Jason and Adam Talk Democracy In The Debates [10-23-19]

Welcome to Another Way. I'm Jason Harrow, the executive director and chief counsel of Equal Citizens, and I'm joined today by Adam Eichen, who is the Equal Citizens campaign manager. Hey, Adam, how are you? Great.

How are you doing, Jason?

I am doing good. So we're bringing you this bonus episode. You're going to get two episodes this week in your Another Wave feed for a couple reasons. One is we had to talk about all that's going on in the democracy reform movement. We had a democratic debate, we had a new comprehensive plan by Elizabeth Warren. Lots of other news going on, other news on Equal Citizens front that we want to share. So we just couldn't have only one conversation in the feed this week. But second, we wanted to let you know that we've got some new features. We're expanding the podcast and we're expanding it in part because we want to bring you on as a patron, as a supporter of the podcast. This podcast is supported by Equal Citizens, which is a nonprofit organization. We do not do this to make money. We do not have advertising and we never will. But there are real costs to the podcast. We try and get high quality audio from our guests with remote producers. That doesn't always work. But some of our episodes, regular listeners will know, sound really great. So we've got a Patreon page. The patreon page is patreon.com/citizens. You can go there and you can become a member at various levels. If you become a member and support us for only three bucks a month, you'll get access to Ask Me Anything episodes that Larry Lessig is going to do starting in a couple weeks. It goes up from there. If you give more money, you'll be able to also guarantee that your question will be answered by Larry. You'll get some merch. We got lots of fun stuff there and it's just a great way to know who is supporting us. It's just a couple bucks a month if you can give and support. If not, of course, though, candidly, keep listening to us for free. There will be no ads. We do this as a nonprofit to give folks information. Adam, any thoughts for our hopefully future Patreon supporters?

No, we just have so many great ideas in the pipeline. People to interview, conversations that Jason, you and I want to have and just overall different things to talk about that we want you to be a part of. We hope that you'll support us.

Exactly. So we're grateful for any level of support and we're grateful for just any listens, any shares, any 5 star reviews, all of that great stuff. But let's get into the meat of it now. We're not public radio, Adam. We're not just gonna do 20 straight minutes of a pitch for supporters. So let's get into a couple of key developments that have occurred recently. And let's start with Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, who is now apparently the front runner for, for the Democratic nomination. And at Tuesday's debate, she unfortunately didn't get many questions about her new anti corruption plan. As we'll talk about this continued streak of not asking candidates about corruption and money in politics and democracy reform, but she did come out with a really comprehensive, really positive plan to fight corruption and end the influence of big money in politics. So why don't we talk about that before we break down her performance and the performance of others on the democracy reform spectrum in the debate?

Right. Well, Jason, I think that that's the key development is that that morning, the morning of the debate, Elizabeth Warren did release her plan. And it was a really good plan specifically focused on money and politics. She had previously released plans on voting rights and lobbying, but this one specifically dealt with campaign finance issues. And the most important development in this plan was Warren officially endorsing public financing of elections. She had kind of given her tacit support to it. She said, oh, I do, you know, I support it. But it wasn't really in her plan until Tuesday. And she's come out for a matching system, a small dollar, small donor matching system in which every small dollar donor will have their money matched 6 to 1. So it's based off of the New York City system or the New York City system before they updated it in 2018 to 8 to 1. So this is very similar to what John Sarbanes, Congressman Sarbanes, has proposed in HR1, the For the People Act. And this matching system is, it's pretty much the standard that most reformers have said is the bare minimum that we need to really democratize political influence. And her plan included a lot of other things, including a commitment to supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn not just Citizens United, but Buck voice Buckley V. Vallejo, the 1976 court case that was really the first to establish kind of the money as speech principle and setting limits on what Congress could do to regulate money in politics. But again, the plan goes much further than that. A lot more contribution limits, more disclosure requirements and public financing for the national party conventions, restructuring the Federal Election Commission. And this is very similar to a lot of the other plans that we've seen, but it's just very detailed and we were really glad to see it. And of course, it made it all the more disappointing that she wasn't asked a question. And I should say, Jason, before, not to belabor the point, but actually all three of the frontrunners, Bernie Sanders, Vice President Biden and Elizabeth Warren, all had released democracy or campaign finance plans, I think within a week of each other. Right before the debates, Senator Sanders came out with a plan for public financing vouchers, which Lessig was very pleased about. And the vice president released a commitment to public financing too. He didn't specify what form his matching system would take in terms of whether it be six to one less more. But he did commit to a matching system. And so this is a very solid and promising development that all three of the major or front running candidates rather support public financing. That's key here.

I think that's right. And let me just give a bit of context before we break down what happened or unfortunately didn't happen in the debate. The reason why we like this so much. And in another podcast that's going in the feed this week with Sam Berger of the center for American Progress, I get into some of the details about vouchers versus matching systems. But here's the fundamental principle. For the folks who aren't super familiar with it, the principle is you could sort of make sure that political candidates and politicians are dependent on the people and not special interests in big money in a couple ways. Well, really two fundamental ones. One is you just simply limit the amount of money that any individual or special interest can give. So you make you lower the limits. Well, turns out after Citizens United, that's essentially impossible to do. We can't really do that. The Supreme Court, as many people know, has send money, a speech, even corporations. And it's just very hard to put those kind of limits on big money donors. So what's the next option? The next option is, well, how about we ramp up the amount that the little folks can do? How about we ramp up the impact of the citizens. And so that's what Elizabeth Warren here and the other candidates are trying to capture. Right. They're not saying we can stop anyone from speaking. We can really eliminate the influence of super PACs. That's very hard. With Citizen United on the books, it's worth calling for a constitutional amendment. Sure. But you know, in 2021, the second you take office, you can't just put in a constitutional amendment that needs to be ratified by 38 states. But what you can do is amplify the voice of average citizens and make it viable to run a campaign that is fueled by the votes of average citizens. Not just for president, because there's so much attention to the office of the president, but for Congress, for your local representative. Right. That doesn't get as much play. And where those super PACs and big donations can really make a difference. How about we amp up the voices of the people who go to town halls whose doors get knocked on, who are really the broad interest and not the special interest? So that's what these plans are doing. That's why we like them. We'll talk about the difference between just handing people money and democracy dollars versus matching and amping up that way. But we should just say they're both really great ways to correct this improper dependence that Larry Lessig has talked about for many years, and that we're really fighting against it. Equal citizens. Okay, but that said, this is such an important point and it's worth explaining to the people. And Adam, what in the world happened? How come the moderators, once again, are not asking about these issues literally in the days after the top three candidates made this essential part of their campaign?

It's really baffling to me. I don't really have an answer to it. And I admit I was pretty discouraged when once again, after watching that debate for three full hours and not getting a single democracy question, I was pretty deterred and quite depressed. But I will just say to kind of foreground this conversation and is that, you know, for those who also were disappointed, we can't give up here, that this just signals more than ever the need for a grassroots democracy movement to be pushing this issue. In other words, the work that equal citizens and the countless other reform groups across the country, that the work that we are all doing has never been more important. In other words, the moderators of the debates will not save us. They will not fix this democracy for us. The only thing that will fix this democracy is if we demand it, organize and fight for what we want. So we, you know, I don't know why they're not asking it, but that's my framing in terms of, you know, even though they didn't, I'm not discouraged anymore. So. But that said, as you noted, Jason, besides for one question that was asked about what to do about the Supreme Court, which we traditionally don't think of as a democracy issue in the sense of gerrymandering money in politics or voter suppression or electoral college, there wasn't a single question asked about those Process issues.

And Adam, let me interrupt. I wouldn't call that a democracy issue. It is a structure of government issue. Right. But I think people in our movement, we're talking about the way democracy works. Right. It's great to know that the Moderators recognize Article 3 exists. Right. That judges exists. Article 3 is the part of the Constitution describing the federal judiciary. That's a win. They don't often ask about it. It's front and center on the Republican agenda. It's incredibly impactful. It's good to know that people are actually thinking about it on the left, at least to start. But that doesn't go nearly far enough. To me, this is not the machinery of our democracy, the way day in, day out, candidates raise money, the way voters vote and the way that impacts the gridlock in our system. So I appreciate the shout out to the Supreme Court, but that's not enough for me, Adam. And I know it's not enough for you. But that said, so you noticed a couple of candidates did bring this issue up sort of on their own, and they have to bring it up on their own because no one's asking about it. So what were those occasions? Right.

And so Elizabeth Warren was the one to bring it up, I think. Well, actually, let me take a step back. The one to probably bring it up the most was Tom Steyer. He is the billionaire businessman who spent a lot of money to get into the debates. And his platform is quite good on reform. And he did take the opportunity for his first appearance at the Democratic debates to call out corporate influence in government. He said numerous times that our government's been captured by corporations and that we have to free our government if we're going to achieve any of the policies that were discussed on that debate stage. In other words, he was parroting what we, you know, Jason, you, I or Larry say all the time, which is that we can't fix anything about our country until we fix our democracy first. And so he was parroting those lines, which was great to see. Steyer, that said, presented some, I would say, kind of weird solutions to that problem. In other words, solutions that didn't necessarily address the political imbalance in our country. It didn't actually alter the way or the inequality, political inequality in our country. So he said that the way to do this is, you know, he gave a shout out to voting rights, which I 100% agree with, but then said that he this is why he supports term limits and a national ballot initiative process. Term limits have mixed results in political science. They don't really do much to lessen political inequality in some respects, Jason, if the term limits are really, really tight, they can actually increase the power of lobbyists because it decreases institutional memory and makes it so politicians have to rely more on lobbyists to get information. But that aside, national referenda, again, unless you're dealing with money in politics, corporations, especially, Jason, where you are right now in California, have long used the ballot initiative process to. To pass what they want, flooding tons of money into swaying the results of ballot initiatives. So that doesn't, you know, that's an interesting idea, but it doesn't get into what we're talking about, about really increasing people power and lessening the influence of big money in politics.

Yeah, I think that's right. I appreciated the creativity. I appreciated the focus from Tom Steyer and his first appearance. But he proposed two solutions that at the federal level, Adam, are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has already said both are unconstitutional. There's a case called U.S. term Limits vs. Thornton. About 25 or 30 years ago, the state of Arkansas tried to impose term limits on its representatives. And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. The Congress has certain qualifications for becoming a member of Congress. There's age restrictions and residency restrictions. For instance, as people know, you have to be 35 to be the president. And, and what the court said is also, unless there's term limits in the Constitution, which there is for president, two terms by constitutional amendment, you can't impose them on your own. So states cannot do that. I guess possible that he's thinking, well, maybe the Congress can do it for everyone. I don't think so. I don't think that was a federal state issue. I think that was no one can impose term limits on senators or representatives. And the second one too, is obviously unconstitutional. There was a not to continue just the Supreme Court knowledge job for people who like getting in the weeds. There was a case again a couple of decades ago about the line item veto. The case name is Chadha. For those who have been through law school. And what the Supreme Court said is that the Constitution has a way that legislation must occur. It's called. Here's the nerdy part. Adam. Bicameralism and presentment. You probably know what bicameralism means, right? You remember that from civics class?

Absolutely.

Yes. Okay. Bicameralism means two houses. The Senate and the House must pass something and present me. Presentment means it has to be presented to the president and signed or have a veto overridden according to the Constitution. That's it, those are the ways you can pass a law. In the Chadha case, Congress had tried to amend a law with only one House acting, and it was held unconstitutional. And the same thing would doubtless be true of a national initiative process. You could, of course, create some kind of system for people to weigh in. But unless it's ultimately passed by the House of Representatives, passed by the Senate, and presented for signature to the president, it will not work. So I appreciate what Tom Steyer is saying, I really do, but don't give me two things that are obviously unconstitutional. We've been thinking about this for a while. Other groups have been thinking about this for a while. Pick off that menu. We got a menu, Adam. So how about something there instead of going off menu?

Yeah, and that, that's what kind of irked me about it too, is that, you know, there are a lot of, there have been a lot of folks, you know, myself included, but people who have been in the trenches far longer than I have, who have, you know, really thought through all these issues in terms of what's the most effective, what's the most realistic, what will make the most impact. And you know, as you said, Steyer should have picked from the menu that the reformers are currently fighting for instead of trying to come up with something kind of totally outside the box, which again, we appreciate, but not necessarily on point. You know, and on his website, he says he supports HR1, the for the people act, and that would have been a great thing to bring up. In fact, no one brought up, no one brought up the for the People act in the debates, which is very, very disappointing. That would have been a great opportunity. They were talking, you know, I think Mitch McConnell came up a couple times, would have been a great pivot to talk about how Mitch McConnell is holding up HR1 currently in the Senate and the need for the next president to champion that legislation in the next session. But, Jason, I will say that the other person who did talk about Democracy Forum in a really explicit way was Senator Elizabeth Warren. I don't know if that was coincidence given that that morning she had released her plan, but she did have this great line where she said we need to talk about the elephant in the room, the way campaigns are financed. And that's 100% true. In other words, she recognized it wasn't being discussed and she claimed that we needed to talk about it, which we agree. And she said, you know, she reiterated her previous support that as president, if elected, her very first act would be to try and pass her anti corruption plan. It was unclear to me whether or not that would be HR1. You know, I know she has an anti corruption plan. I think that was just shorthand in terms of her first act would be to pass a slew of reforms to fix our democracy. Unfortunately, that conversation, Jason, as you and I have previously talked about off this podcast, was derailed by Senator Kamala Harris, who kept interrupting Warren when she tried to speak about campaign finance reform because Harris wanted to talk about whether or not we should ban Trump from Twitter. That was a very, very, very frustrating moment for me. I was really deterred because this was the moment where they could have had a discussion about democracy. And it was derailed over whether Trump should have been. Should be banned from Twitter, which does not seem like something necessarily the president should be weighing in on or presidential candidates. But certainly it's not as important as fundamentally fixing our democracy.

Yeah. So let's sum it up there, Adam. I think there's really three things to say because. And it really is a microcosm of so much is going on. Right. One is the media is not doing its job. The media asks nothing about what are the most important issues and all kinds of things about things we've already heard about or that will never get past absent democracy reform. Two is Trump's freaking Twitter account interrupts the most substantive discussion we're about to have all night. Talk about something that occurs every day, right. That it just throws people off and you can't help but talking about it. But you gotta focus on what matters when you. What Elizabeth Warren was talking about, the way campaigns are funded matters. Whether Trump is gonna be banned from Twitter doesn't. He's just not going to. And if he did, he would go to some Fox News created media outlet and continue to spew whatever he wishes to spew. He's the President of the United States. And three, though there is hope, there is hope because good plans are coming out, because people are starting to recognize that candidates are repeatedly bringing this up, even unprompted. Imagine what would happen if we continued to press the media and the media did its job and ignored Twitter and started thinking about how to really get some of these ambitious proposals over the line. And the only way to do that is to reform our system.

Yeah, Jason, just very quickly, I should say that apart from those two main. The two candidates who brought it up kind of most explicitly, there were these little moments during the debate where we almost, we got on the cusp of talking about this stuff. Bernie Sanders called out candidates who take health care industry money. When in a conversation about health care, the NRA came up a number of times and the need to kind of deal with the structural power of the NRA in our politics, even on climate. You know, Tom Steyer brought up the fossil fuel industry and you know, he said that Trump was bought by the fossil fuel industry. But of course, there are many other politicians far beyond just President Trump who have taken fossil fuel money and potentially been influenced by that. And I will just say there was a really interesting conversation that went on about big tech, Facebook, Google, Amazon and how they play into our democracy. It was a very cursory view. Unfortunately, Warren kind of got into it a bit about calling the tech monopolists who dominate our democracy. She used that phrasing. You know, that could have been a great follow up for the moderators to really ask the candidates, you know, to speak about the ways tech influences our elections and how best to bring our democracy into the digital age, which without our institution suffering. So we were beginning to have a little bit of that conversation. It just wasn't really explicit. And so there's so much more to grapple with in terms of what was beginning to be discussed in the debates, and we just didn't quite get there.

Yeah, it's true. All right, so let's turn to the knowledge drop section of this bonus podcast. This is where this is kind of a supplement every Friday during our fundraising campaign. If you're on our email list, which you should joinqualcitizens us, you'll get Friday knowledge drops, little bits of knowledge about kind of what we're working on. And these knowledge drops are in part about what we're working on as well as news in this area that is really worth knowing about and worth thinking about. So, Adam, you wanted to start off with the first knowledge drop.

One of the reasons I'm most upset about the failure to discuss democracy in these debates has been in each of each of the debates have taken place in a location where some serious anti democracy policy has been passed. You have a debate in Florida where, where you have the restoration of felon voting rights and then the immediate action by the legislature to override it and gut it. You have Michigan, home of some of the worst gerrymandering in the country, but also the movement led by Katie Fahey to override it and create a nonpartisan independent redistricting commission. And then you have a debate in Texas where there's some of the worst voter suppression measures in the country and serious gerrymandering. And this last debate took place in Ohio, another state that has seen a wave of anti Democratic policies that, you know, as far as the Democrats are concerned, have, have kept them out of power. So you'd think that people would, candidates vying to be the leader of that party would want to discuss these structural issues that have really prevented electoral success. And so there are a couple of things I just want to note about Ohio. One, the Ohio gerrymander, again, one of the worst in the country, was actually struck down earlier this year by a federal court. That ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court in their gerrymandering ruling, saying that federal courts have no oversight of that. There's no way to actually rule something as a partisan gerrymander. But throughout the decade, let me just double check this. Throughout the decade, Republicans have long held, I believe, a 12 to 4 majority in Congress. That's 75% of the vote for one part or of the representation for one party in a swing state. Jason, that's not how representation works. So the gerrymander has been awful in Ohio. But also there's this really interesting story that happened alongside the debates, which is that Ohio has long been trying to pursue some of the most aggressive voter purges in the country. So each state has to regulate and update their voter rolls. When you get registered to vote, you go on a voter roll. And so everyone's name who's registered, a registered voter, an active registered voter, is on that list. And so one part of keeping your voter rolls cleaned is making sure that people who have moved away aren't on that list, people who have passed away aren't on that list. And so states have a compelling reason to remove people from the rolls. But what Ohio is doing is trying to be very aggressive about removing people from the rolls. And there was actually a Supreme court case in 2018 that upheld Ohio's very, very aggressive voter purge. Pro send you, I think, twice a postcard in the mail saying that you are going to be removed because you haven't voted in a certain number of elections. It certainly seems like that was an unconstitutional provision by federal law, but the Supreme Court gave the go ahead. And so now Ohio is moving forward with that. And they earlier this year issued a list of 235,000 names targeted for removal from the voter rolls because they had these voters reportedly had not participated in the last three election cycles. But here's the rub, Jason. Recent reporting has now revealed that Ohio officials have determined that roughly 40,000 people on those lists, nearly one in five were put on that list for removal in error in other words, these are active voters who should not have been targeted for removal, who were still on that list. It was a mistake, a massive mistake that could potentially result in 40,000 people who are active voters who are legally supposed to be on that list being removed, potentially causing chaos at the polls. And get this, one of the people who was slated to be removed was the head of the League of Women Voters of Ohio who was actually engaged in countering that purge. So talking about trying to purge your

enemies, seriously, and you know, I think, Adam, it really highlights nicely how oftentimes we hear these neutral explanations from advocates of voter suppression that the, they're just trying to protect the integrity of the election. They're just trying to make sure that people who want to vote, who can vote, who are registered, should vote. And there's no fraud and there's no games being played. But actually, when we dig into what's actually happening, right, these kinds of purges, these kind of suppression, they are implemented whether it's maliciously or incompetently, it almost doesn't matter, right? The harms that it causes to our democratic process are clearly much worse than any tiny, tiny marginal benefit that even on their own terms they say they're going to get. So it's important to push back against these things, both in principle, just to say, look, there's really no reason to do this. There's no problem here to be solved. But as you just mentioned, Adam, it's also important to push back on these things in practice because even when they are implemented, they go so much further than they should have, again, either because of incompetence, maliciousness, or both.

And also just cross checking those lists, I mean, it's difficult. It's a big data set. And a lot of these, the ways they do it are shown to be highly problematic and produce false positives. And I'll just quickly, quickly say, and then we can move on from this, is that, you know, voter purges, they haven't been long discussed in the reform community. It's something that more and more folks are talking about because in a lot of ways, you know, they've always been with us, that there have been state actors who have really aggressively purged voters wrongfully. But, but this problem has gotten so much worse after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights act in 2013. And the Brennan center did a great study about the increased amount of voter purges in the wake of Shelby County. But just one quick statistic just to frame this conversation. It's not Ohio, at least 17 million voters were purged nationwide just between 2016 and 2018. And they found that the greatest increases were in places that were previously under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act. So it's just something to think about as we move forward and the ways that these, the folks who don't want people to vote have concocted new and aggressive ways to enact their anti democratic agenda.

Exactly. And let's just hope the backlash to these kinds of games are worse than what they're trying to do in terms of purges that people get so angry at their rights being taken away that they show up 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 4 to 1 even than the people who have purged and really exercise their rights. Okay, but speaking of highly problematic, my very quick knowledge drop is on something that we all recognize as highly problematic or a majority of the country recognizes as highly problematic, and that's the Electoral College. And I just want to highlight for folks who have been following our case about the status of faithless electors. Well, I shouldn't say faithless, but independent electors, folks, that is presidential electors who don't vote for either major party candidate that they're expected to vote. As some of you know, we've taken this issue to the Supreme Court to get an answer to what's the status of the electors and to try and shine a light on exactly what the problems are. We just recently got word that Colorado has joined with us even though they're on the other side of this. They have joined with us in enthusiastically asking the Supreme Court to take the case. So that's something we'll be working on in the coming months. It's great news for the prospect of the Supreme Court taking this, deciding the issue for the good of the nation, and also hopefully highlighting once again to people how problematic this is and giving a little shot in the arm to reform. So that's just one other thing we're working on.

So, Adam, Jason, do you want to just quickly, Jason, say when we'll know if we're gonna make it to the Supreme Court?

December, January, depends exactly on what happens next. And there's some things out of our control and there's some things we can look at the calendar for in a couple weeks to kind of roll it forward. But as of now, we'll say December or January. So we will certainly keep you up to date. In the meantime, check out our patreon patreon.com/citizens. It's new. You can be one of the first people to sign up and become a regular supporter and help support these podcasts, help keep bringing guests on, keep getting high quality audio. So if you can support us by Patreon, please do. Otherwise equal citizens us. We should mention that more. That's where you can sign up for the emails. That's where you can get the Friday Knowledge Drop videos. Much, much more. See what we're up to. Okay, Adam, we'll talk to you soon.

I'll talk to you soon.

Sa.