On Our Own Failed Democratic State (And What's At Stake On January 17)

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.

This is Larry Lessig, and this is a special episode of the podcast Another Way.

If you're listening to this podcast, you

probably know I've been in this fight for democracy reform for a long time. Not as long as some. Fred Wertheimer, who was literally at the table when the 1971 Campaign Finance Reform act was written, has been in this fight for literally 50 years. I joined 14 years ago after my friend who we have lost to suicide, Aaron Swartz, convinced me that there was no reason to be fighting for the issues I was then fighting for so long as we had a deeply corrupted political system. Now, the reality is that however bad the system was 14 years ago, it has gotten infinitely worse. And so the fight to change, to reform that system, has become infinitely more important.

And this year, or more precisely last

year, was to be an extraordinary opportunity

to actually bring about fundamental reform of

our broken political system. Because going into the 2020 campaign, we, along with other groups like N Citizens United and Represent Us, had succeeded in

getting practically every major presidential candidate to commit to taking up fundamental reform as

one of the first things they would do.

And when Joe Biden became the nominee,

he made that commitment as well. And so, in 2021, Nancy Pelosi delivered on her promise by passing the for the People act in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer took it up in the Senate, only to have the bill stalled, stopped, and stopped by the filibuster. And then, after some negotiations with a key senator in the Democratic Caucus of the United States Senate, Joe Manchin, the For the People act was revised to become the Freedom to Vote act, which

was changed in important ways, but kept

the critical infrastructure of the for the People Act. There's a section to deal with the suppression of the vote. There's a section to deal with partisan gerrymandering.

There's a section to deal with dark money.

And an extremely important section to facilitate experimentation at the state level for public funding for federal offices. This bill, though not quite as ambitious as the for the People act, would,

in my view, be as important as

the for the People act in reforming and fixing much of this corrupted and broken democracy. But it has not yet passed because though there is a majority in the Senate that would pass it, a majority in the Senate that's committed to passing is blocked by the filibuster. And after being pressured by many, the President, President Joe Biden has finally come around to acknowledging that there must be

changes to the rules of the Senate

if The Senate cannot pass this critical legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act.

January 17

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has promised there will be a debate on the floor of the Senate about the filibuster and the rules of the Senate. It will be the final try to get a majority to change the rules to at least allow a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act. January 17th, the day we will celebrate the the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. It's a fitting day for that debate. It would be a tragedy if that vote goes against what Dr. Martin Luther King certainly would have supported, a change to the filibuster to allow the consideration of voting rights legislation, including the Freedom to Vote act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement act, and also, in my view, reform of the Electoral College act, which brought us to the precipice of disaster in the last presidential election. We'll see.

But in teeing up that debate in

this podcast, which let's acknowledge, if we fail to pass this bill this year, where is this movement for reform? What is the reason to continue to fight in Congress? If we know in Congress there is no chance of success this podcast, then this special episodemarks Perhaps the beginning or the end of the hope for reform. If we pass the changes to the filibuster to allow these bills to be considered and voted on, then it's the beginning of reform. I fear if we fail, then it's the end of this cycle of reform. It's the beginning of thinking anew about what we do to save this democracy. In this episode of this podcast, I

want to read for you an essay

that I published in the New York review of books, December 10, 2021. During the week when the State Department was hosting a democracy summit with leaders from democracies around the world, many of us thought that was extraordinary chutzpah because

here the United States, so deeply flawed

in its own democratic tradition, was somehow

purporting to speak for the ideal of

democracy, to defend the ideal of democracy around the world when there's so much to be done at home.

So I want to read a revised,

slightly extended version of that essay, which maps out all of the moments of flaw in the architecture of our current representative democracy, what our framers would have called republic. And as you listen to these flaws, I want you to think about how critically important it is to fix them. Right now, the title to this essay, as it's published on my medium page, is Our Own Failed Democratic State and what's at stake on January 17. But the graphic steals from the recent movie Don't Look Up. And if you and if you don't have a chance to look at the graphic, let me describe it. It's the Don't look up logo. And then the don't is being scratched out because we need to look up. We need to look up to recognize just what is at stake if we can't get a democracy that represents the majority, maybe not again, maybe it never has, but at least for the first time.

So the essay published in the New

York Review of Books was titled why the US Is a Failed Democratic State. My Medium post introduces it and then I will read the revised version of that essay.

This is a slightly extended version of an essay first published in the New

York Review of Books during the State Department's Democracy Summit last month. I am republishing this version of it here along with this podcast you're listening to here.

One week before the Senate takes up changes to its rules to allow the

Freedom to Vote act to pass, everything now turns on Senators mansion and cinema. Which means everything now turns on President Biden's ability to rally them. This is Joe Biden's LBJ moment.

Like Johnson, Biden knows the Senate.

Like Johnson, Biden has defended what now blocks reform.

And so, like Johnson, President Biden needs to use his influence to get these senators to do the right thing. For remember when Johnson was advised to take up civil rights upon assuming the

presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy because he was certain to lose, and such a loss, they thought, would guarantee defeat in the 1964 election? Johnson famously replied, what the hell is the presidency for? Exactly. Exactly. President Biden, December 10, 2021.

The State Department is hosting a Democracy Summit this week. Representatives from around the world will assemble virtually, quote, to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal, end quote. For the United States, the webpage declares, quote, the summit will offer an opportunity

to listen, learn and engage with a

diverse range of democratic actors.

America will also the page continues in what certainly is the money quote, of the whole conference, quote, showcase one of

democracy's unique strengths, the ability to acknowledge

its imperfections and confront them openly and

transparently, so that we may, as the United States Constitution puts it, form a

more perfect, unique union. End quote.

I'm not certain who, precisely, is going

to be showcasing our own imperfections. The agenda online is complete. But it is right that we confront these imperfections openly and transparently.

Because what's most striking about America's understanding

of our own democracy is our ability to see what's just not, not there. We are not a model for the world to copy.

The United States is instead a failed

democratic state at every level.

The institutions that we have evolved for implementing our democracy betray the basic commitment

of a representative democracy that it be,

at its core fair and majoritarian. Instead, that commitment is now corrupted in America, and every aspiring democracy around the world should understand the specifics of that

corruption, if only to avoid the same in its own land.

The corruption of our majoritarian representative democracy

begins at the state legislatures because the

Supreme Court has declared that partisan gerrymandering

is beyond the ken of our Constitution,

states have radically gerrymandered legislative districts, as

Miriam Seifeter summarized the data in a recent article for the Columbia Law Review,

quote unquote across the nation, the vast majority of states in recent memory have had legislatures controlled by either a clear or probable minority party, end quote. Her work was based in part upon an extraordinary analysis published by the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, which found that after the 2018 election, close to 60 million Americans, quote, live under minority rule in their

U.S. state legislatures, end quote.

The most egregious states in this mix are also the most important in presidential elections.

In Wisconsin, for example, the popular vote

for Republicans in 2018 was 44.7%, but Republicans controlled 64.6% of the seats in the state House. Likewise, Republicans in Virginia won just 44.5% of the vote but received 51% of House seats.

State legislatures, as Seifer characterizes them, are

the least majoritarian branch of our representative democracy. Yet this fact is all but invisible

to most Americans, including, as she evinces,

justices on the Supreme Court. We are all outraged when the Electoral College selects a president who hasn't won even a plurality of the votes, which it has five times in its history. Why are we so sanguine about legislatures that are regularly controlled by the party

that won fewer votes across the state?

These gerrymandered states then spread their minoritarian

poison in two distinctive ways.

First, they have taken up the most ambitious program of vote suppression since Jim Crow. Through a wide range of techniques, Republican state legislatures are making it selectively more difficult for presumptively Democratic voters to vote by reducing the number of polling places in Democratic districts by ending early voting or voting outside of ordinary working hours by deploying biased ID requirements that selectively enable IDs held by Republicans gun club registration cards while disabling IDs held by likely Democrats student IDs by understaffing polling places so voters must queue for hours to vote and by many other creative techniques as well. In Georgia, the legislature has even made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line. What possible legitimate state interest could that law serve? Such acts are often framed by their

opponents in racial terms. That framing is a strategic mistake.

I'm happy to stipulate that many who push these techniques of suppression are motivated by race. But every single person pushing these techniques of suppression is certainly motivated by politics. It is raw partisan power driven to destroy the party not in power that explains what is happening here. And rather than forcing that corruption into the box of racism, we should be asking a more fundamental why is it permitted for the party in power to rig the system against their opponents? No doubt racism is America's original sin, but we should see this as a sin too. And unlike racism, this sin is now openly and self consciously embraced by those who would destroy the ideal of representative democracy. Before the United States, Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked lawyers from the Republican National Committee why they were opposing

provisions enabling more to vote.

Because it puts us at a competitive

disadvantage, the lawyer was untroubled to reply.

The second way minoritarian state legislatures spread

their poison is by gerrymandering the United States House of Representatives as well.

First perfected in its modern big data

form by Republicans in 2010 see Dave Daley's magnificent book Racket Fucked.

The Democrats then spent the decade trying to get the Supreme Court to stop partisan gerrymandering completely. When the Court announced it would not, there was little left for the Democrats except good government initiatives aiming at moving the redistricting process away from the most egregiously partisan influences. That did Some good until 2020 signaled to Republicans that their party faces virtual annihilation if the majority gets its say. The efforts to gerrymander in 22 and 24 are therefore more sophisticated than any and ever. Barring a legislative miracle, Republicans will have secured, through gerrymandering, the control of the House of Representatives, whether or not they

succeed in winning more votes than Democrats.

And if the plans of some extremists come to fruition, then key state legislatures will also have passed laws that give the legislatures the power to overturn the

results of a popular presidential election in their state.

These two techniques of majoritarian rule, gerrymandering

and partisan vote suppression could have been resisted by the courts.

Yet what's striking about the United States Supreme Court is not only that it has done nothing to resist minoritarianism, but that its most significant recent interventions have only ratified perhaps the most egregious aspects

of our moderatorian democracy. The Role of Money in Politics While

most mature democracies have various techniques for minimizing the corrupting role of money in politics, the United States Supreme Court has embraced the most radical conception of campaign money free speech, of any comparable democracy anywhere. While the Court has upheld limitations on direct contributions to political campaigns, it has simultaneously held in its infamous Citizens United versus FEC, that any limitation on independent spending violates the First Amendment. Lower courts have then read Citizens United to mean that any limitations on contributions

would violate the First Amendment as well.

These rulings together gave rise to super

PACs, which now dominate political spending in America.

In 2020, for example, the 10 top

super PACs accounted for 54% of outside spending.

What's critical to recognize is that the real role of this money comes not from its effect in persuading voters. Its power comes instead from the dependence

it creates within our political system. Candidates know they need the support of

super PACs, either to make the case for them or to defend them from others who would attack. That dependence produces enormous power in the super pacs. That power is thus concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of presumptively, but not necessarily Americans. In a nation of hundreds of millions, a few hundred families now dominate political spending. Here again, there is no shame. In June 2021, the Political Action committee no Labels had a call with Joe Manchin about legislative priorities in the balance of the year. On the call, the founders of no Labels emphasized the power their group had in Washington not because of their ideas, but because of their money. The ultra wealthy donors supporting the no Labels PAC were able to, quote, hand out $50,000 checks, its co founder, Andrew Bersky, bragged, and those checks, he explained, represented the most valuable money in any political this was hard money, money that FEC rules allow the candidates to spend themselves. And then to prove just why that money was so valuable, Bersky offered the incredibly revealing picture of just why the economy of influence in Washington gave the ultra wealthy so much power in Congress.

As he explained, most House members, quote,

are spending four, four hours on the telephone dialing for dollars. And so what the large contributions from donors such as you does, aside from sending the very strong message that there are folks who will have your back

if you take tough votes.

That bipartisan nature that may not be popular within your party.

So that was in the original, just

like that, it also in real life, frees them to do more work because

it's spending less time raising those funds.

Bersky is remarking upon the obvious dependence that exists with our current system for campaign finance, the dependence of representatives on fundraising. Because of that dependence, particular kinds of funders, namely large funders, are especially valuable. Large contributions give members two things at the same time. First, and obviously money. But second, and even more critically, large funders give members time. A $50,000 contribution give members the chance to breathe, even as it naturally obliges that member to the interest or the person who enabled that chance to breathe. The legislative branch, of course, is not the only minoritarian institution within our republic. Because of the way states allocate Electoral college votes. The presidency is effectively minoritarian too. Not just in the most egregious way, when the candidate who wins fewer votes nonetheless becomes president, but also, and more significantly, in the more regular way, because of the way states allocate their Electoral College votes. It is only a tiny fraction of American voters that actually matter to the ultimate result. All but two states give the winner of the popular vote in their state

all of the electors from that state.

This means that the only states that are actually contested in any presidential election are the at most a dozen or so swing states. Those swing states represent a minority of America, less than 40%, depending on the election. That minority is in turn radically unrepresentative of America itself. The voters in the swing states are older and whiter. Their industry is more traditional. There are seven and a half times the number of people working in solar energy in America as mine coal. Yet we never hear anything about solar energy in a presidential campaign because those people live in states like Texas and California. Coal miners live in battleground states, so they become the central focus of the

candidates running for president.

It is thus this tiny unrepresentative minority

that effectively selects our president, making the

president, as political scientists have evinced, especially responsive to this unrepresentative few. Spending is higher, all things being equal,

in swing states over non swing states.

Regulators are particularly responsive to regulatory concerns

in swing states over non swing states.

Does America flirt with steel tariffs or ethanol subsidies because either policy makes any sense? No. We live with these policy mistakes because the beneficiaries of these mistakes live in swing states, and so too with the courts. If any institution within a representative democracy

is supposed to be minoritarian, courts, it is said, are.

But that is true substantively.

It is not supposed to be true politically.

Substantively, of course, courts are meant to uphold constitutional rights regardless of popular majorities. My First Amendment right to speak should not depend upon whether my views are liked by a majority. But the institution of the judiciary is also populated through political action. And to the extent that those actors have power because of a minoritarian corruption of representative democracy, the courts they populated are likewise tainted by minoritarianism. Consider the United States Supreme Court. The current court is divided six to three, with the majority dominated by extremely conservative justices. That division is in no sense representative of America. Two thirds of America is certainly not conservative. And while the random nature of Supreme Court turnover can sometimes produce such unrepresentativeness, this court was expressed, expressly constructed by Senate leaders who changed the norms of confirmation to effectively steal a Supreme court seat. In February 2016, then majority leader Mitch McConnell declared after justice Scalia's death that it was, quote, inappropriate to confirm a nominee of President Barack Obama's because it was an election year. But when justice ginsburg died just six weeks before an election, McConnell declared that it was perfectly appropriate to rush a nominee through the senate before the 20 in record time for a modern appointment. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, certainly among the most conservative of the justices now seated on the Supreme Court, was confirmed by a Republican Senate.

Yet without doubt, the most extreme institution of minoritarian democracy in America today is the United States Senate.

Of course, that flaw was, in a sense, intended. The only way small states were going to agree to the new constitution in 1787 was if the Constitution gave them extra power. That compromise enraged James Madison, but he could read the political writing on the wall and eventually defended this compromise of

majoritarianism at the heart of our republic.

Even then, though, the minoritarianism of the United States Senate was muted. It was muted first because the differences in population were much smaller then than they are today. The most populous state, in 1790, Virginia, was 13 times the size of the smallest Delaware. Today the most populous state, California, is 68 times the size of the smallest Wyoming. But it was muted more fundamentally than because until this century, the Senate did not regularly block the will of the majority of senators. The original Senate rules expressly protected the power of the majority, a simple majority, to vote on any bill whenever it wanted. It was only when Senator John C. Calhoun, the pro slavery Democrat of South Carolina, began to muck about with those rules 50 years after the Constitution was ratified, that the will of the majority was placed in jeopardy. We miss this fact today because the technique of this blocking has a name that has long been part of Senate lorethe filibuster. And given the tactics long pedigree, it is easy to imagine that what we are talking about today is the same as has existed in the Senate for most of the Senate's history. The reality, however, Is radically different. The filibuster that existed for most of the Senate's history was a device that simply slowed the consideration of legislation.

It didn't kill it.

The one exception to that characterization was civil rights legislation. The only example of laws being blocked by the filibuster all the way through 1965 were anti lynching laws and laws to improve civil rights. For the rest, the filibusters simply slowed the consideration of legislation. And for that slowing to happen, the senators supporting the filibuster had to do real work. If a senator was going to filibuster a bill, he, and it was almost always he would have to stand on the floor of the Senate and speak. Strom Thurmond, then Democrat from South Carolina, held the floor for 24 hours to slow the consideration of the 1957 Civil Rights Rights bill. That was not mere showmanship, as House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy's recent eight hour filibuster was. It was the only way that a filibuster could work. Today, however, the mechanism of the filibuster is radically different. All a Senator must do to assure that a bill is filibustered is to make a request to their party leader. That request, literally, it could be a simple email or text, then shifts the bill from being one that will pass if a simple majority supports it to one that cannot even be debated unless a supermajority 60 senators supports it. The effect of the old filibuster was to keep a bill on the floor of the Senate as the filibusters were debating. That allowed their dissent to be better understood, if not in the Senate, then at least by the public. The effect of the news filibuster is exactly the opposite. Its effect is to block any debate until a supermajority allows it. Thus, the for the People act has been blocked from debates on the floor of the Senate now twice, even though a majority would vote to allow that debate to occur. This modern filibuster thus doesn't enable debate or understanding. The modern filibuster is just a gag rule on any legislation a minority does not like. Yet even this description masks the real corruption in the current system because the norms that limited the filibuster to only

quote important issues like blocking anti lynching legislation are gone.

Instead, today the filibuster is now a routine hurdle that any significant legislation must clear. What that means is that we have now introduced a procedural requirement into the passage of legislation that renders the legislative process more extremely minoritarian than any other legislature in any Comparable representative democracy. You can see this point with a simple accounting. If it takes 60 votes to even debate a bill, that means 41 senators have the power to block the United States Congress from enacting practically any legislation. Budget reconciliation and certain nominations are exempted from the filibuster. Everything else is subject to it. So take the smallest 21 states that supported Donald Trump by at least 10 points. Those 21 states would give the minority leader 42 votes, enough to block any legislation subject to the filibuster. Yet those 21 states would represent just 21% of America's population. Which means we have evolved a so called representative democracy in which just over one fifth of the nation has a veto over any non budget legislation that Congress might pass. It is hard to overstate just how extreme this supermajority requirement is. The President, presumptively elected by all the

people, gets a veto.

But that veto can be overridden with a vote of 2/3 of Congress. The Constitution can only be amended if three fourths of the states affirm that amendment. 75%, not 80%. No nation anywhere has a super majority requirement for ordinary legislation that's that high. None ever in the history of representative democracy has set it at 80% of the nation's population.

Okay, actually that's not quite true. There's one important counterexample, historically the failed United States of America. Under the Articles of Confederation, that failed

constitution effectively required 70% to support any important legislative act. The modern filibuster is comparable. Yet it is hard to see how different that failed system is from the one that hands to the most extreme minority in America the right to decide what the rest of us can enact through Congress. What we've done in our democracy is to recreate precisely the failed democracy that our framers had to rally America to discard. Not through an amendment, not through any law passed by Congress, but simply because of the innovation of America's modern day Calhoun, Mitch McConnell. This filibuster lock alone, ignoring gerrymandering in the States, the gerrymandering of Congress, the

suppression of the votes in elections, the

Electoral College, the corrupting dependence of money. This alone would be enough to categorize

America as a minoritarian democracy.

Like South Africa under apartheid, or Liberia with African American nationals, or Ba' athist Iraq with the power of the Sunnis, or Syria with the Alawites, or Rwanda with the Tutsi. The American Republic, originally designed to be a majoritarian representative democracy, has become minoritarian, or more precisely at every level of the current institutions of our representative democracy, we. We have rendered those institutions unrepresentative. This fact alone should be enough to lead aspiring democracies around the world to look elsewhere for models of how democracy might be made to work. Our only lesson for these democracies is

the consequence of our own failure.

In 1997, after he had surprised the world by winning reelection decisively, Bill Clinton convened a small dinner with the top donors to the Democratic Party at the Mayflower hotel in Washington, D.C. what should he do at his second term? What did they think he could achieve? It was a moment of great hope and possibility.

Nine months before the revelations of a

White House intern would deflect the administration

from achieving anything of significance.

As the story is told, about 30 of America's super wealthy sat around a table. The President asked each of them in turn to give him their views. One by one, they rose to speak. The last to rise was a businessman, the founder of Stride Right Shoes, and the second largest contributor to the Democrats in 1996. As he stood up, few had any

sense of what he would say when he sat down. Few could believe he'd actually said what he did say.

Mr. President, Arnold Hyatt began, I know you're an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so I want you to put yourself in FDR's shoes in 1940, the year when Roosevelt realized that he was going to have to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy. Because that, Mr. President, is precisely what you need to do now. Now, to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy. That would not, of course, be a war against fascists. It would be a war against fat cats, people like Hyatt, rich people, and people who believed, unlike Hyatt, that just because they are rich, they're entitled to dinner with the President at the Mayflower. Hyatt was challenging the President to recognize that, quote, current campaign finance practices are threatening this nation in a different but no less serious way. He said, quote, only your leadership and

your office can turn this around. There was a silence when Hyatt finished.

No doubt some were uncomfortable. Hyatt remembers the President being gracious. The only published account reports him as

being less than, than gracious. Quote.

Clinton's response effectively slashed Hyatt to pieces,

according to Peter Buttonweiser, humiliating him in front of the group.

At the time Hyatt spoke, Citizens United was still more than a dozen years in the future. We had not yet seen the pathological gerrymandering of 2010. Few could have imagined the open efforts by partisans in state legislatures to suppress the vote votes of their political opponents. Not a single Republican in any state legislature was then considering legislation to allow state legislatures to override the popular vote for president. And though the filibuster had been deployed beyond the domain of civil rights, by then, it would be nine years before the architect of the modern filibuster, Mitch McConnell, would be elected to lead his party in the United States Senate. And no one, literally no one, could have imagined an event like January 6th taking place in the United States of America from our perspective today. Hyatt spoke at a time of relative

health in the American democracy.

And yet to him and to many others, including an 88 year old woman, Granny D, who nine months later would begin a 3,000 mile walk across the country with the words campaign finance reform emblazoned across her chest. The corruption of money was already reason enough for them to, quote, wage a

war to save democracy.

Today we confront a Republican party that's

effectively declared war on majoritarian democracy.

At every level, the leadership of that party challenges the fundamental ideal of majority rule. Rather than adjust their policies to appeal to a true majority of Americans, Republicans have embraced the minoritarian strategy of entrenching what has become, in effect, a partisan quasi ethnic group against any possible democratic challenge. They rig the system so the majority cannot rule. In the face of this threat, what America needs is what Hyatt said FDR had been. A leader who could, quote, convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy. Or maybe better, what America needs is a Winston Churchill, somebody who could convince a distracted nation that there is a fundamental threat to our democracy that we must now wage war to save.

Yet we don't have Churchill leading this fight. We have Chamberlain.

Rather than name the threat and rally America against it, President Biden has been keen to negotiate the differences in conciliatory fashion, as if the modern filibuster were not a fundamental threat to democracy, and as if the fight against majoritarianism were not a threat either, Biden has been eager to engage in a bizarre nostalgia, recalling a golden age when white men from different parties somehow got along. Rather than recognizing that American democracy has never faced a threat like this one. Even if this is precisely the political reality that black Americans have known for

all of the country's history, There was

real hope this year for effective action

to address this corruption of democracy.

Every single major candidate for president in the Democratic primary in 2020, with the exception of Kamala Harris, had committed to making the for the people Act a top priority in the first hundred days, some had promised even more. Speaker Nancy Pelosi maintained that momentum and passed the act in the House. And after she succeeded in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer committed to getting the Senate to do the same.

Standing in the way, however, was the filibuster. For most of this year, that was

last year, President Biden defended the filibuster and stood practically silent on this critical reform. He has focused not on the crumbling critical infrastructure of American democracy, but on the benefits of better bridges and faster Internet. Democratic progressives in Congress were little better on this question. Although Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren all supported the for the People act, in the public's eye, the issues they've championed have overlooked the country's broken democratic machinery, forgive student debt, raise the minimum wage, give us a Green

New Deal, and so on.

As a progressive myself, I love all

these ideas, but none of them are

possible unless we end the corruption that

has destroyed this democracy. None of them will happen until we fix democracy first.

It may well be that nothing could have been done. It may well be true that nothing Biden could say or do would move the senators who are blocking reform just now.

Yet that fact is not an excuse for this appeasement. Even if we can't win on this

round, we have to frame the stakes accurately and clearly. In the words of the State Department,

we have to confront these imperfections in our democracy openly and transparently, recognizing that

they are not mere imperfections, but instead go to the very core of the ideal of representative democracy and reveal our

representative democracy has failed.

Someone should at least acknowledge this at

the Summit for Democracy this week. I'm not holding my breath.

After more than 20 students staged a 15 day hunger strike in front of the White House, President Biden finally agreed that if the Senate couldn't pass voting rights legislation, then changes to the filibuster

must be taken up.

Majority Leader Schumer has obliged. On January 17, the Senate will take

up debate on changing the Senate rules. We'll see how far they get. In the meantime, please look up this is Larry Lessig.

These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us and find to these podcasts at Equal Citizens Us Another Way. I'm grateful for the comments and feedback

that you send me in response to these podcasts.

You can find a way to do

that on the website, or you can find me on the web as millions apparently have. As my inbox is embarrassingly overflowing. But here's the lesson. Here's the TL Dr. We've got to win this fight on the 17th, and

you've got to do everything you can

to rally us, all of us, to make sure we win. It's hard to overstate just how critical this decision is.

And it is embarrassing to listen to

the excuses that are being offered for not making this change and making democracy the most important achievement of the first two years of the Biden administration. We have to win on Martin Luther King's birthday. We must make it possible for the majority in America to govern themselves, because if they don't, because if a minority

locks themselves into control and exercises their power to drive America in a direction that most of America doesn't not want

to go, how long will the majority wait?

How long will the majority sit by

peacefully, passively, as their democracy is stolen from them? I feel for the sad souls who are convinced that the election was stolen and in response marched on the Capitol to, quote, stop the steal. They were wrong, but they were led to their mistaken beliefs by people who profited from that error. But their response was natural. It was understandable, given what they believed, however wrong, what they believed was. We must begin to recognize that that response is not just the response of people on the right,

that many will begin to wonder what means are necessary

if we're going to secure a government that represents us. This is Larry Lessig. Thanks for listening and thanks for anything. Everything, everything you will do, because I know some of you will do a lot, everything you can do to help us make sure that this bill can pass, because the rules that block it from passing are changed. Stay tuned. We'll see what's next. I can promise one more episode in this series. I spent four days with the hunger strikers. I was on a hunger strike for five days with them until the medical sorts advised me that my blood pressure was not happy with the hunger strike.

But I spent time with them and

I listened to them and I recorded their messages. And I've done an extensive interview with one of the co founders of the group that led that hunger strike, unpack.org

and I'm now working to weave together

that conversation in a way that explains what they were doing and what they were hoping to accomplish. And that might express, in a way that's appropriately moving because what they did was extraordinarily moving, the importance of the fight that they too have taken up. Stay tuned for that. Thanks for all you do. This is Larry Lessig. Bye.