the congressional reform more central?

No, I mean the funding of congressional campaigns. So changing the way congressmen raise money is a critical part of this change. Right. So citizens unite is part of it. But small dollar public funding, or even like Kirsten Gillibrand was talking about $600 in democracy dollars or vouchers that people could have so that everybody would become part of the funding of campaigns as opposed to the tiny fraction who fund campaigns. Now I'm puzzled why that's not more clearly at the center of what you're talking about.

It may be just that it's just not something that I focused on in the same way that you have during the course of working on my book and other things. And I think it is important and I know that there are people, places like Seattle that are working on projects that we can learn from. So I don't want to discount it. And on the Other hand, I also think Citizens United, while that is a really heavy lift, I think it's a lift that's worth trying to make, in part to rally the American people to the cause of fixing their democracy.

Yes, it's.

People in the past have done it. That's just. That's one of the reasons why I think. I don't think one should negate the other. And maybe my emphasis wasn't strong enough, but that is why I've included it there. And if I were president, I would love to go to every single one of the 50 states and make a case of why Citizens United should be overturned. And I think there's a lot of folks in the, you know, younger people that I meet who don't remember a moment when we ever amended the Constitution. And, boy, if there were ever a good reason to do it, it'd be to agree with 95% of the American people that there's too much money in our politics. Something the court doesn't understand. I used to say that.

Yeah, I was just to say you're right. But I guess I've spent about a dozen years now on the road talking about this issue. And the thing that I've learned about the constitutional amendment stuff is that while you might be able to excite some people to the idea, so many people begin to think it's impossible if that's what it takes. We did a poll. We found 96% of Americans thought it was important to reduce the influence of money in politics, and 91% didn't think it was possible. So this is the politics of resignation. And the only way we fight that is give them a picture of something that they know Congress could do tomorrow that would radically change the system. And, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand's proposal, even Andrew Yang's proposal, which is just $100 of a voucher, would. Would be a game changer that. That doesn't take 50 states, you know, getting behind the idea of at least 3/4 of them rallying a change to the Constitution. So I guess this is the part that it sounds like you're not against, and I'm just. No, no, I'm not.

I'm happy to explore it, but just have not really been focused on it, I guess, in a way that you have. I'll take it as a friendly amendment to spend some time.

That would be really great. That would be really important. What about the Electoral College?

You know, it's funny, ironically, I sort of feel that about that. I feel about that a little bit the way you were just expressing the view on Citizens United, I think that it's outlived its usefulness, but I think we'll be dead by the time we do anything about it. And so I'd rather put my focus on Citizens United and some of the other things that I propose.

Yeah. So Colorado has just passed the National Popular Vote Compact and now there's a movement to get it repealed. Do you have a sense that this is a real hesitation about that support for that, or is this just politics in the traditional?

I think it's just politics and I think it will settle down people over time. Most people who study this at all or even look at it all, I think pretty quickly come to the view that the Electoral College is obsolete, of dealing with it. Like the referendum or the statute that we passed, the resolution that we passed in Colorado, I think those things in the end will be sustained, not overcome and not overturned. It'll be interesting to figure out where the money is coming to oppose those things, though. You know, it's probably the same.

Yeah, it certainly is. Okay, here's the final puzzle. I'm really keen to hear you explain to me. So, you know, given the way you view the problem, given the way I view the problem, given the way many view people view the problem, that fundamental reform is fundamental and has to come first. What's striking is how invisible it is in the political debate. I mean, you know, you have, we've had seems like 100 democratic debates so far. It's questions never been. Never been asked once by any media person to address. What are they going to do to fix the broken system? So you're an expert here much more than I am. What explains why it's so hard to surface this or to get people to talk about it or get people to even understand that it is the thing that has to be addressed first. What is the explanation for that?

I think my only explanation is that I think we're running two campaigns right now. There's one campaign that engages the flesh and blood people that are in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the actual base of the Democratic Party, who are raising their families, building their businesses and trying to make their communities better. And then there's another part of this process that's a virtual part of the process. It's a social media part of the process that on a daily basis changes whatever the priority happens to be. You know, and one day it's free college, and one day it's Medicare for all, and one day it's something else. And it, to me, it doesn't reflect the set of priorities that I hear about on the campaign trail, and it certainly doesn't reflect the view of people in Colorado. I mean, if I had to summarize the 10 years of town halls I've had, what people are saying to me is, Michael, no matter how hard we work, we can't afford some combination of housing, health care, higher education, early childhood education, people living in poverty who don't come to my town halls mostly because they're working two or three jobs. If they did come, they'd say, no matter how hard we work, we can't get our kids out of poverty. And they want the democracy to work, they want the economy to work. And I think in a conversation with them very quickly, you can get to a place where, well, why hasn't Congress done anything about this? And that leads to a discussion about reforming the government. For some reason, I don't know why it hasn't gained traction in the Twitter base of the Democratic Party in the same way that some of these other issues have. And that's either that may suggest a problem with the issue, or it might suggest that those of us that have made this a priority have not communicated effectively in those new mediums. I don't know.

Yeah, but it's not just the new mediums, right? I mean, these debates are not rung by Twitter. Their debates are run by mainstream media. And even those like.

But the mainstream media in many ways is run by Twitter. That's a good point. If I think about, you know, if you asked me 10 years ago who ran Washington, I'd give you. I would have given you an answer. It would have been wrong. And when I chaired the Democratic Senate campaign committee in 2014, I would have had an accurate answer. That would have been depressing, but it would have been right today. You know, if you ask me who runs Washington, I would say, and who's setting the agenda? I'd say it's basically the 12 or 13 million people that watch cable at night, the hosts on the cable television, and people who engage politicians on social media. And none of that dialogue is actually about accomplishing anything. It's about endless partisan warfare that asks nothing but the sacrifice, sacrifice of your time. And it doesn't. It's not about creating a set of solutions. It's about generating acrimony. And I say that I sound old fashioned and stupid when I say something like that, but it's really true. I mean, it's just. I'm giving you an honest answer. What it is that people react to on a daily basis in D.C. and some folks say, well, okay, but that's democracy. And, and my view is there are 320 million Americans who don't watch the cable and who do not engage with their politicians on social media who still need representation in the nation's capital. And one of the things they need representation on is fixing our immobilized exercise in self government so they can begin to legislate again for the benefit of their kids in America's place in the world. And when I say that we can't Repeat the last 10 years of politics without understanding that we're going to be the first generation to lead more, that's what I'm talking about. Ten more years of immobilized self government while China marches ahead, while the world marches ahead, while climate change continues to gallop ahead. We can't afford 10 more years of this immobility. That's why we've got to fix it. And the. And I think that instead, at least from my point of view, we've got to figure out how to make it a priority. And acknowledging that it hasn't been a priority is maybe a first step to making it one.

Yeah, but that's why it's so frustrating to hear people talk about who Michael Bennett is, because it's always about, you know, he's the moderate in the campaign, and that's just not the dimension along which we have to have this fight. I mean, what we have to have is a fight between those who realize the system has to be fixed before anything can happen and those who are happy to continue the fight within the system. I think it's really striking. For example, Bernie Sanders has not said that reform is day one. He's not said that. He's been asked again and again. He refuses to engage at that level. And I think this is a distinction that somehow we have to figure out a way to get the world to focus on. Because if we don't get a president in 2021 who says making reform fundamental is what I promise, and here's the critical reform we'll make, then I agree with you. We as a nation are an extraordinary problem. But then that's the problem. How do you change the debate? How do you change the conversation? And I just wonder if you, you know, if you must lie awake at night wondering, is there a way to do it?

Yeah, I mean, well, one. So I think figuring out a way to give the American people something to do so they're part of the action you mentioned, you know, the difficulty of a constitutional amendment versus Congress doing something. You know, even if you're not going down the road of a constitutional amendment, we can still give people something to do to make sure that this becomes the number one issue or that we've agreed that this is a list of things that we're going to go after in the first day and give people action to organize, to mobilize. You know, like we're seeing on the guns now with Moms Demand Action in the Parkland kids, you know, seeing a visible group of people in this country that have made this their priority, kind of like we did in the Progressive Era. You know, I think that would. That would have value, and I think that would help us change things. I also believe having an honest conversation with people about how we're going to make progress on climate, and that's a chapter of the book, I go into that at great length because I think there's been so much dishonesty peddled around this. And it's because I'm so incredibly discouraged that we haven't gotten anything done on climate that I think it's a particularly important place to land on kind of explaining why the corruption of inaction in that case has made it impossible for us to do the work. And also, as I said earlier, why you cannot accept the degraded version of our political system that McConnell is presenting or the Freedom Caucus is presenting, or Donald Trump manifests in all its glory. Because you got to be able to create a durable solution, and we won't be able to do that if we don't fix our system. So that should not be heard as a call for a lack of urgency. It's all the more urgent that we fix the system because we can't get to the climate issue if we don't.

We agree. And the challenge, though, is no matter how many times it seems people like you say that, nobody in the media space seems to hear it, so that we don't get a debate framed around that. We get a debate framed around this climate policy versus that climate policy. And I'm grateful, you know, that you continue to plug away to try to make this issue central. But I think that I think we need to find, you know, I would love that you would find a way to change this debate so that people could step back and say, I don't know if he's a moderate or a progress. I don't even know what those words mean anymore. But none of it matters if we don't get that kind of commitment to Reform that he's talking about first. You're a kind of hero in the corner of this world that thinks about how we're going to get reform here. And I'm grateful that you would take some time to talk to us about it. Let me ask.

Well, thanks. Yeah, go ahead.

This is one last question. So your book, again, I love. At the end you say you have a chapter after going through the economy and immigration and obviously climate change and foreign policy, you have a chapter that says acting like founders. So I wonder what you think, what, what you think that should inspire us to do here, you know, because some could say the founders were deep compromisers. We made the compromise with the devil and like embedding slavery into our system as a necessary compromise to get forward. So what, what would a founder do here? Like, what is the move to get us to at least a government that could work again?

So my argument is that I say very clearly in the book that they did two really incredible things as a generation. They led an armed insurrection against a colonial power that was successful. That was the revolution. And they wrote a constitution that was ratified by the people who live under it. And I also make very clear that they did something abhorrent, which is they perpetuated human slavery. And I make the case using Frederick Douglass, the example that Frederick Douglass is as much a founder as the people who wrote the Constitution. And I believe that. I mean, here's a person born a slave, goes to Massachusetts, doesn't go there, flees slavery, goes to Massachusetts, where he finds the. Where he finds the abolitionists, and they find him. I think they were on Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket, I forget which one. But they're there and the abolitionists are making the case they found the Constitution is a pro slavery document. And Douglas says, no, you got it exactly wrong. The Constitution is an anti slavery document. We're not living up to the words of the Constitution. Same thing that King said the night before he was killed in Memphis when he said, I'm here to make sure America keeps the promise they've written on the page. And what I try to argue is that's how we should think about our role as citizens in this democratic republic. We are founders, whether we like it or not. The decisions that we make are going to mean that this republic will last for another 230 years or whether it won't. And in that context, I think it is our job, not someone else's job, our job as citizens to rescue this democracy and to overcome the corruption in our system. It is you know, people on both sides of the aisle have different reasons for doing this, but there's a tendency, tendency among politicians to say it's corrupt, it's bankrupt, the special interests have overrun the place, it's gigantic, it's inert, it can't be fixed. All of those things to one degree or another I actually agree with. But we have to see those as challenges to be solved, as an invitation to fix our exercise in self government, not a reason to turn away from it. Because if we turn away from it, it will become a self fulfilling prophecy that it will collapse and be overrun by the special interests and the people that control it today. So I think what it means for us today is for every single one of us to fight to root out the corruption that's there and to make sure that every single one of our eligible citizens can actually vote and has a meaningful opportunity to vote. I would say those two things would put us on the road to being. And by the way, we can be bad founders. The choice I'm arguing is that we should be good ones, not bad ones.

It's a great analogy because there is in this complicated document a very fundamental principle that we've forgotten, which is the principle of equal citizenship. Like we all should have equal political power. That was an ideal, that's what the House of Representatives was guaranteed. And that's the.

Another way, if you give me one more second, another way of thinking about that is, is that this has always been at bottom an exercise in pluralism. And that pluralism has gotten more and more and more and more small d democratic over time. And when I think about the kids in my old school district, I know how imperfect our pluralism is because they're being marginalized in terms of their ability to contribute to the democracy, contribute to the economy. We are at our strongest when every one of us as a participant in this democracy has a meaningful role to play and can add our voice. Because the founders, I mean it wasn't about creating a republic that we, where we would all agree, their view was we would disagree. And out of those disagreements we would create more durable and imaginative solutions than any king or tyrant would come up with on their own. That's why the system is designed the way that it is and we've lost that for the moment. And there's a real question whether autocratic regimes around the world are going to make the decisions that need to be made to contend with the 21st century and that western democracy is going to be left behind. And that's why I Think it's such an urgent question for all of us at this moment to. To save the democracy. That's really what's at stake.

Yeah. They gave us a republic, by which they meant a representative democracy.

Exactly.

They meant a democracy where we'd all be represented equally. But given the way we fund campaigns, given gerrymandering, given the way we suppress votes, we don't represent each other equally in the system. And I think that's why the fight you're talking about is so important. I'm so grateful for your time, Senator. And please pound the table.

Don't let me come by and say hello sometime. I will.

I would love that. Pound the table and say, let's talk about the first issue first. Okay. Good luck on the campaign.

Thanks, Larry. Talk to you. Appreciate it.

These podcasts are produced by equalcitizens. Us. You can find us on the web at equalcitizens. Us and find the podcast at equalcitizens. Us. Anotherway. There's a place there where you can share this podcast, give us feedback, give us your ideas. I'd ask you to do all three, especially the sharing part, because spreading this word, spreading these thoughts, is the only way they become relevant. Many of the ideas discussed in this season of Another Way are also discussed in a new book that's being published this fall in less than a month. They don't represent us. You can, as in, you definitely should pre order many, many copies of that book. It's a great Christmas present, I promise. @hc.com representus that's HC for HarperCollins.com representus just one word. As you can hear from the questions I asked, I believe Senator Bennett is, in his heart, a real reformer. I'm puzzled sometimes by how easily reformers get pulled into a conversation that makes it seem as if reform has already happened and that all we need to worry about is which of the many great policy ideas the Democratic Party might be talking about should be the policy ideas we rally behind. The real challenge, though, as Michael Bennett acknowledges in this episode, is how to get the conversation focused on the need for fundamental reform. So many candidates have made it. One more box they check off Represent Us has a wonderful page, fix Democracy first, where they list those who've said reform will be fundamental. And Citizens United has been working hard to get candidates to talk about reform as fundamental. But the question is not whether they agree with the idea that reform should be fundamental. The question is whether they live that idea, whether in every single speech they give, they say to the public, hey, look, I know you have things you want this government to do. I know you have things you think it must do. But whether we agree on those things or not, what we all should be able to agree is that we won't get any of those until we fix this democracy first. So if there's one thing we all should be able to agree upon, all Democrats and Independents and even those Republicans who voted for Donald Trump because they thought he would, quote, drain the swamp. If there's one thing all of us should be able to agree upon, it should be this single idea that we have to find a way to get a democracy that can actually function, a way to get a government that can actually function. And then when you think about it in that way, even for people who are thought of as moderates like Michael Bennett, it becomes clear what stops Americans from dreaming that their government can play the role their government should play. I mean, I, too think every single American should at least go to bed every night believing that they have health care. They have the guarantee that if their family needs help, the help will be there. But I think that too many in the progressive part of this fight don't recognize how skeptical most Americans are about the idea of government. I think for no good reason, I'm a deep believer in the capacity of government. I would recommend Michael Lewis's great book, the Fifth Risk, which is an account of the extraordinary work that bureaucrats do to make our society work. But the reality is most people are skeptical that government can actually do something here. And if we don't give them a reason not to be skeptical, if we don't give them a reason to believe that government can actually do something without being beholden to the corrupting influences that make it so hard for it to succeed now, then it will be hard to rally them to the idea that we need to elect someone who will make government do something to solve the many problems we see exist in our life. That's why reform is so fundamental and so critical. And so I'm grateful that Senator Bennett would spend some time explaining the struggle he's had to make this issue salient and central. And I'm so hopeful there's someone listening to this podcast who has the magic bullet to make this issue central, the silver bullet in this debate that makes it so all of us know that before we get anything, we have to get this. This is Larry Lessig. Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast Another Way. Stay tuned next week when we'll talk about the strategy to get an electoral college that can actually represent America fairly. It's a struggle which I fear too many don't yet have a clear sense of what's at stake.

Sam.