Special Episode: The Viral Movement Holding Politicians Accountable

What I hope happens is there's enough Americans that start to have these experiences and they go, I like this. This works for me.

And if we lose, then we ought to really be getting the pitchforks and like running the revolution.

80% of voters approve of not taking corporate money.

Washington is in a swamp. To run an effective campaign, they have to accept a lot of this money.

There's this unmet demand that we have been meeting of people that are just done. They're so tired of it. If someone says every politician is corrupt, why should I care? You let the corrupt politicians get away with it.

So this is Larry Lessig. And this is another episode of the podcast Another Way. Now, it's very different. Usually we do really budget productions. This year, for the first time, we've had video. But when I told our executive director that I wanted to do this episode, she was like, we have to splurge and have this amazing setup because these 2 guys are the most important people in money and politics in America today. and they are building the most important movement. And I know because I've been in this business for 147 years, and I can tell you these two are building something that's absolutely gonna work. So we're gonna talk to them about it, but let's make sure we all know who we are. So this is Maya Cook, who is the executive director of Equal Citizens. She's come in now, you've been here for a year and a half.

But working with you for 3 years.

Yeah, you've been working on this forever and with me for 3 years, but now you've been running our organization for a year and a half. And Niko and Daniel have been behind, well, you have, well, you're gonna introduce what you guys in fact do, but everybody knows, well, everybody knows Niko from, he's my total social media, I'm maybe admitting a little bit too much, but he's my total social media feed talking about money and politics issues. But tell us about how you got this thing going and what this thing is in your mind. And now you've even transitioned a bit to embrace the fight against AI. But let's start with the money in politics.

Even before you do, can you ask the question just to kick us off?

Oh yeah. Is your member of Congress a piece of shit? That's the question, right?

Yeah.

But thank you for those, the kind words about our work. I mean, it started with, as you mentioned, my social media in 2025. And then me and Daniel got connected over that summer after I started making these videos asking the question, is your member of Congress a piece of shit? And then we started up the Political Integrity Project in November of 2025. Does that sound right? So it's still been—

About to get the renewal on our domain like next week.

Yeah.

So it's been almost a year. Wow.

That is a lot for one year.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in that year we launched the Integrity Index, our website that has all of our financial integrity grades. We've launched the Trump Tracker, tracking the finances of the Trump administration.

Tracked the California governor's race when that was like in the heat of it.

Yeah, California Governor Tracker. We've launched our political integrity pledge, which many candidates, and now we have almost a dozen incumbents that have taken that anti-corruption pledge. It's been a fast-paced year.

Yeah. So my background, I worked in some campaigns, I worked in some of these nonprofits. And I think the biggest thing I realized before pitching this to Nico and starting to work with Nico on this is that for a lot of these nonprofits, you're just sort of throwing reports out into the void. And it's like you produce this well-researched, fact-checked piece of content that maybe is covered by a couple smaller industry outlets in the political world. What does it do?

Is this open secret slander?

I'm not slandering. No, they're a very good research tool. Yeah, like, like the thing is, is, is when you're a focused mission and like you're not trying to do necessarily, um, uh, like voter persuasion or persuasion in that way, like you can do something really exciting and really good. It's when you're trying to be like, oh, we have like a effectively a consumer side. Like a lot of those places aren't built for it, but when we have a built-in audience Like, it means you can skip all of step 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 where you have to get people to care. Like, we don't have to worry about that. They, they, we are, they already care. Um, and that has made it so it takes off way faster than anything could have in a year in this span.

So that's the part that's really interesting to me. I mean, why is it we're at a place where people care? I mean, you know, again, 147 years I've been in this project, but I started When my friend Aaron Swartz shamed me into giving up the work I was doing on copyright and internet policy and to take this issue up. And that was literally almost exactly 20 years ago. And he and I started a project called Change Congress immediately starting in 2007. And what Change Congress aimed to do is exactly what you guys were doing. I mean, we went out to every single member of Congress and every single candidate to get them to make a pledge. And a pledge was same rough thing that you were doing. And we got a whole bunch to make this pledge. But the critical difference between then and now is that when you said to people back then, hey, look, we've gotta address the corruption issue before we address any of these other issues, they wouldn't get it. They would be like, I care about climate change. And you'd be like, I care about climate change. I care about this issue too. But you gotta see that if you don't deal with the money, you're never gonna deal with the climate change. Or if you don't deal with the money, never going to deal with healthcare costs. That connection wasn't clear 20 years ago, but it feels like everybody kind of gets it now. So what do you— why do you understand? Is that just because of you guys, or is it— what made that happen?

I think when I started the social media series, it came out of seeing a frustration online that people had about this corruption issue. I felt like the anger was being directed oftentimes in the wrong places. But we definitely did not manufacture that. That's, that's been there. And what I—

It's not Chinese bots.

It's not Chinese bots. What I try to stress often is that a lot of this is, a lot of this is new, or at least has accelerated a lot, not in the past 10 years, and it has in the past 10 years, but in the last 2 years, right? I mean, you talk about stock trading, right? We've, we haven't seen the president make stock trades like this ever. And I'm not talking about in the last 4 years, I'm talking about in the last 4 months, right? Same thing. I mean, even Citizens United, that's 15 years ago. It's not that long ago. And you can go to wealth inequality too. Daniel always, you know, you can actually get into that if you want.

Yeah. I mean, I think it, the biggest thing, the 2, 3 biggest things between now and when you were working on this. One is it's just worse. All of it's worse. And like, it's only, no one sees a way of it getting better without some significant change. I mean, this will be the most expensive midterms. 2028 will be the most expensive presidential. It's just, it's going to keep going up and up and up. I think what Nico's getting at that I always try to emphasize is inherently money in politics is an inequality problem. Because you, you, someone cannot be, should not be able to have enough money to donate $100 million and get no tax benefits and just do it for bribes and do it for corruption. But they can because they have so much money, it doesn't matter to them, right? When we look at, I mean, what the 2026 estimated about $3 billion or something like that, like for a lot of these tech companies, that's, that is, that it's some money, but like, That's like a medium-small acquisition of another company. If they can buy an election that way, they'll do it. And so as inequality gets worse, that gets worse. And then I think a really big thing is like the brazen corruption that's been going on in the White House has forced people all across the spectrum to like look at their own house and say, how are we going to clean house? Because if we want to stand on this as a real critical issue, we need to do that.

That's a great point. Yeah. I mean, so I think that when I was first in this, it took a while to get people to see the connection and it was almost quaint. Like it was, people would have fundraisers and they would raise $20,000 and it was like, do you see that that's going to affect their ability to make the right judgment. But it was all indirect because it was all relatively small contributions being raised mainly from rich people. So it was still an inequality issue. But Hemingway has this line, how do you go bankrupt? Slowly at first and then suddenly. So there's this slow buildup. Citizens United kicks in and then we think SpeechNow, the case that created super PACs, really ignites this. And you have this explosion. But still before the president, before this president, it's still this kind of systemic or institutional corruption. Then this guy comes in and it's plain old kleptocracy.

Yeah.

I mean, it's plain old like, let's show exactly what you need to do to get the policy you want by benefiting me in the following 6 ways. But I hadn't thought about the fact, this is a great point, that this forces the Democratic Party in particular to say, okay, if we're going to actually stand up against this, We gotta look at ourselves. And I spoke to the Senate Democratic Caucus and you could see they were split. There were some people in that caucus like Chris Murphy who was like, hell, we've gotta be as strong on this issue as we possibly can. And others like the minority leader who is like, mm-mm, we need to be able to have money that we can actually do something with. So there's not yet a full complete recognition, but I think your point is great.

This is exactly what we need. There was polling that came out a couple weeks ago from Data for Progress that was showing like, I think the Democratic Party has like a 3-point advantage on dealing with corruption. Like, you— that should say something, right? If you're, if you're based in DC, if you're in the Beltway, like everyone here, you mention the word corruption, they say, we know where it is. It's like, it's, it's 1600 Penn. But if you're outside of DC, we see this all the time with all of the— with, with the unmet demand that, that Nico hit on when he started this channel. Like That is millions of people who like they're just like they're all corrupt, every single one of them. I mean, it they don't, and that allows you. You say this all the time.

Yeah.

If someone says every politician is corrupt, why should I care? You let the politic the corrupt politicians get away with it, and that's what's been happening. And because quite frankly, people like Nancy Pelosi have said, "I'm we're going to keep trading stocks," and I'm going to let that be a something that can be used against the entire party and apparatus, like that self-interest has made that tenable. It just, you're making it easy for them. And that, the one last thing I think that's important that is different now than 15 years ago is the internet's a very different place. And for better and for worse, but for better in the sense that like, Quite frankly, Nico, a random 20-something from Harvard, Massachusetts, can like be able to break through and not need to say, "Oh, Washington Post, you're going to cover this story again." Right. New York Times, can you mention this? Like we right now have an asymmetrical attention bank. 95% of the politicians that we talk about. have 10% of the followers that we have. There's like 2 or 3 or a couple that don't. And that means when you yell at them, they listen in a way that they can't do anything about.

So tell us about the numbers. Like, where are you now?

As far as social media reach?

Yeah.

I think we're close to a million followers if you add together all the different social medias. And we generate tens of millions a month of views.

Give yourself a shout out to people who aren't already following.

Stalking the Capital, stocks spelled like stocks and bonds. Yeah. But I think Daniel's right in that the, I don't know if this would've worked even the way the internet worked 10 years ago.

5 years ago.

5 years ago. 'Cause I'm not doing long-form YouTube content. It's, It's minute-long videos. It's vertical media. And also just the way that some of these algorithms work these days where you don't have to build up a loyal audience. I mean, I quite literally wrote on my Notes app, is your member of Congress a piece of shit video idea? And I was just like unemployed.

Oh.

I needed something to do because you can only apply to so many jobs on Indeed in one day. And so I set up, you know, I literally put my phone, rested on a book and clicked play. Is your member of Congress a piece of shit? And the video got 30,000 views or 20,000 views. And I thought, okay, let me make a similar video.

More views than I've ever had in my life.

Like, like, let me make another.

Yeah.

I, if I 10 years ago had made a YouTube series, is your member of Congress a piece of shit? And posted that video and it got 5 views. I don't think I I have too much pride, I think, to, you know, I'm gonna make another one.

Niko, I have to tell you, I gave my first guest lecture in an election law class just down the street at American University College of Law. And I said, who's heard of SpeechNow v. FEC? No one raises their hand. Citizens United, of course, everyone's heard of that. And then I said, is your congressperson a piece of shit? And then they all said, let's find out.

Really?

It was crazy. And I said, have you heard of Larry Lessig? And I'm sorry, Larry, but like they, they hadn't heard of Larry Lessig, who's been in this for 20 years, or as he likes to put it, and as I like to put it, 140. Um, which is absolutely crazy to me. So I'm really excited that you guys are doing this because you're making money in politics cool. I think Larry had a really great point earlier, which is that people see these issues as siloed. So it's climate change, healthcare, and then campaign finance. But the truth is all of those things. are symptoms of this broken system that we have. Larry, several years ago, was like, we don't have enough young people talking about money and politics. We need a young person to make this cool. And I said, Larry, that's what I'm trying to do, but I didn't do it. You guys did. So we're really excited.

I think what's been really integral is For a long time, money and politics organizations—and again, we're not—I'm not trying to to subtweet anyone. I like everyone's done done their things. But like when they try to do public-facing stuff, it's always like we're gonna sort of treat this like a like an academic research exercise. But you just—I mean when Nico started saying his remember crown piece piece of shit and like lean into like this is corruption, this is bribery. It's not just, oh, there's like this fancy version of a, a pack can do this and maybe it comes from there and like we'll have a bunch of asterisks. No, like no one gives a shit.

Yeah.

Like, um, and, and I think they're really— there's this unmet demand that we have been meeting of people that are just, they're done. They're so tired of it. Um, and that's why this has worked so well. It's like, obviously the content's good, the idea is good, The products are good, but like really it's because people are so tired of it.

And you make it accessible. Like I've worked at Open Secrets twice now. And for those listening who don't know what Open Secrets is, it's a platform that aggregates FEC data. So it pulls all of the statistics on lobbying, direct donations, and then outside spending, which—

They bought Follow the Money.

They did.

That's the state organization.

Yeah. Not this, this is the domain.

But it really, like one of the things that we really struggled with internally was making this accessible. And you're right, like, we can't say your congressperson is a piece of shit. There is real value in having these, like, truly nonpartisan facts-based orgs. But what you guys are doing is, like, breaking into the sphere and actually making it accessible to people.

And this gets into a little of the weeds, but I feel like you'll enjoy this. Like, that's why we organized—

Why am I going to enjoy that?

Because it's—

I'm weeds. Okay.

Yes, it's also—

it's kind of— you are.

Um, uh, but like, that's why we organized Like this is a pack. We our entity is a super hybrid pack. It is a hybrid pack. We have like carry committee. It's a carry committee, but like it was fun when Nico the initial video launched. It was we're launching a super pack. That's one of the most viral videos you've done for some reason.

And people saw me and they're like, "Wait, you're making a super pack? You're one of the bad guys?" Yeah.

And I think, and we did that on purpose because when I had worked at these C three organizations, I was like, "You can't fight with your hand tied behind your back." And I think you had done something like a Super PAC Ends Super PACs previously, right?

2014.

And but what we realized is we, when we do a video about someone or about a race, like we don't need— we're not spending money to boost that, but that organic reach is equal to whatever, $100,000, $250,000 in ad spend for that candidate. This is just free attention and free, free engagement for them. And free in the sense that they have to take our pledge. But that is like, you couldn't do that as a C3 the way we do this. And that for us, that was integral to say like, we, like the money that goes to a C3, if you're doing media and content, it's gonna be much harder for that to go as far if you can't be like brawling in the trenches with what's going on.

So let's talk about particular candidates. For example, I'm really interested in the dynamic that you have with candidates. So there was obviously an interesting dance with Seth Moulton, who changed his stock structure in response to what you guys were demanding. But when you reach out to one of these people, assuming they know who you are, which I imagine now every one of them knows who you are, and you begin this conversation, is there pushback? Do they try to explain to you what—

No.

They think you don't know, or like, what does that dynamic look like?

I mean, I think one of the issues with algorithmic social media is what I've noticed from conversations with especially campaigns is they might have seen one of my videos, but they haven't seen all of my videos. So they might be familiar with a part of our organization or how part of our organization works. They might not be familiar with all of it. And I think that's what I got out of some of those conversations is We'll often hear something like, hey, we introduced a new anti-corruption bill. Can we get 5 points on our integrity score? And it's like, oh, no, no, no, that's not how that works. Or we'll have staff or members that want to take our pledge and we say, but you take corporate PAC money.

And they're like, what if we do all the other parts?

Well, yeah, what can we take the other 3 parts of the pledge? And no, right?

Yeah. Would you tell us what the pledge is? Sure.

So political integrity pledge. I could do that, but yeah, yeah. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Do it. Political integrity.

I mean, I know it. Let's have our audience hear about it.

You can sing it.

Sing it. Sing it. It's no corporate PAC money, no holding individual stocks, and also co-sponsor a congressional stock trading ban, lobbying ban for former members of Congress, and to we say overturn Citizens United, but Yeah, we'll get to that. Right. But get rid of super PACs.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so all of them are really important, but I want to understand them. The lobbying one I think is really critical. And it's not just the members, it's their staffers.

Yeah. Senior level staff.

Right. The staff are included in the pledge.

Yeah. Senior staff. That's what's so important about it because, because Jack Abramoff, who I interviewed once, describes the most powerful tool that he had was to walk into a Senate office and say to the chief of staff, so what are you doing when you're finished with this place? And when you're finished, I want you to come look me up. And he said, when I said that, I owned that guy from that moment forward without a single dollar trading hands. And that's true because all of these people, not all of them, but most of them there are imagining their life after Capitol Hill, after they can like trade their $100,000 job for a million-dollar job, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so that's an extremely important part of the pledge. But let's start with the corporate stuff. I want to know exactly what you mean by a corporate PAC, right? Because there are political action committees that can make maximum contributions to a campaign. There are also super PACs.

We decided super PACs are not included in the pledge because it is— we wanted this to be something that is under the control of the member. They can return a check from Deloitte. They can't return a check from Leading the Future that is spent on their behalf. For some, that can be seen as a workaround, but the real thing is like, what is a super PAC pledge from a candidate gonna do? They can't really do much about it. They could say, bad, don't spend this on my behalf.

Well, I mean, like Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown in 2010, set up the People's Pledge where they basically said, if any super PAC spends on our behalf, we will contribute that amount to some whatever. So the point is they created a structure, which I think I've said to the Democrats, this is what they ought to say in every single race. They ought to say, we offer the People's Pledge. We offer to say that we will join a People's Pledge to get super PACs out of this race.

Right.

Long before Citizens United or SpeechNow was overturned. But you, you guys aren't trying to regulate that at all.

The amount of money that's being spent, like, if, you know, a super PAC comes in, spends $10 million, I don't remember the specifics of the People's Pledge, but like, most of these candidates aren't gonna be able to donate any amount close to that. It's also like, a pledge is only worthwhile if you have people take it. And I think the difficulty with something like the People's Pledge is like, it's very hard to get. You'd have to get both parties and every race aligned on that.

Or every member of the primary.

Or every member of the primary. And it's like, it's just, that is, it's going to be very hard to get that on a wide scale.

And you also look at a lot of the races we've had so far in the primary season, and almost always a super PAC spend is very lopsided. So there's an incentive for one candidate to say, yeah, People's Pledge, not, not in this race, not right now.

But what about a pledge That says, I, the candidate who is benefiting from super PACs, even though they're spending like independent of my campaign, which I cannot control, and we can debate whether they can or can't, 'cause they coordinate all the time. But I will not do favors for the donors who give to the super PAC that is helping me with their soft money.

We've stayed away from pledges that we've tried to get— remove as much subjectivity from our pledges as possible, right? So if someone were to say, let's use the example of corporate PACs, I take corporate PAC money, but I pledge not to make any favorable, you know, legislate in any favorable way to the corporations that are giving me money. Mm-hmm.

How do we determine that?

How do we determine that? Whereas I don't take corporate PAC money, We can DM a staffer and say, hey, we just saw a $3,000 check come in. They say, oh, we're returning that, right? And then we can see that it's actually returned. Okay, they're back to zero corporate PAC dollars taken. And we can continue to say, yep, they're in compliance with the pledge, especially with being an online content creator. Like you're gonna hear immediately every bit of pushback, right? So if you have a subjective pledge, there's gonna be some people that think that, The candidate's in compliance and there's going to be some people that think that the candidate has violated the pledge. So we want it to be as cut and dry as possible where we can say to that, you know, comment that's going viral, we can say, show us the receipt, right? Where's the receipt where they've broken the pledge? If they're not able to provide that, we found most of the time we win the internet for that.

But you could, you could objectively say like part of this pledge is that you will pledge to join the People's Pledge if the other side does. Like it's not unilateral disarmament.

Yeah, but that's that I would be into. Yeah. Yeah.

So that could create— and the Democratic Party, I think, ought to take that pledge if they want to take care of this 3-point advantage, which is just ridiculous. But they ought to say it generally, like, we will always make that pledge. And if the other side wants to not take us up on that, that's their call. Just like they did the game with gerrymandering where they're like, you want to play the gerrymandering game? We'll play the gerrymandering game. We don't believe in it.

Yeah. I mean, one thing that I don't understand, maybe I do understand it, but I feel like it doesn't make a lot of sense to me in the money in politics world is how for some reason when we get to the money in politics issue, politicians stop caring about perception. I think every politician knows you got to be careful about what you say because you might get clipped out of context. You got to double vet everything the staffer tweets because you don't want them to use a word that could be misconstrued. But when it comes to money in politics, it's like, oh no, that's actually my spouse's. money that's being traded. It's, no, that's not mine. Oh, well, I take money from this corporate PAC, but I actually don't do any of their bidding. And I think that if I'm the Democratic Party right now with the place that I'm in where there's a certain subset of the party that's not taking corporate PAC money, if I'm thinking about perception, which I think is crucial in politics, obviously, the investment it would take to become the party that doesn't take corporate PAC money is tiny. I mean, it's— it would be like $100 million, $80 million. And you could be the party that doesn't take corporate PAC money. And I hear from people in D.C. all the time, well, we can't disarm like that. I don't think that that's disarming. I think that that's good ad spend.

Right. Right. But so the one pushback people would give to the whole corporate PAC pledge is that if you in fact look at corporate PAC spending, It's relatively moderate. Yes. As opposed to like non-corporate PAC spending, which is extremist. So, so the question is why you're flushing the moderate money out of the system and like encouraging the extremist money in the system. There's an answer to this.

And the answer, the answer is, and we can go to the stock trading issue too. It's one, it's perception. It's 100% which politicians get get it, right? I mean, you couldn't find— if you find me a politician, I was talking to a friend, yes, the other day, find me a politician that doesn't take corporate PAC money that is also not for sweeping reforms when it comes to, you know, super PACs, Citizens United, SpeechNow. They don't exist, right?

Okay. But there's a stronger response because this is a bullshit argument. And so here's the way to unpack the bullshitness in this argument, right? So there's a great paper called the iceberg theory of campaign contributions. And the argument is basically, we're looking at the top of the iceberg when we look at campaign contributions, but there's a whole bunch underneath. And the bunch underneath is the threat value of the contributor. So if I say, I'm gonna give you $10,000, that's equivalent to my threat to give him $10,000.

Mm-hmm.

So if I can say credibly, like, if you don't do X, Y, and Z, I'm gonna give him $10,000, I've effectively coerced you without spending a penny, right? I don't have to give anybody anything. If you believe I really will give him $10,000, then you are going to worry that I will.

Mm-hmm.

So that's why it's important for the corporate PACs to be giving to both sides.

Mm-hmm.

So they can credibly threaten, they can credibly say, if you don't support us on this, we're gonna give to the Democrat. And the people actually know that. So this is, so it's, it seems like it's moderate, but it's actually more invidious because it's actually more effective giving. than if they were like always going to be always on the far right or always on the far left.

Yeah. And we like— our— the candidates that are taking our pledge are not just like the DSA progressives.

No, I know, I know.

And that's been very important for us. That's really critical. Um, like, and, and importantly, like, this is a pledge that is open to anyone of any party. We have had a couple like, you know, non-candidate Republicans take it, and they've tried to To run a primary. And it's been an uphill battle. But like, the real thinking should be the reverse of what you're saying is why is it that the moderates are the ones getting bankrolled by corporations? Like, what is it about that? Is it because they're voting with their interests? Is it because Josh Gottheimer doesn't actually care about people and really cares about his stock portfolio and his corporate backers? Probably. And I think this is an issue that is like, it is 80/20 across parties and maybe 90/20.

What do you mean?

It is, there's 80% of voters approve of not taking corporate money. There is no voter you could go to, no matter the party, and say, Do you think your candidate or your member should take more corporate cash? So maybe it's 90/10, you know, like the only people that would are the lobbyists and the people in the Beltway and the execs, right? Or the public affairs people. But like, like that, that is a wedge issue that has not been fully realized. And it hasn't fully realized because of the people like Josh Gottheimer who insist on running on $2 million in corporate PAC money when they don't need to.

Right.

He has no reason to do that. Like a lot of these people, they do it for love of the game and they do it 'cause it's the way it's been done. But—

They're also trying to climb the ranks of the party.

Yeah.

They're trying to contribute, raise as much money as possible no matter where it comes from so that they can contribute to the party.

And the really depressing thing about this is once I was talking to a member and he said, everybody will tell you they hate the fundraising, but in a certain way they love the fundraising. And the reason for that is, this is a shitty job, he said. He said, this is a shitty job. Nothing gets done. Like, you get elected, you come here, nothing gets done. And you're like, this is the one thing I can do where I feel like I'm making progress. It's like doing pushups. Like, I can say I need to raise $15,000 and I can do it. And then at the end of the day, I feel like I've done it. But like, if I say I want to address climate change or I want to do something important, that's never going to happen. So there's this weird psychology going on.

I've never heard of that.

Yeah.

I only hear the complaints.

Yeah. Yeah. This is my only success, my success metric. For some people it is. And I think, you know, getting back a little bit to the super PAC thing you were talking about, the thing that actually for us is more important that we have not been able to fully crack yet is joint fundraising committees and the leadership PACs.

Right, 'cause they can just channel it through.

'Cause those are very nefarious. They, a lot of them are, They, they get a pool, they are pooled with corporate funds and then they get given, right? So there is a level of remove from the candidate directly if they get money from that leadership PAC. I think for the next iteration of this pledge, like, we'd want to figure that out. Yeah. Because it's clearly a some degree of a workaround. And ultimately, I mean, the way this pledge was designed, we worked with a researcher out of Stanford named Adam Bonica.

Yeah.

Obviously, I've read some of his stuff. And these pledge items were things that he made very clear, like a lot of these you could do without actually legislating. You could have the leadership in a party say, we're in power, you are not gonna be able to have a leadership position if you take corporate money. They can do that.

Yeah.

They won't, but they could. And that would be, That'd be the best building of anti-corruption credibility anyone could do. And the same with stock trading, right? Stock trading, they could say if you own individual stocks, you can't have a leadership position.

But here's— so this is a hard position, a hard thing to say because people hate members of Congress because all members of Congress are pieces of shit, right? But, but, you know, the reality is, especially in D.C., These people aren't paid a lot of money compared to what they would be if they were living at home or what their families are expecting given where they are. So how many of the members of Congress are sleeping in their offices and showering in the gym every day because they just literally have not the money to— now there are a whole bunch that are millionaires, they don't care, or billionaires, they don't care. And they live life like billionaires using leadership PACs to fund all of their expenses. But I wonder whether, you know, my view is we ought to be paying these members a lot more money. Right.

I think you guys agree with that.

I completely agree. I got a lot of shit on Twitter for saying, you know, I think that members of Congress should get a pay bump. Yeah. People were like, no, members of Congress should get paid minimum wage or the average salary of their district. What are you talking about? Right, right. Who do you want to be in Congress?

Exactly right. Right. Who do you want to hire? I mean, my students graduate from law school, they get paid more than members of Congress, and also federal judges. But the point is we are filtering out to have only rich people, or, I mean, there are certainly people, I think AOC is somebody who devotes herself regardless. It wouldn't matter what the money is. So I'm not saying there aren't people like that. I'm just saying if you're aiming for that as the norm, you're going to miss.

I think you also have to really take a look at staff salaries as well. I mean, I live in DC. I have a lot of friends that work on the Hill. They paid like 50 grand, right? And so many of them are, you know, talk about, okay, we— I got to the Hill, I got this prestigious job, but can't afford it. I can't afford this. I gotta, I gotta go, you know, and cash out, cash out. And then you have people taking these jobs, these, you know, these lobby organizations and whatnot.

All of these shutdowns too. I mean, I live in DC. I live like less than a mile away from the DC Circuit Court where SpeechNow was decided. But during the shutdown, we received so many notifications from our apartment building. It's like, if you need help to pay your rent, we now have a flex plan for you, whatever that means. We have an option to help you afford this. And that's crazy because a ton of the residents in my building were staffers.

Yeah. So when I did my first book on this, Republic Lost, one of the most extraordinary statistics that I discovered in writing the book was in 1972, I think, The average salary of a staffer was the same as the average salary of a lobbyist.

Wow.

So like in a world where that's true, what do you wanna do? You wanna be a staffer. Like you're gonna spend your whole career becoming really good at being a staffer 'cause you can feel like you're doing good, like forever you're gonna work for. But this is a world where the whole purpose of being a staffer for, I don't know, 30%, 70%, 90%, I don't know, is to like figure a way to like bump up to this other layer. And the other layer of lobbyists is basically money controlling policy in America today. This is, this is the deep corruption.

I think the important part of this is like, there's, there's no way that Congress as it now stands is going to pass a pay raise. Um, of course. Yeah. But I think if you're able to pass a suite of anti-corruption measures, and that's a part of it, that could be a possibility. The problem is, is that as we sort of got it before, like the entire country sees it as an inept bastion of corruption because kind of is. And no one's going to be like, oh yeah, throw them some more cash. That's a great idea. I'd love to see them. Because I mean, we say they get— they don't get paid enough, which is true, but they're still getting paid double the average income of an American. Right.

So for an American living in a city that they travel and they do all this other stuff like I mean, they live in 2 places and they're living in one of the most expensive places to live.

The facts are clear, but it's more the perception. Absolutely. If the Democratic Party tried to do that, Tom Cotton would have a field day.

Like, yeah, no, no, no. So here's a true policy you can't pursue. Let's talk about a second one that's nowhere on your list, which I also think is a true policy that it's very difficult to pursue. Public funding. Oh, yeah. Right. I mean, you know, why are they raising corporate money? Because it's easier to raise corporate money than it is to raise $200 contributions from people. Right? But they've got to raise money to be in the system. They've got to. If you don't have money, a couple people don't need money, but it's in the system, you need money. So long as we have a system where we privately fund campaigns or we fund campaigns the way we do right now, these people are going to be vulnerable to this money. So isn't public funding of some form, whether it's vouchers or New York's matching funds or whatever, a critical part of the solution?

I think this is what we're really excited about as we move past 2020. What year is it?

'26. You got it.

2026 is expanding into more state-level work because how I see this going in an ideal world is in someone's local election, they've experienced public financing of campaigns, which, I mean, as a DC resident, I gave $10 to a candidate and being able to see, right? I think I bought a hat and it said, you know, this is a $17 purchase. The candidate's going to get $70-something. And I was like, that's awesome. Right. And then also as a DC resident, I got to use ranked choice voting on my ballot. And what I hope happens is there's enough Americans that start to have these experiences and they go, I like this, this works for me. And they have that firsthand experience. And I think that that's the pathway to federal legislation is like a lot of— if you see advertising, negative advertising about ranked choice voting, it's usually It's so scary and confusing. How will you ever know how to fill out your ballot if you just have experience in your local elections?

Right. That's a great choice.

That argument stops working.

Totally agree.

I think the same thing could be true with public finance.

Okay. But, but, you know, in 2021, we came close to passing a bill that effectively created public funding for Congress, for the House. Right.

H.R. 1.

H.R. 1. I mean, the Freedom to Vote Act is in its version had basically a block grant system that they would give to states where they said, you can use this to experiment with different modes of public funding. It seems to me, I don't know, I'm not gonna be around long enough to have it go through the states and bubble up to the United States Congress. Why not go for it directly? Why isn't this as important as any of the other issues that you're talking about? Because it will not be that you will have a Congress free to lead, as my friend Buddy Romer used to put it, unless they don't have to constantly worry about how they're gonna be raising money. Spending 30 to 70% of their time dialing for dollars. I mean, that is the essential corruption in this system that will only be solved by public funding.

And yeah, the last thing I'll say on this is like, it's harder to sell, as you've said before. Like, I think we're trying to—

Which is why you need to sell it.

I mean, for God's sake, who else is going to sell it? I think we've done some stuff on this. We did some stuff with Brad Lander who helped push through some of that in New York. And obviously New York has its own place. I think the biggest thing that we've found that has been really important for our work on the money and politics side is trying to stay away from mission creep because there's so many different things that need to be done to fix this system.

This is the mission. This is the mission.

I understand.

I mean, ranked choice voting is mission creep, but this is the mission, right?

I will say one thing is, as much as, and this is again, Our social media is mostly vertical and algorithm-driven social media. I post videos that get 2,000 views. That's it. I post videos that get, you know, and so a lot of times, you know, like what would I rather have? Would I rather revamp campaign finance, our campaign finance system, or ban congressional stock trading? 100%. revamp our campaign finance system. What performs better online? Okay. Stock trading stuff.

Public financing. There are certain ways to go about this so that it doesn't feel absolutely esoteric. So one of the things that I've noticed when I tell people in DC, oh, what do you do for work? I'm sure you've been at networking events and that's like the first thing they ask. And I tell them, um, I'm in the money in politics space and I'm like a campaign finance reform advocate or an anti-corruption advocate, as Larry prefers to say. And they're like, that's great because all of Washington is a swamp. And I think one of the really fun nuances of campaign finance is that you can actually explain to people, well, Washington isn't a swamp. Like, this is for people's own self-preservation to run an effective campaign. They have to, to an extent, accept a lot of this money if you're not like somebody who's already coming into this super rich or with rich friends. So I think if you explain the nuance that public financing would allow people like of integrity— I wouldn't be able to run. a campaign either without becoming beholden to super PACs or accepting public funds.

Yeah, that's a really great point because go to—

But what if I don't live in a state where there's a public financing program? New York City was a great example.

Right. So go to Seattle, for example, and talk to people in Seattle who get to run for city government in Seattle, who are much higher proportion of women and people of color because they've got vouchers. Right. And if you talk to people about what vouchers mean in Seattle, it is turning out people to vote at a much higher percentage. Because if you hand in a voucher, you're going to vote, you're going to go out and vote. And you give an opportunity for people to raise money that they otherwise wouldn't have. But the point is, like, thinking about how do you make it interesting? It's not about talking at the level of public finance, which is words you should never utter, or even campaign finance.

Campaign finance.

It's about talking about how it matters In particular to how people can do politics. And Mondamia is the other really great example here. Why could he afford to be so solidly against super PACs? Why could he make that the central issue he talked about every single time he opened his mouth? Because he knew he had all the money he needed from the public funding that he was getting through the matching system. So those things have to go together. But I think that you could get people to see— you, I can't, but you can get people to see how these things are connected. And if they do, they can begin to demand that too.

Right. And Daniel, I think you have a really great point at the beginning is this is an equality issue. And if you put everything campaign finance related under that lens, I think you can tell a story that is compelling and that can get you guys clicks. And also going back to your point about equality, I really love that you said that at the beginning because our organization is literally equal citizens. So—

Shit, we got a lot of work to do.

So let's, let's turn finally to our Bête noire, Citizens United. So here's another political reality. We just live in this real world where people are associating Citizens United with the devil.

Yeah.

And obviously I wish the decision were different. Indeed, I support American Promise's constitutional amendment to basically say the Supreme Court should be out of the business of making these judgments. We should leave these judgments about What's the best way to fight corruption to legislatures?

Federalism.

Right. Right.

But one critical thing about the strategy that attacks Citizens United is that many people, maybe most people agree, but then roll their eyes. Like, there's nothing that we're ever gonna do about Citizens United. And I think that's true. This court, I mean, we're trying to get them to be honest originalists, and if they were, they would overturn Citizens United. But they would overturn Buckley. But that's a shot. But the critical thing is to get them to see that you don't need that in order to end super PACs. If we're successful in the First Circuit, and I saw your really great video about that case, if we're successful in the First Circuit, the Supreme Court will have a chance to— I think it's a gift we're giving to the Supreme Court because they're going to be able to say, There are a lot of people out there criticizing, talking down Citizens United, like Bernie Sanders, who says it's the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court. And then Chief Justice Roberts will say, we disagree. We continue to believe Citizens United is correctly decided. But there's nothing in the logic of Citizens United that says that you can't limit the size of contributions to campaigns because it's the contributions to campaigns that's the core of the corruption. There was just a mistake. That was made in the cases that gave us Citizens United. So that would be an enormously important victory, right? And we could get it even if we live in a world of Citizens United.

Before you guys answer, Larry's asked you a lot of hard-hitting questions. I recognize that. And I just wanted to add—

You said I was supposed to do that.

I did not say that. I'll add a personal— oh gosh. I'll add a personal anecdote though, is so many people believe that Citizens United is responsible for the creation of super PACs. This is not uncommon at all. In fact, I spoke recently with a firm that does polling, and I was like, "Could you try to get us a statistic on how many people believe that's true?" They said we could for $20,000. I would say it's 99% of Americans that believe it, and I did in college. I gave a TEDx talk about why Citizens United is bad and why we have to overturn it. I spoke for 18 minutes, and this is how I met Larry. I was speaking on a panel, and he said he was so nice, but he said every single time you said Citizens United. You should have been saying speech now. So it's really funny because what started my career in this space was just this fundamental misunderstanding I had about Citizens United, that it created super PACs and it didn't. So I'd be curious to hear how you guys might handle that really careful nuance because Citizens United is a rallying point for people.

Mm-hmm.

I don't wanna be the asshole who's correcting people all the time saying, actually, it's not Citizens United, It's speech now. Like, that makes me look like a dick, but it matters because we can actually do something about speech now, whereas we can't do something about Citizens United. So what do you do with that information?

I think, and this is where it gets into the benefit of us not being an academic organization, is, uh, you lean into it. Like, we're not going to change the fact that that's what the common knowledge is. That's not our job. Like, and if we did that, we'd be fighting a losing battle. And, and We should be able to just use that as a term that for many people means much more than it, and that's fine if we're actually we're what we're really talking about is something else. But it's like that's the word that people know. We don't want to put tons of resources into reeducating people on the legal theory if they already have a way of saying in their head Citizens United equals unlimited spending. Like if that's the case, then. I think, and we've done some of this, it's like, use it as a way to frame that argument, even if you're talking about—

What if the consequence of that is for people to say, so it's hopeless? I mean, you know, you can get angry about it, you can be pissed off about it, but if the only way to fix this is to imagine the Supreme Court overturning Citizens United, it's hopeless. So I'm going to go work on something else. This is like a waste of my time.

I think the— I mean, I don't have polling to support this, but I think that if you were to tell somebody Well, we actually need the Supreme Court to overturn this other case, SpeechNow. I don't think most people understand SpeechNow to be easier to overturn than Citizens United because I think most people just don't even know what SpeechNow is. So I'm not too—

Well, I mean, so that's a great point. But if you framed it as the Supreme Court's got to reverse its own decision versus the Supreme Court's got to reverse a lower court decision.

Right, right, right, right.

Right. It's, it's pretty intuitive. That's a— there's a difference, right?

And you guys have actually influenced my language. So when I talk about that final, uh, point of the pledge, I will often say something like they've pledged to overturn Citizens United and get rid of super PACs. Yeah. And get rid of super PACs is kind of everything else. It's because we always talk about how— yeah, at all. We're, we're an outcomes-driven organization, right? So I mean, we're not going to be, you know, crying over, oh, they didn't overturn Citizens United, but now there's no more super PACs. That's a win. Obviously, it's a win, right? So, but, but as Daniel said, like, if we, if we see using the terminology Citizens United is going to continue to get clicks, get views, get people elected to office that are focused on promoting anti-corruption policy, we're probably going to keep Yeah, it's just if we—

Using that rallying cry. I see it similarly to like, you were saying something about this similar, like the stock trading stuff. Like people, is, is, are, are a lot of the, the members of Congress who are trading individual stocks, are they really like using their backroom intelligence to say, uh, oh, now I know how to buy this stock because I know they're gonna get a defense deal? Some of them definitely are, but a lot of them, it's like they literally have a wealth manager that's pushing some buttons and saying trade these things. But the perception is that this is just rampant corruption. And I think I see it as a similar thing, which is the perception is Citizens United is the be-all end-all. Behind the scenes, like, people don't— like, your gen pop, I don't think they care. And so we— you can use that as the marketing device for what is potentially a different set of policies behind the scenes. Okay.

Like, you guys are the experts. You've been much more successful in figuring out Like what the messaging is and what the click generator is. I'm just going to identify 2 problems with the strategy. One, I've already identified, that it could turn a bunch of people off to the cause because they think it's hopeless.

Mm-hmm.

The other problem is, I think, even worse. If we get to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court rules against us, and most people think Citizens United decided this case, and they think, and they see, The Supreme Court did not reverse itself on Citizens United. It seems like a small loss. It's like, what did you expect? They were not— but if we get to the Supreme Court and they rule against us, that means they've wildly expanded the craziness of this doctrine because we absolutely should win under their own principles. Right now, we should win. They don't have to change anything for us to win. And if we lose, It means they're even more extreme than they are. Then we ought to really be getting the pitchforks and running the revolution, but it'll almost not be noticed because it'll be like, this is what everybody expects, like when NARA overturned Citizens United. So it feels like there's 2 dimensions where it's important to help people understand there's something here to be done. And if they don't do it, then we really do need to think about what they're—

You correct me if I'm wrong, Niko, I don't see us getting many comments of people saying like, why are you talking about this? The Supreme Court will never do anything about it.

I do hear that. Okay. I will say I do hear, I do hear that. But I think that we've generated— we— I will say I hear that. I also hear people say, what do you mean this politician doesn't take corporate PAC money? Of course they actually do. They're lying about it. You know, they don't know how any of the reporting works. So there's a lot of pessimism, right? And okay, I will, I will say this, um, zooming out a little bit, I think actually one of the holes that I've dug for myself is the opener, is your member of Congress a piece of shit, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like that opener is, is negative, right? And, and it gets, it, it taps into some anger people have and it's a great way to go viral on social media. But I've done other videos where I'm like, guess what? Maybe your member of Congress isn't a piece of shit. And everyone's like, no, they all are.

Yeah.

Dance, dance. You know, like do the thing where you would say negative things. And I think it's really hard to tell people that people are doing politics the right way. I think that positive message can be a lot harder to break through. So it's— I think I do hear people say, you know, Citizens United has no chance. But I hear— I mean, it's everything. You know, all of them are corrupt. It doesn't matter. Burn it all down. And that is not where we want to go. So we're hoping we can build a positive vision. I think that's what we're doing.

That's critical. Because to the extent you've really succeeded in triggering the recognition, you've created the monster. Now the question is, can you steer it in a direction that's going to be really powerful and good? And I think you can. I mean, I've been astonished with the skill, with the really insightful skill. I mean, it's obviously you're looking at data, but I don't think it's data that's doing it. I think it's art that's doing it. I think of intuitive sense. And that's been powerful. And you've been at it for one year.

Yeah.

One year.

Astonishing, right? I met Daniel before this even, before you even put together, right, Political Integrity Project.

Yeah, I think we were just starting. We are not going to be the Vox explainer YouTube video about this. We are not going to be the, at least at this point, we don't have that. We're not gonna be the Economist video that describes in detail the legal things. But to your point before, you know, even if there is some nuances in how the court case is decided, like, Niko can open a video and say the Supreme Court did this on Citizens United. And like, people aren't gonna be like, but actually, because like 99% of people don't know that. Maya knows that, and that's great. We need people to know that.

But it's actually huge. We need, we need people to know that, and we need the organizations that are helping bring these cases.

Yeah.

To know that and use the most effective strategy. Don't listen to me on my TikTok. You guys should ask us, right? Legal strategy.

We don't do legal strategy.

Which is why we're grateful for you guys supporting us. We do marketing. Yeah. We tried doing this video with More Perfect Union where we were out in front of the First Circuit before oral arguments were heard, like well before oral arguments were heard. And we were explaining the distinction between independent expenditures and contributions and SpeechNow and Citizens United. And I'd like to think that we did a really good job. translating the legalese. And then we look at the comments section and it's like, Mark Ruffalo. And at the time I didn't know who that was. It's the Hulk.

You're genuinely kidding yourself this whole recording though. I know, I know.

It's so bad. It's so bad. Shout out Mark Ruffalo. Thank you for— yes, I do know him now. But he said like Citizens United really sucks. And it's like, well, did you not listen to the video? Yeah. He said fuck Citizens United.

Yeah. I just, it is, it is a, It's so hard to communicate.

So I'm caught in between, you know, working with Larry, who's at Harvard Law School, and like understanding this legalese. But then I'm also caught in actually trying to translate it. So like, I'm right between both of you guys. I recognize what you guys are doing. Yeah, yeah.

And you need people doing the marketing, which is what we do in so many ways. And you need people doing the legal work, right? If you look at a lot of the organizations on far-right organizations that have done any sort of legal advocacy, they also then have a media operation that converts whatever the legal stuff is into some popular understanding, right? The transgenic mice stuff, which had $2 million put in one, like, bill, right? And they were like, to turn the mice trans. So this is idiotic in many ways, but like, it didn't need to be to make perfect sense. And obviously we don't want to lie. We don't lie. But you can tell a story in a narrative that is much more compelling than, please sit down for my money in politics lecture, which we— and the number of videos Niko has done or comments that have been, that person did not take that super PAC money. Thank you for letting me know that the super PAC spent there. We can't— that's not— it's going to— it's never going to go away until the super PACs go away.

Yeah, there's always going to be things that we can't fully explain to our audience, especially in a, in a minute. Right. And, but I, I will say there are sometimes, there are some issues I've kind of put my foot down on. If someone comments, okay, if I use the opener, is your member of Congress a piece of shit? And someone says they all are, or all politicians are corrupt. I've now made a point of responding to that comment every single time.

That's good.

And saying, this is exactly what the most corrupt politicians want you to think. Mm-hmm. And how they want you to feel. Right. So there are some, like we have, We don't have, you know, an unlimited ability to wrangle all of our social media, but we do have some agency to pick battles.

And the funny thing on that too, and this is veering a little bit away from this, but to the current election cycle, like there are a lot of candidates who get fat Fs on our rating and even they are doing money in politics ads. Like they're trying to go after their opponent or the super PAC's trying to go after their opponent. to say, did you know this person took this money? And it's like, if they know it's a losing issue and they're trying to lie about it, like, we're really onto something, right?

Can I tell the Shree story?

Oh yeah.

So we were, we were in Michigan for the primaries and I had the opportunity to knock some doors for Abdul and Donovan McKinney. And I had already been familiar with this campaign that Shree Tanudare was running, the incumbent member of Congress against his challenger, Donovan McKinney, where he labeled him Dirty Money Donovan. And he had these flyers, handouts, and TV ads, Dirty Money Donovan. There was no there there. I mean, I still don't even know what the dirty money is. It was just like a nickname with nothing behind it. And I was knocking doors and I knocked the door of this woman who said, look, I don't vote, I definitely don't vote in primaries. I don't know who this Abdul guy is. I don't know who my member of Congress is. And I was trying to, you know, just give the spiel, turned the poster to her of Donovan McKinney, and she said, that's Dirty Money Donovan, right? That's scary to me because we can, you know, what we try to do is we try to get the word out about who's taking the dirty money and who's not taking the dirty money. But there's a lot of mudslinging. where, you know, you can just—

and people already have this. Just say things.

People already feel like they're all corrupt. So the mudslinging is very effective. You just go, I mean, one candidate holds stocks, has hundreds of thousands of corporate dollars. The other candidate, no stocks, no corporate dollars. And you can just still label him Dirty Money Donovan, run an ad, and people will believe it. Right. That's scary. Right.

That's awful. But it's really interesting to me that that is now what they're choosing for mudslinging instead of going after something else. And honestly, I think that's a win. I think it's unfair and politics is dirty and messy, but like money in politics is a salient issue. And it's also—

Thanks to people like you guys.

Tree loss. Some of my favorite ones have been— there have been a couple candidates and we can— we'll name names if we want to in this table. I'm not sure, but a couple candidates who like were clearly like steeped in the shittiest money possible and then they would try to go after their opponent, not like a super PAC ad, but like they would try to like tweet at them or do a video on them, be like, did you know my opponent did this? And it's like, you're in the wrong turf, man. And like, because of channels like us and because we've provided public resources that make it very easy for people to understand that, like, people can be like, look, shut up. We know you're full of shit. Like, good try, effectively. And that is a completely different environment to be in than, quite frankly, 2012, where what would you have done if Sri said something? If some candidate did something like that, you can be like, I'm going to go reach out to maybe one local news publication and go yell on the corner with a sign. It's a different era. And that is, in the same way as the internet, both breeds great potential hope and great potential risk.

So we're coming to the end, but I think we're kind of in the same field and we understand the issues in exactly the same way. And the only question, the only thing I'm feel like I'm pushing is like, how do we steer this so we get to where we know we want to be? And one thing we know is we want to be in a public funding space. And the second thing we want to be is we want to be in a no super PAC space. And I completely get your point about needing to have objective measures. So I wonder, and this is not for '26 because you're kind of solid for '26. You got, I think, 130 candidates who are going to be in the election who have taken the pledge.

Yeah, I think we'll have 40 that have taken the pledge.

36.5. 5 is our current projected members of Congress that have taken the pledge that will be in the 120th Congress.

That's so great. That's amazing.

You can go to integrityindex.us and see what the current number is. It updates every day at 9:00 AM.

So that's enormous success. But as we think about 2028 and we want to think about what we want to build, and if public, if vouchers is my favorite, but some version of that is there. Why not have an objective measure that somebody pledges to co-sponsor a bill on day 1 of the next Congress? So you're saying you pledge to co-sponsor, and there are so many great anti-corruption bills out there, you pledge to co-sponsor one of these bills. Because what we know is if they get enough co-sponsors, you can then force the bill to be voted on.

Yeah.

And that feels like a way to be pointing to the package of hopeful reform more than the negative that we, you know, all agree we've got to find a way.

I think that that's, that's the point, right?

I think, I mean, going into '27 and then into '28, like, the plan is continue to grow this anti-corruption coalition, um, and then with that be able to, um, put bills on the table that are either passed by both houses and dropped on the president's desk, and he refuses to sign a bill that is a 90-10 bill. Um, or, and/or get ready for a different Congress and different, um, leader in the White House where day one there is a suite of anti-corruption measures that need to be passed. And in that flurry are things like this.

Yeah.

Um, uh, you look in the post-Watergate era, and obviously a Watergate happens on every other Yeah. But like, there was, that's where the FEC came out of, right? That's where a lot of these things that we hold to be the bedrock of our compliance and transparency initiatives came out of that comparatively tiny scandal.

Right.

If we don't take the same energy as a response to what's going on, it's just gonna happen again. And I think it's gonna be important to like shape what is that package? What is in that bundle? And that's going to be a January 29th question in many ways.

I think one thing that we're going to have to do is when we win, we have to let people know that we won and we have to let people know who got us to that victory. And it's going to be really, really important because that's how you get the snowball effect, right? You pass a congressional stock trading ban. you got to show everybody who supported it and who didn't support it.

Yep.

Right. And when it becomes law, you have to make sure that folks know who gets that credit.

Yes.

And we think it's going to be the folks in our coalition, obviously. Uh, I think that's again how you get the snowball effect where you pick up more seats every election at the federal level. And then also if we expand this to the state level, more folks who are taking these anti-corruption pledges. And because I think that there are going to be folks— this is how Congress works— once a bill everyone knows it's going to pass, they know it's popular, That's when finally it gets 300 yeas, right? We have to let people know, okay, who was really the 218 people that got that bill to the finish line?

But the dynamic of Congress that's important is that you only force a bill to be considered if it's got a certain number of co-sponsors to it. So you could get people to pledge to co-sponsor. And if every one of your people you were electing was co-sponsoring a particular thing, that would be an enormously powerful And I believe that that's either explicitly or implicitly in the language of the pledge.

It's in the language of the pledge for incumbents. Incumbents are expected to co-sponsor certain pieces of more viable legislation. Right now, that's the stock trading stuff, given the current makeup of Congress. But I mean, we're going to be pretty strict on that. We're not going to— we're hoping to do a lot of wrangling in the House.

Excited to see how this changes as McConnell leaves. Office, like younger. Is he in office? Yeah. Well, see, that's a question I wanted to ask you guys. Where is Mitch McConnell?

We know.

I have it in my notes. We know.

We're not allowed to tell you guys.

We did launch whereistomkeene.com at one point. That's hilarious.

But I love editing people onto milk cartons. It's really cool. It's really good. I've done it twice now.

It's actually like very— I love it. But I think what's going to be really fun is so When we— when a candidate takes our pledge, they, um, send— they have the opportunity to send in this video that we can then help promote them with, and they send in a little picture of them holding a sign saying, I took this pledge. And then what we're seeing is a lot of these candidates are now running on not taking corporate money, and what we know is going to happen is at least one of them is going to cash corporate check, and we're going to be like, what is this? What did you give us? And, and we are waiting for that day. It'll be glorious.

Um, probably the first The first member to break the pledge will actually probably grow the movement instead of harm the movement. I think there's a misconception that yeah, oh, someone's gonna break your pledge, and then you know you guys have no integrity left. You need a scandal. We need a scandal.

Just like Watergate was a scandal that initiated, you know.

Yeah, our Watergate. Our Watergate. Some someone breaking the pledge because we have.

I mean, we have so many great ideas for what what we can potentially do when someone. breaks that pledge in that way. Um, it's gonna be really exciting.

Yeah. And I think there's, there's gonna be room to going into '28, figuring out like, what are the ways we can prepare a pack? Is, is this all that the pledge is gonna be? Can't say that's the case. I have no idea. Yeah. Are there more things that should be included? Mm-hmm. Um, yes, there should. And I, I think we got that idea here. Yeah. Um, And if so, how? And what is the most effective way of doing that? Because again, we needed to be something like— our goal with this was we wanted this to be something that a campaign staff can look at and not have to spend like 3 weeks with their political team and decide whether they should sign on. Absolutely. Um, and, um, that so far has worked pretty well.

Um, so what I'm hearing is if all of us, all 4 of us, are successful with our initiatives, then we're jobless.

Which is good.

That's the goal.

Yeah, we'll get a lobbying gig.

I still teach.

Yeah, he'll, he'll hire us somewhere. I don't know.

Fingers crossed.

Okay, move on to a different country.

People ask us to do this in Europe and Canada all the time.

Like, I don't know, you're not finished here.

Yeah, it's, it's work.

Okay, so as somebody who's been in this for 147 years, I can't express my gratitude powerfully enough. For the enormous success you've had in the work you're doing. This is, you know, I believe the most important thing to be done and you're doing it. And I'm so grateful for that. Um, so Maya and I both just want to thank you for joining us. And I'm really grateful because, because you guys are here, we got this really cool set. So I feel really powerful.

Yeah, I feel real fancy.

That's right.

And thank you for, um, for setting the groundwork for us. Well, for 147 years. Yeah. It's been, it's been amazing to, to, to Step on those, in those footsteps.

You can see our videos at stalking_the_capital and on the Political Integrity Instagram at politicalintegrity.us. You can see all of the grades of every member of Congress and every candidate running for Congress at integrityindex.us. And you can give us money so that we can continue to build this movement at support donate dot political integrity. That's where we pop for. Donate.politicalintegrity.us.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, go check out equalcitizens.us to learn more about our work. And if you're able, please consider making a donation by going to the link in this episode's description. We're a small team taking on a big fight. Your support and engagement make our work possible.