S5E02: Overturned Tables: Democracy Reform: John Sarbanes

This is Larry Lessig. For the past 17 years, I've been stuck in the fight to fix a broken democracy. Over those 17 years, that broken democracy has only gotten worse. Not on every dimension. The though the money problem has only gotten worse. We've seen critically important progress with gerrymandering. We've seen the adoption and spread of ranked choice voting, important changes in access to voting. But still, overall, as I described in a particularly depressing Even for Me essay in the New York Review of Books, overall we have evolved a pretty unrepresentative representative democracy, indeed a minoritarian representative democracy where the Minority rules By far the most important reformer of this mess in Congress today is Congressman John Sarbanes. As you'll hear in this episode, I met Sarbanes in the very beginning of my work in this field, just after my first book, Republic Lost, was published in 2011. I've watched and worked with him as he's pressed patiently and without self promotion or hype, to advance a package of reform that might address the flaws that mar fundamentally this democracy. This progress gained real momentum in 2018 when Nancy Pelosi, the most prolific fundraiser in the House of Representatives, promised that if the Democrats regained control of the house in 2019, she'd pass the for the People Act, Sarbane's omnibus reform package. That package included matching funds for funding campaigns, a pilot for vouchers, gerrymandering reform. It included the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement act, as well as Supreme Court ethics rules, and a bunch of other important changes to make our government both more trustworthy and trusted. It was, in short, as I've said, the most important democracy reform package in modern history. The Civil War brought some equally important changes. We'll just skip over those for now. And the point is, it was the speaker of the House who had committed to passing them if the Democrats regained control. And so when the Democrats did regain control of the house in the 2018 election, she delivered on her promise. The House of Representatives passed for the People act, but it promptly died in Mitch McConnell's Senate in 2020, Pelosi made the same promise. If Democrats retained control, she promised she would take up HR1, the For the People act, in 2021, as one of the very first items that Congress would consider. And then Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate made the very same promise. If the Democrats indeed did retain the House in 2021, sworn in on January 3, then Pelosi would pass the bill. And Schumer said if he was the majority leader, he'd pass the bill in the Senate as well. So on January 3rd, we were surprised to see that the Georgia elections, which were runoff elections to select the two senators from Georgia, were going to resolve in favor of the Democrats, which means that the Senate would be 50 Democrats to 50 Republicans, with the Vice President, Kamala Harris, casting the deciding vote. And so this shift opened up the possibility that Chuck Schumer would be held to account. He had made a promise. If he had the Senate, would he deliver on the promise that the for the People act, which Pelosi quickly passed in the House, could pass to the Senate and pass in the Senate and become the most important democracy reform package passed in modern history? I've got to say that when I glimpsed that possibility, I was overwhelmed with a certain emotion. I'd taken up this fight after my friend Aaron Swartz had guilted me into it. In December 2006, he had come to me. I was in Berlin, and I was very proud of what would become the last book I would write about Copyright Remix. And I was very proud to brag about the fact I'd been invited to make my first presentation on the main stage at ted. And I was describing the arguments about copyright reform that I would be pushing both in the book and on the main stage at ted. And Aaron said to me, so why do you think you're going to make any progress so long as we have this deeply corrupted Congress? And I said to him, it's not my field, Aaron. It's not my field. I do copyright policy and Internet policy. I don't do corruption policy. And he said, you mean as an academic? And I said, yeah, as an academic. That's what I do. And he said, what about as a citizen? And he had trapped me because I wanted to think highly of myself and I didn't have any excuse in response to what he said. I mean, I could spend the rest of my life, like, arguing for the tiny tweaks at the corner of the law of copyright and talking about the infrastructure of the Internet and how it needed to be regulated or adjusted. But we all knew, he knew I knew none of that was going to happen in the real world so long as this corruption defined Congress. So that day, literally that night In December of 2006, I promised him I would give up my work on the Internet and copyright and take up the fight to get us an uncorrupted Congress. He promised to join me in that fight. We started something called Change Congress in the fall of 2007, and we worked together for a while. On this project. And then he got distracted, all excited about Barack Obama being elected. As if electing a president was going to fix this problem anyway. If you know the name Aaron Swartz, you know we lost Aaron Swartz to suicide. And when we did, I vowed I would not give up this fight until we won.

And I was, I was so naive still.

I'm naive in so many ways, but I had.

But I actually had hope.

So when I saw the Senate shift from Republican to Democrat with a majority leader who had committed to taking up S1, that's what he had named the for the People act and pass it just as Nancy Pelosi had, I thought for a second, I thought for a second that we could win this. Standing the way were the norms and rules of the Senate. And you got to really understand how important the norms are. And when we talk about the filibuster, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about these norms. But the norms and rules of the senate as Mitch McConnell had made them. Because when Barack Obama became president in 2009, Mitch McConnell committed to his number one task to make sure that Barack Obama was a single term president. He failed in that. But what he succeeded in was changing the norms of the Senate. Because the filibuster went from being something rarely deployed by senators who felt extremely strongly about some particular issue. Typically Southern racist senators who were trying to make sure that civil rights legislation didn't get passed or anti lynching legislation didn't get passed, you know, those really important issues. But rarely was it invoked in a way that blocked the ability of the majority to take up and vote a bill. But McConnell changed that norm from being something that rarely happened to something that literally always happened until they exempted certain issues like budget reconciliation proposals or nominations for judges, Supreme Court judges. Except for those exceptions, anything else going through the Senate needed to get at least 60 votes to be able to be debated and passed. So standing in the way of Chuck Schumer passing the bill that Nancy Pelosi had passed was a filibuster that would block debate on the for the People Act. Just think about that for a minute.

A filibuster,

the tool typically understood to be the tool to extend debate way beyond the time. It's really helping anybody. But the filibuster as it's currently crafted is a tool to block debate, at least unless the Senate decided by a majority vote to exempt the for the People act from the reach of the filibuster. Now, that exemption would require the concurrence of every Democratic senator, including the two most unlikely, Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema. And we'll talk about that unlikeliness again when we get to the episode about the filibuster. But that unlikeliness led to a year of negotiation. And in December 2021, we thought again, naively, that there was hope. I joined a hunger strike by a whole bunch of super young people from West Virginia and Arizona, organized by the fantastic organ youth organization un-pac.org hunger strike outside of the White House. We sat there in the cold, bright, cold, Sunny December days, 4 days, not eating, holding it together, believing that the attention that these West Virginia and Arizona souls might bring to the senators of Arizona and West Virginia might get them to finally do what they obviously should have done, which is to join with the other 48 Democratic senators to exempt the Voting Rights act, basically reformation of the for the People act in the way that Manchin wanted it to be reformed, to exempt it from the reach of the filibuster and to allow it to be debated and voted upon. You know, the end to this story. Chuck Schumer found a way in January

of 2022 to get around

the ordinary rules that would have blocked debate. It was kind of genius parliamentarian jiu jitsu. And that launched a debate about whether the bill should be allowed to be voted on despite the filibuster, whether it should be exempted from the filibuster. Suffice it for now.

That debate failed.

The bill did not pass the Senate, and it therefore died in that Congress. Now, I can't describe how depressed that failure made me.

For a moment, I had had real

hope that I would escape this. I'd resolve that. If we passed the for the People act or the Freedom to Vote Act, I could just declare victory. We'd done it, could declare victory and move on. And when we failed, I knew that

I'd be in this fight for the

rest of my pathetic career.

Okay, and that's where we are now.

But in this episode, we're going to have a conversation with a hero. In this story, the architect of that bill, the for the People Act, Congressman John Sarbanes. Sarbanes was elected to Congress in the same year that Schwartz guilted me into this fight. He served since 2007 representing Maryland's 3rd congressional district. His father was one of the most respected and prominent senators in the United States Senate. He, too, had been in Congress, but then moved to the Senate. Paul Sarbanes, He. He served in Congress. Paul Sarbanes served in Congress from the time that John Sarbanes was about 9, I think, until John entered the House. John Sarbanes graduated from Princeton in 1984. He then attended the Harvard Law School, graduating in 1998. He clerked for Judge Frederick Motz in the District Court of Maryland and then worked at the law firm venable from 1989 until he ran for Congress in 2000. And sex and in this conversation, you'll hear Sarbanes describe the reform that he helped craft and then the reform as it was changed and more importantly, the promise ahead. If we do ever fix the overturned table, sweep the ice from the deck and get this bill passed, it will be because of the incredible public servants you're about to hear on this podcast. I, for one, hope he can get this done soon as there is so much else I'd love to do. Here's John Sarbanes.

Congressman Sarbanes, thank you for talking to us. I went back in my calendar and June 7, 2012 I had this entry and it said a reservation is under your name@grill700. The lounge is typically closed, so the hostess will escort you and Sarbanes will meet you there. And at 10:45 I arrived at this Grill 700. It was closed and I was walked to the back of the room and in a booth there was you. And we were hidden from the world as we were going to have a conversation about campaign finance reform, which you wanted to talk to me about. I guess you had read my book and you were eager to talk about it, but not too publicly. It was a sufficiently secret meeting and

as I think about as all subversive meetings need to be, if only our

conspiracy had been more effective as a conspiracy. But as I think of all that's happened in the 13 years since that, or the 11 years, I guess since that meeting, an extraordinary amount has happened. You began thinking at that point about how to fix what you already recognized was a broken way of funding campaigns. And that eventually led to you shepherding through Congress first a way to think about funding campaigns, and then eventually the

for the People act, which was, I

think, the most ambitious democracy reform package considered and passed by Congress maybe ever. I'd love to just have you start by just telling the story of how you got from point A to point B, where we had a chance to do what Nobody thought in 2012 we would ever be able to do.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. We've done this before, but it's always good to reconnect and lift up the issues that we care about so deeply. Point A for me was arriving in Congress already sensitized to the influence. Of course, I didn't know at the time how deep and broad and insidious it was, but the general influence that money has on not just our politics, but how we make public policy, there's two frames, as you know. There's all the money that cascades into the system as a part of winning or losing campaigns. That gets a lot of attention. But then there's how money flows after the campaigns are over and, you know, the headquarters are closed down and you shift to whatever the position of authority and responsibility is that you hold, whether that's in Washington or in a state capitol. But elected representatives are then faced with the role that money plays in how public policy gets shaped. And I was interested in that from the beginning. I had some sense of it, but I didn't really understand the extent of it until I started doing kind of my own research. And that started right away, because right away, the special interests that want to make sure they've got access to you start showing up at your door, not literally holding bags of money, but with the promise that there's a fundraiser next week or next month that they're going to make sure is profitable for you, and their expectation is that they will have your ear when it comes to policy matters they care about. So that started happening right away, and my first reaction, my instinct, was to push back on that. I felt I didn't understand the way the system worked enough yet to get entangled in that dimension of it. And I was determined to get a broader perspective. And that's what pushed me to both then start experimenting in my own campaign with new and more democratic ways of raising money, but also to look at what, from a public policy standpoint, we could do to fix the system, Whether it's fixing what happens in campaigns or it's bringing more disclosure and transparency to how money flows in Washington once people show up there. But the commitment to understand the system better, and if I saw places where I thought it was fundamentally broken, to do what I could to fix it and reform it, that's where it came from, and it remains there today. I mean, it's been a long slogan. I think we've certainly elevated the issues and created a higher level of awareness, certainly among my colleagues in Washington and Congress, of what's broken. It can be difficult sometimes to get them to take the leap to the solutions we want to see, But I think there's an understanding that there's really Some fundamental issues that we need to address if we're going to do the job and meet the expectation that the public has of us.

Okay, but let's pick up with the

innovations that you tried yourself at the

beginning, when we spoke in 2012, didn't really have a clear sense of what the right solution would be. But you started experimenting in the way you funded your own campaign, in ways that designed, I think, just to bind yourself, to make sure that you would have the right incentives in how you raised your campaign and would produce a certain discipline for what you thought that was like. So just describe for us exactly what those early innovations look like.

Well, you know, politics is an experiment in human behavior. So I decided to make myself the guinea pig and see if, as you point out, I could design incentives that would force me, encourage me to reach out to places and people that might not be sort of most at the ready in terms of raising money for one's campaign. Certainly not the people that show up unsolicited at your door, but with a sense that I needed to democratize the universe of people that were providing financial support to me, because that's the group I wanted to be answerable to and accountable to. And I didn't want to become too dependent on a relatively tiny group of high end donors and political action committees that come with a very organized perspective of what they want the return on their investment to be. So what that looked like was figuring out what does it mean to build a universe or an ecosystem of smaller donors, build a relationship there, do it in a way that can be viable for your campaign, because you do have to raise money. And so I created, I designed these incentive structures. I went to some of the more traditional donors, we talked about this, and I got them to sort of create a fund for me that I promised, pledged not to touch until I had recruited a certain number of small donors. And what was interesting, Larry, was, and maybe I was blessed with a group of donors with capacity who were as interested in the experiment as I was. But I was able to raise the dollars into those funds pretty quickly. And then it was a matter of, okay, how do I unlock those dollars by finding the smaller contributors. So I pretty quickly established the incentive. And then I needed to go learn about how you find the small donors and you bring them into your campaign and you get them excited and empowered around the idea that their small contribution can actually leverage something. That then led me to understand better what sort of online platforms could yield in terms of communication with small donors. It meant that suddenly the reason to do a House party wasn't just to stand up in front of a group and give your stump speech on policy and promises. It was also to say, hey, I need your contribution of 10 or 20 or $25 in order to power my campaign because of the way I've set this up. And that was extremely motivating for people and was certainly motivating for me. So we continued to do that over the course of two or three election cycles, making some changes along the way. At one point I said, well, I am reaching out to smaller donors, but they all seem to be concentrated in certain parts of my district where it's kind of easier to do the outreach. I got to push myself to reach out more broadly. So then I said, okay, I've got to find small donors in at least 100 precincts out of the 250 precincts in my district. And that became the incentive. And I actually went and built a matching program with high donors for 100 different precincts. And there were lessons in that. Some of the precincts I pushed myself to go knock doors in and ask for contributions, the people there couldn't afford a $5 contribution. So then that got me thinking about the utility of vouchers as a way of bringing people into the space of democratic fundraising or small d Democratic fundraising. So it was a constant kind of tailoring and reworking and tinkering with the model to test new incentives. All of it though grounded in the idea that you want to get away from being dependent on the big money crowd, the special interests, the insiders, whatever the phrase is, you want to use, and reach instead to everyday citizens out there who are the ones with the rightful expectation that every move you make is one that's being made on their behalf.

So I would imagine that many of these people, especially in the more middle class or lower middle class places, that districts that you would go to, were kind of surprised with the idea that you were asking them for money. Probably you were the first politician that would have been asking them for a $5, a $10 or $15 contribution.

Like, well, let me tell you, I'm going to tell you two stories that I just told in Athens, where I gave a keynote speech on the connection between democratic agency and mental health. The idea basically being that if people feel welcomed and respected in the political town square, it's good for their, their state of mind and sense of well being. And conversely, if they feel that their vote and voice is being suppressed and disrespected, it has the opposite effect on them. But the two stories I told them around Democratic empowerment and sense of agency, when you're talking about the money and politics dimension. The first story was a volunteer of mine, a guy named Terry, who came up to me at a house party. This was back, this was probably 12, 13 years ago. And he said, you know, I'm one of your biggest champions. I've knocked doors for you, I've made phone calls, stuffed envelopes. I said, I really appreciate it, thank you so much. And I was sort of getting ready to move on. And he said, but I do want you to know I have one complaint. I said, what's that? He said, well, you've never asked me for a contribution. He said, I can't afford much, maybe 10, $15, I'd be happy to do it, but you never asked me. And in that moment I understood what he was saying, which was, when you need the money, when you need the real power behind a campaign, you go other places, you go to the deep pocketed donors, you go to the PACs. I'm good enough to knock doors for you and make phone calls, but I'm not good enough to be the power behind financing your campaign. And that really stung me or kind of woke me up because I realized that there were two sides to this equation. Yeah, I love the idea of getting small donors, but I don't think I appreciated so much the sense of empowerment or ownership that they felt on their side of that transaction and expectation and what it meant for a sense of dignity on their part, particularly if they knew that the people that were making those contributions were coming from a fairly elite place. And so that helped to fuel or fortify the efforts I was undertaking to broaden my outreach. So fast forward a few years, I can't remember if I told you this story, but it was when I had decided that I needed to get some small donations out of these hundreds of different precincts. And I needed to do it according to, again, the design of my own experiment. I needed to do that by the time the polls closed on election night. So it was election night. It was 7:30, the polls were closing at 8 o'. Clock. I had managed to recruit small donors from 99 out of the hundred precincts that I'd selected. But I still had that one precinct to go. And so I was obsessed. And I remember pulling off the highway into a shopping center parking lot in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in my district south of Baltimore. And I had a list of registered voters with their contact information in this precinct. And I just started Cold calling people. And I finally got. It was about 20 of 8, I got a woman on the phone and I started making my pitch. You know, this is Congressman Sarbanes. You know, I'm trying to recruit a bunch of small donors to show the power and democracy of that and so forth. I got about 15 seconds in, and she interrupted me and she said. She said, excuse me, is this a recording? I said, no, no, this is Congressman Sarbanes. I kept going. And a few seconds later, she interrupted again and she said, so this is a volunteer from Congressman Sarbanes office. And I said, no, this is actually your congressman. I'm calling you. This is me. At which point she got very excited because she'd never heard from her congressman before, and she'd certainly never heard from a congressman or any elected official calling her to ask her to make a $5 donation to their campaign. But I explained what I was doing, and I sort of said. I said, at one point, I'm calling you from the future. I'm calling you from a time and a place when your contribution and your relationship to the campaign will be the most important thing. And so then she was very excited. I said, look, are you at a computer? She said, yes. I said, do you have a credit card? She said, yes. I said, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get my staff to send you a link. If you go on there and you donate by 8 o', clock, then the experiment is a success. And so I sent her the link, and then I waited. And God bless her, she made that donation in time. Now, I know she was excited and felt empowered by that. But what was incredible, Larry, is how excited and empowered I was by that. When I got off that call and when I found out that she'd made that donation, the adrenaline rush I got from that was like nothing I'd ever gotten from like $1,000 donation or a $5,000 donation. I mean, this was. It was like we had this human connection around empowerment. Like, there was this, like, feedback loop of empowerment that was happening. So you're absolutely right. Most Americans, certainly, when it comes to the financing of campaigns, typically feel left out of that process, but they belong right in the middle of it. And that's why I've pursued, as a policy matter for so many years, this idea of a small donor matching system that would basically make the contribution from an average citizen out there, be the leverage that members of Congress would depend on to finance their campaigns. And then if they're successful, they end up in Washington indebted to who? Nobody other than the broad populist electorate out there that helped them get to that position. So it was a very exciting experience for me, very formative for me. Much more so probably than that woman realized that evening. But it helped propel me forward into this experiment and this interest.

Okay, I want to go two different ways and I can't at the same time. So I'm going to take a short detour here to close the loop because yesterday I had a conversation with an academic, Jennifer Herwig, who is studying vouchers in Seattle. And her interviews with council people and people using the voucher system in Seattle produced many stories exactly like the one you're talking about. Even though the thing they were handing over was this artificial money, this just coupon that was sent to them by the city. And the dynamic that she described for everybody who was in the voucher system was this dynamic of them realizing how empowering it was for both them and the citizens to feel like this was the important relationship in the voucher system. People are opting into the voucher system, that's all they've got. They can't go anywhere else. So they're not going to get the thousand dollar contribution. They've got to work to get the small contribution. But what's interesting is the experience you're describing as this empowering experience for both sides is what's defining the dynamic of that process, which I don't think I really, when I thought about vouchers and wrote about vouchers, really thought about it in that way, in that very visceral, on the ground way. But it's important that it's confirmed in both contexts, both where it's real money and also in the context of just vouchers.

Well, and let's contrast it with the two sides of a different transaction, which can end up making everyone cynical in the exercise. So when you're getting the funding for your campaign from a lobbyist or a PAC or a high end donor who's got a particular agenda that they expect from you, that transaction leaves both sides feeling pretty cynical and transactional. Only it's not a values based interaction, it's a what, you know, what can you do for me, in a very specific sense. And unfortunately, because that's the way the system forces a lot of its participants to raise money and be viable in the system, you end up with a very cynical environment generally. And that's not good for going and making public policy or anything else for that matter. So there's something Sort of. There's a renewal dimension to connecting with everyday Americans and making sure that every dimension of their interaction with the system is one that makes them feel empowered. It's not enough, for example, and this is why we always combine these things into an overall reform package. It's not enough to clear the path to the ballot box. Understanding that that's an incredibly important source of empowerment for people if once they elect those public officials and send them off to the place where laws are made, they feel like they've gone into this inside world that doesn't respect the people that sent them there. So it's two sides of the coin. One side of the coin is the right to have your. Your voice heard, and the other side is the right to have it actually mean something when you get. When your representative shows up in Washington. So I think it's all about meeting the expectations. And unfortunately, those expectations have diminished over time among many people out there and the public. But the expectations, that their voice is really important, that they do have power in the system. My goal has always been to try to design the incentives of the system and the basic infrastructure in ways that reinforce those voices out there. And in some ways, by introducing real competition, diminish the voice and influence of the traditional insiders and. And special interest. And if we can do that, then I think we can begin to address some of the cynicism that's taken hold of so many out there and then leads to anger, frustration, and some radical solutions that people seek.

Yeah. So now let me go down a different path, because what's really incredible about the story of this reform effort is you spent many years just trying to talk to your colleagues and to connect with them, to get them to think about what an alternative could look like and what would make it better. And I wonder, in those conversations, was this contrast something that you would talk about? Would you contrast the idea of people giving you money just because they want and support the ideas you're pushing for, where there's no transaction and no cynical quid pro quo, where. With the other context, where, of course, there's no illegal quid pro quo, but we all understand the transactional nature of it. And did you have the experience of seeing in some of your colleagues a recognition that this could be actually better than it, in fact is for the vast majority of people on Capitol Hill?

Yeah, I did. I think their first. Their first reflex or response to this idea that you could change up the way campaigns are financed was that you could never raise enough money under that other system. That's being proposed to be competitive. So we came armed with very sophisticated models we built to actually show them, based on their own fundraising experience, that they could be successful under the model that we were proposing as kind of a small donor matching system. So that would be the first reaction, and that's a reaction of survival. So it's understandable. The second reaction, though, was really longing for the idea or the prospect that you could do your job without being sort of held hostage to these big money players or put a different way or another dimension of it is having to fear them at every turn. And I think that's a combination of resenting, feeling like you're something that you know you're being bought and sold on the one hand, as well as seeing how much time and energy you're spending catering to that group in ways that pull you away from the job you really want to be doing. And then I think you probably get last in most cases, to the other side of this. The notion that it's really uplifting and empowering for the small donor to feel like they're the source of powering your campaign. It's harder, I think, for the average member, average politician who has built up, they built a perspective that has separated the world into. There's one place you go to get money and there's another place you go to get votes and volunteers and activists and sort of on the ground, grassroots. The idea that those could be connected to each other and that you would create this kind of holistic model of empowerment, I think is harder for many people to see. And I didn't see it initially out of the gate. I had other things pushing me towards these experiments. It started as maybe an abstraction, but that's the most exciting dimension of all of it. And so if you could align incentives so that the people that you actually are asking to vote for you and volunteer for you and do all those things are also the people that can power your campaign financially. What a beautiful, elegant model of. Of pure 100% civic engagement that represents. But I think it's the hardest thing to see because of all these other dimensions that are thrown in your path.

How many others across the country do you think are practicing a similar kind of fundraising politics? And I don't mean that they get small dollar donors, because obviously lots of people are very popular with particular wings of the parties they are in, and they get lots of small dollar donors. But I mean, the experience you're describing of, like pushing yourself to be in a context you're actually connecting to People who are only giving you small dollar donations.

Well, I think maybe a better question or the one I can answer is whether people that have been financing their campaign the old way are trying to move to a different approach. Because you can get very comfortable with the system as it works, particularly if you've been there for a while, people know you, the money people know you. It's all kind of formulaic. You can raise what you need to stay there from fairly limited sources that have capacity and so forth. So what I found is a very interesting project is to, you know, what is it that gets people to move in a new direction? People in this case being elected officials and candidates and sort of transition from the legacy system of raising money towards something a little more innovative. Now one thing that moves them interestingly is the political potency of being seen as beholden to corporate interests. And you've seen over the last few years this move to be corporate PAC free, for example. So you have, I think probably over 75 or maybe 80 members of the House and Senate combined who've taken the corporate PAC free pledge. And that includes some members who used to take a fair amount of that money but now see some political risk in terms of the voters perspective on this to not moving to a different place. And you know, typically it's because they, they're getting challenged in a primary with people who are taking a corporate PAC free pledge or something like that, and they have to make a judgment of whether that's going to be a salient enough issue politically for them. So you see some of them moving for that reason. So that's one set of people. I do think that because the new tools out there and technologies are ones that make it easier to raise small donations that you get. Increasingly among the newer members that join us, there's a higher percentage that are able to power in pretty significant ways their campaigns with small donations. So having them in the mix and part of that ecosystem, that peer, you know, that peer group that is, that is Congress in my case also helps generate a higher level of awareness of what it means to connect to small donors. But I'm always interested in sort of the average rank and file member, not the one who is particularly good at going viral on some social media platform and having a huge volume of small donations pour in and can kind of rely on those. But the ones that got to raise, you know, significant amount of money, but need a new system that can leverage small donations in a way that makes them viable and their campaigns viable without having to go to PACS and special interests. And that's where you get back to the actual design of the model that will allow people to be successful if they step into it. And, you know, we designed our proposal with a six to one match, as you know, and we ran the numbers on that and showed that 80%, more than 80% of my colleagues, would do better in a system like that based on their own historical fundraising, than they would if they stayed in the current system. So I think that there's many different ways people can find the path to this kind of design and model, but the most important is that we make it an opportunity, an option in our system that people can choose. Right now, they don't have it. We see it at the state and local level in some places, but at the federal level, there is not a matching system for small donations that candidates can choose to participate in. And what's interesting about that, Larry, is the more you get it happening at the state and local level, the more the absence of it at the federal level acts as a kind of ceiling that candidates who use those systems at the local and state level hit their head against. They can't make the transition to be a viable federal candidate because this model, this empowerment model around small donors that they've experienced at that other level is not one they can carry into the federal level. That's why it's so important to establish that as a meaningful opportunity for people.

Okay, now I want to shift ahead to what felt to me like an extraordinary moment when Nancy Pelosi in 2018 said that if the Democrats take control of Congress, she would pass the the for the People act in the first period of 2019. That was extraordinary for a number of reasons. First, I mean, Nancy Pelosi was the most successful big money fundraiser for the Democratic Party. She's very good at the old system, but here she was staking her future on the idea of fundamentally changing the way democracy could work. And by that time, the package that you had helped architect was obviously much more than just the fundraising package. It include included the John Lewis voting rights package, which the really important change in the way that we think of the right to vote as an actual right as opposed to something that's just not to be interfered with in certain ways. There's a gerrymandering part to it. There was ethics for the Supreme Court. God forbid that would ever be imagined. There's a bunch in it now. So there are two questions here. So first, first, in this process of putting together the package, I know you became a very articulate defender of the idea that it needed to be multifaceted because you needed to have somebody have some reason why they really cared about it, and it wouldn't be the same for everybody. But I wonder whether in the end, that still seems like the right strategy or did you learn something when you were doing that? And the second part of the question is, you know, Nancy Pelosi, this, you know, obviously you convinced her that this was fundamental. How much of that convincing do you think is going to carry over assuming the Democrats take control of the House once again?

So, in terms of Pelosi, I think her commitment to it is because she's always had a. A commitment to that. She's also always understood power and what you got to do to get and hold power in politics. So if there's an. If there's a. If there's an existing set of rules for succeeding that you've not yet been able to change and create a new design, you got to do everything you can within that set of rules to be successful. And so she was very good at that. Nancy Pelosi also understood that there's a benefit to creating a system in which everyday Americans feel more respected and that Democrats are the party that should be leading on that. And she also appreciated that there was this increasing sentiment out in the country that the political system is corrupt and the interests and viewpoints and priorities of average people are being sacrificed to an agenda of insiders and special interests. So she could see coming, or really already having arrived, certainly by 2018, if not before, the political cost of being seen as disrespectful of the voice of the broad electorate out there and part of a corrupt system. So there was, I think she genuinely and authentically always wanted to move in that direction, but she also appreciated the political benefits of responding to the anger and cynicism in the country by overhauling our democracy. So that's, I think, where her motivation came from in terms of this idea that we had to link arms across a broad set of constituencies and design a package of democracy reform that would address a number of different things that were broken. That in many respects came from just being listening carefully to what people were saying out there. And it basically, their frustrations fell into two broad buckets. One was, I want to be able to get to the ballot box without running an obstacle course. This is nuts. I should be able to register and vote. I should be respected in that process. Whatever the community is, whatever I look like, whatever I come from, I ought to be able to vote in America. And there was deep frustration that it's so hard and complicated in so many places. But people also understood that that wasn't worth the ballot you wrote your name on. If the people you elected got to the place where laws are made and immediately were captured by special interests and big money, because then your voice has been hijacked and thrown in a closet someplace. So the public was saying, if you're going to go do this, do it. Like, don't sort of just nibble around the edges, fix what we're upset about. Now the public's also incredibly skeptical. They're like, you keep saying you're going to do this. It never happens to the point where it's like oxygen. It's in the room, but nobody's talking about it. It. So you talk about other issues, which then contributes further to their sense of detachment from the process. But the idea that we had to do these two big pieces. We had to make sure people's voice was heard in the process of electing their officials, and then we had to make sure that those officials would go act ethically, would not be captured by special interests and money, so that they could carry out the agenda that the public expected of them, that that had to be part of the solution as well. It was pretty clear from the beginning that the public had the appetite for that. And frankly, if you did one without the other, you would only end up in a place of more frustration. So that wouldn't be politically sensible anyway. So we put these all together, and the baskets were ballot access, fixing partisan gerrymandering, addressing ethics, addressing the disclosure of dark money, and creating a system that would empower small donors. So they felt like they were actually on the field making a difference in their own democracy, not just kind of up in the bleachers watching people be refereed on the field of democracy. So that was the imperative behind packaging all of these reforms together. And it made a huge difference in terms of motivating the public to get behind this particular effort. Pulling all of these elements into one overarching package was really a matter of respecting what we were hearing from the public in terms of the change they wanted to see. Now, it was a big bet because if you go out there and tell people you're going to try to make change like that and you don't succeed, then they can end up even more cynical than when you start the process. And I think all you can do under those circumstances is show them that you're trying and you keep coming back at it. And what's Amazing, Larry, is the commitment you mentioned that Pelosi had, along with so many other people in our caucus and resulted in the designation of this package of reforms as HR1. The first bill that would be put forward by the Democrats in the 116th Congress, it came back again as HR1 in the 117th Congress. In that Congress, it was also S1 on the Senate side. And now in the 118th Congress, it's going to get designated again as S1 on the Senate side and HR11, which is the best we can do in the minority on the House side. So for three consecutive Congresses, Democrats in Washington have said this is our number one priority. This is our legacy commitment as Democrats on the Hill. And that's unprecedented. But I think it reflects an understanding on the part of our caucus that this is the overarching issue that all the other things that we care about, climate change, health care coverage for people, every issue that matters to people is kind of a side story if the democracy itself can't function. And that's why it needs to be this continuing priority.

So what was a little frustrating in the way the media framed this throughout was that they emphasized very strongly the voting rights half of this, but not the kind of Democratic, you know, the other half of the Democratic reform part, which I think is unfortunate because it gets spun in obvious political ways to make it seem like it's not as broad based as in fact, I think you have demonstrated that it is. And indeed, when it got to the Senate and became the Voting Rights act or the Freedom to Vote act, many of the kind of most important elements it seemed to me were muted or pulled away. And I just, I wondered, as you watch that happen, you know, obviously a congressperson is constantly dealing with the compromise necessary to get something done. So it's nothing new. But I wonder whether you feared that that would weaken the chance to build the broad based movement, to push it over the top.

Yeah, I do fear that. I think you always need the two main pillars to be there to be successful. You need the voting side of it and you need the anti corruption part of turns out that the anti corruption piece is the one that is most salient across the political spectrum. It's also the piece that if you don't deal with it, is most easily weaponized by people who are cynical about our politics and only care about their own power. And exhibit A, B, C and all the way to Z of that is Donald Trump, who found that cynicism and anger in the public over the notion that the system was corrupt and money was calling the shots in Washington. And he said, I'm going to go up there with a baseball bat and I'm going to show those politicians what for. And, and people responded to that. We were coming with something different, which was to say, we agree, we understand that you feel upset and frustrated and that there's a lot of corruption in this system. We have an idea of how to actually fix it rather than burn the thing to the ground and make sure that your voice is heard and is a powerful part of our politics and the way we govern. But if you don't address the corruption side of it, then, like I say, others with a different agenda and a more cynical outlook will come along. Grab onto that. And by the way, the corruption, there's some polling I've just seen that came back that showed that the feelings about corruption continue to drive so much of the perspective out there in the public. And what's interesting is there's still a lot of people who don't perceive which side will. Which side, Democrats or Republicans, are the better place to turn if you want to solve your anger about corruption. And so it's a continuing battle to put in front of an angry, cynical electorate the positive, restorative set of proposals for how you address corruption, rather than the one that just says, I'm going to go burn the place down. And so we're still struggling with that, but absolutely, I think that the corruption pillar has to continue to be in the mix just as much as the access, the ballot access and voting rights issues are.

Yeah.

And it's really edifying, rewarding to hear you frame it like that, because I think there's been an evolution in the way that we talk about this problem. There's a really dramatic exchange between Nancy Pelosi and Jon Stewart where Jon Stewart says that Washington's corrupt and Nancy says, no, it's not corrupt. And what she eventually came around to was that the system was corrupt. So what she was originally thinking was Congress is not filled with a bunch of people who are making deals to get rich in exchange for politics. That kind of simple quid pro quo corruption is not really what drives. Drives Washington. But the system being corrupt, when you've got everybody paying attention to the tiny number of donors who are going to make it possible for them to come back, that should be a way of talking about it that we all understand and we all agree on. And I do think that it's exactly the right way to frame it, to connect it back to ordinary people, because that Frustration is real and really cross partisan. But it's sad that the public doesn't realize that the only party that's actually moved an agenda to address it is the Democratic Party. And it's even worse when the press frames it in a way that erases that part of it and makes it seem like this is just the Voting Rights act of 1965 revived.

Well, I think the press itself is very cynical. I mean, I experienced this when we were in the home stretch of trying to get the Freedom to Vote act over the finish line in the last Congress. Nobody believed that it could ever happen, particularly the press that sort of operates inside the Beltway, inside that ecosystem. You know, they. They all believe that. They know it all. They've seen it come and go. It's never going to happen. Then of course, if it doesn't happen, it just validates their worldview again. And what made me frustrated a lot of the time or some of the time, was that they had no idea of two things. One, how transformative this was because they didn't really bother to look at it for the most part, because it wasn't going to happen. Who cares? Whatever. So they didn't understand how big it was on the one hand. And on the other hand, they never appreciated because they didn't really want to study it. Like how close we actually got. I mean, we almost got it. I mean, I'm not going to write a book, but somebody will write a book one day which will explain just how close we got. And so it was maddening to have this, the press out there just sort of, you know, being cynical and skeptical and all the rest of it, but it didn't affect all the things we were doing to try to succeed. It just would have been really nice to prove them wrong, you know, so whatever.

No, I was in the circle of people who believed. And everybody said, you're just so stupidly naive. This is ridiculous. But you know, our friend Raymond too, who was working for you and now of course is over in Senator Schumer's office. He was a real believer it was going to happen.

Oh, absolutely. And he was not only a believer, he was making it happen. And we were, We were working all the angles. There was no stone left unturned. But, you know, the sort of random pinballs of the universe just stopped it at the end from happening.

Okay, last point on this, because I think this is really important so I can report from the reformers community that that loss was a real gut punch because, you know, so many of us Thought we were close, that if we did this, this would be transformational, it would be the most important change that we could make. And to have gotten that close and to lose it was really, really hard. And I think that there are many people in the reform community now. I don't know if you ever had Roberto Unger as a law professor when you were here, but you remember the end of his first great book, he says they were like priests who had lost their faith but kept their jobs. Talking about the law professors, but I sometimes feel like the reformers in the reform communities are people who've lost their faith but kept their job, because what are they going to do, stop, you know, running their. Their reformer PACs and things like that? So the question. The question for you is like, you know, you are a believer and you thought it was possible, and I thought you were right.

Are you a believer?

Do you think it's possible? Do you think that, you know, in the next four years we're going to see.

All depends on the composition of the House and the Senate and if you have someone in the White House who would sign it. So there's a couple things I'd say. One is I think we have assembled a team, a kind of Ocean's Eleven team, or whatever you want to call it, inside and outside, that understands that the next time we have the opportunity, opportunity electorally to do this, we have to do it. And the members of that team will come and go. I mean, a number of the organizations that have been in this fight for years now, but even in the last five years, you know, the people that work there have changed. The presidents of those organizations, organizations have changed, but the organization's commitment to this as a priority haven't changed. Yeah, Elijah Cummings is not with us anymore. John Lewis is not with us anymore, but Nekimah Williams is with us now. You know, who took John Lewis seat in Georgia and others. So there's a sense, I have this sense that we. And it's a broad. We have created something that exists. It exists. It's a commitment that exists. And all it needs is the next opportunity. It's not like we're going to have to go build a new product. Yeah, there'll be some changes in it, some adaptations, etc. But we know what has to be in there. We built it. You know, we built the car. We don't have to build a new car. We just got to fill up the gas tank so that it can, like, get out on the road again and get over the finish line. And the fact that, as I said a moment ago, the fact that you've got Democrats leadership on the Hill that keeps saying this is number one, that's pretty remarkable, that shows it exists as a commitment. Now what we need to do is we need to get a gavel back into Democratic hands in the House. We need to get enough senators in the Senate, Democrats who are willing to change the rules to bring the bill to the floor there to get that to happen. And we need to have a president in the White House who would sign the bill when it gets through Congress. That's not easy. That trifecta is not easy. And of course, we saw we had a trifecta last Congress where we fell two votes shy of the rules change that we needed. But the fact that we had every Democrat in Washington supporting that bill, including the two that didn't want to do the rules change, but on the bill itself they supported it was pretty amazing. And creates like the floor from which we're operating now. I mean, we're operating from a floor of 48 Democrats who did support a rules change. And I don't think any Senate Democrat, new Senate Democrat showing up who isn't committed at least to that, if not broader changes on the filibuster. So this thing exists. We created something that still exists. And that's, I think, a reason to have some optimism that it's. I mean, I remember talking to Wade Henderson after the disappointment of this, and he pointed out that the 1965 Voting Rights act, that that battle started long before and in 1957, people felt you were close to a breakthrough and it didn't happen, but eight years later it did. So I think that it's a matter of getting the votes. I think the commitment, if we get the votes is pretty locked in. And my goal is to keep that, to make sure everybody stays as locked into that as possible. And one example is next week we're going to reintroduce the Freedom to Vote act and it will be S1 in the Senate and it will be HR11 in the House. And that's a statement that you know it exists and we're not giving up on it. So.

And it includes the voucher, I mean, the matching fund proposal that you have,

it has in it where we landed at the end of last Congress, which was to create a fund that would support opportunities for states to use those dollars to support matching systems for federal candidates. It would give them that option to do it. Now, my preference is you create the opportunity across the board and next Time we go live on this, depending on who the makeup is of the majority that we have, I think we reach for that again. But to be honest, we landed in a pretty good place with that. And in some ways if states. Because one of my frustrations, as I mentioned at the outset, is you have states that are putting these matching systems in place, but then they can't do it for federal candidates. If a state's committed to that because its experience is positive and it's got a culture around that, it will choose to use the funds that are available to it to put those systems in place. Whereas do you want to ram it down the throats of a state that's dead set against it and has no culture or experience with it? So it's an interesting conversation to have. But the idea of this and the opportunity of it is very much a part of the package and I think has to continue to be part of the package. Because the money corruption thing is not about just the big dark money and more transparency that gets you knowledge of how money is being spent, but frankly can be demoralizing to the average person because it just shows them more clearly that their voice doesn't matter. You need the empowerment side of it to really bring people back into the town square with a sense of optimism and confidence and dignity and cure the deep cynicism. And even if we got all these things in place tomorrow, Larry, we're probably decades from repairing the damage we've done in terms of how cynical the public has become and how it views its democratic institutions. And of course, lurking in the background of this conversation we're having is the very real possibility that the cynicism has gone so far now that anti democratic forces which have taken hold will continue to strengthen and we may be in a world where it's too late for this reform. And that's a whole other discussion, but obviously relevant here.

Yeah, so. So last question then about that. So can states use that money for any kind of public funding? So could they use it for vouchers too?

Yes, it'd be like a trust that we raise from this surcharge, small surcharge we put on government settlements with corporate lawbreakers and high end tax cheats and so forth. And believe me, the government settlements that are going to be coming will bankroll this system till kingdom come. And then there'll be a menu of ways that states can choose to use their allocation from that fund. And it'll be all kinds of democracy experiments. It'll be very interesting. It would fund states being Democracy Labs, they could choose to do campaign finance things, they could choose to set up, look at ranked choice voting, they could look at infrastructure investments, all kinds of things to test them out. But it would include these various forms of campaign finance innovation as well. So it could be very interesting, I think, over time.

So that's a federalism idea, but still you got no Republican to back it.

No, but we got Joe Manchin to back it, which was what was operative there. He loved the idea. So we were like, okay, great, Joe, let's run with that. But we just. But we couldn't get him for the rules change because he had this notion that you can't do anything big unless it's bipartisan. And we were like, well, the 14th Amendment was big and that wasn't bipartisan. And where would we be if we had not done that? Because we felt it was more important to have both parties on board, even cosmetically. But we couldn't persuade him of that in the end, unfortunately.

And all the problems that you were trying to correct, from voter suppression to gerrymandering were not problems created in a bipartisan way in the states. They were pretty one party driven. Right. I mean, gerrymandering could be one party either way, but certainly the vote suppressed. Yeah, but we could go on.

Well, and those are problems that the today's Republican Party view as virtues and it's become their value system, unfortunately. And that's why we're living in such perilous times. I mean, we just voted today on an ndaa, a Defense Authorization act that is full of all of these terrible, hateful cultural agendas of the Republican Party. But they hijacked a defense bill to try to put their mark on it. This is where we are and hopefully we can fix the democracy, as I say, before they take it and take it over the cliff with them. But we'll see. For now, there's still another election coming.

Yeah, there's at least one more.

Yeah.

I think Congressman John Sarbanes, thank you so much for taking once again time to explain this and thank you so much for the work you've done. I don't think we would be here had you not done what you did for the last 1312 years. And you will be the one that's there when we carry it over.

Well, I appreciate that and I also sort of right back at you. Like you mentioned at the outset, that original meeting we had was because I got motivated by your writing on this topic and your commitment to it. And so we're both part of a group of believers and stakeholders that number in the thousands who have gotten us to this point. And I think we've built a foundation, we've built a platform to reach for the next thing. And so, as stinging as the loss was that we experienced last year, and at times I've got a kind of PTSD reaction to the whole thing, we achieved some things that even six weeks out from the day of the vote on the rules change and so forth, nobody thought was possible. So we have to take heart in that and understand that this is a long game. I mean, if the democracy, if we can hang on to the democracy, then we've got time to fix this. And that's not necessarily going to be easy. But I think we can do the first thing. And if we can do the first thing, then we can certainly eventually do the second thing.

Okay, thank you very much.

This has been the second episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens.

As I've said, in the abstract sense,

they are produced quite literally by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find more about Equal Citizens at Equal Citizens Us. Give us your thoughts and and feedback. I love the feedback, especially the ideas.

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