The Architect of The For The People Act (H.R. 1)

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. This is the podcast Another Way. It's January, it's after January 20th. It's after the transition has occurred. It was rockier than many of us expected. It was less constitutionally rocky than some of us feared. But we are in the post Trump era of American democracy. We are in the Biden administration, and we're beginning to talk about the extraordinary potential that is before us, created by the opportunity to actually enact fundamental reform. Now, that opportunity was not guaranteed on November 3rd. It was only after Georgia voted and elected two Democratic senators that we were assured that Mitch McConnell would not be calling the shots in the Senate, because, Of course, Mitch McConnell would never allow reform to occur. And the only way we could get reform to occur, therefore, was by electing a Senate that would allow reform to pass. And that's why we here at Equal Citizens stepped into what felt to many like a overly political fight. We didn't fight it because we were trying to elect Democrats. We wanted to be in that fight because we wanted the chance to enact reform. And so in this season, not sure which season we're on, but in this season of this podcast, we're going to be talking with the actors who are going to make HR1 and now Senate1 happen, both in Congress and out of Congress, both supportive and skeptical. And as we watch the development of this extraordinary piece of legislation, we want to make sure we're seeing what the risks are, what the problems are, and what the action must be to make sure that this passes. I'm incredibly honored that we get to start this conversation with the member of Congress who is more responsible than anyone else for this being on the agenda. I met John Sarbanes about a decade ago. As you'll hear in the talk, it's after he read my first book, Republic Lost, and he asked me to meet with him. And we met in a deserted restaurant, intentionally. The restaurant was closed and we each had a glass of water, but it was possible to meet without anyone seeing us meeting. And he described his strong desire to find a way to change the economy of influence in Washington and his deep, deep frustration with a system that didn't respond to the will of the constituents. And that conversation led him. Not just that conversation. I'm not claiming any credit here at all, but I'm saying after that conversation, Sarbanes did the hard work of talking to his colleagues about what kind of reform is most likely to be embraced by them, because in our constitutional system, campaign finance reform cannot be imposed on members of Congress. It has to be an incentive that they're willing to take up. And he developed a program system for funding campaigns that was built on matching funds, small dollar matching fund system where small contributions get matched. In earlier versions, it was up to 9 to 1. The current version is 6 to 1, to create an incentive for people to fund their campaigns with small contributions only. And what was so striking about his coming to this idea is that he lived it himself. There was a series of races where he committed to limit himself or to incentivize himself to raise small dollar contributions. He created a fund and he went around to some of his supporters and people who wanted to give him larger contributions, and he said, give that contribution to this trust fund. And the rules of the trust were that he could only access that money after he had raised a certain number of small contributions. So he knew that he couldn't get the money, the big money that he needed in his races until he raised the small money. And that discipline gave him a practical, real world sense of what it would take to make this system work. And that led to his legislation. And much more importantly, that led to him creating in Nancy Pelosi the recognition that the Democrats needed to embrace fundamental reform as their cause. And in 2018, he convinced Nancy Pelosi to promise that if the Democrats took the House in 2018, she would introduce as the first piece of legislation HR1, the most comprehensive democracy reform package in the history of the 21st century, I think since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And I can tell you that when she said that, there were some of us who were skeptical. Here's Nancy Pelosi, one of the biggest fundraisers in Congress. That's how she got to be the majority leader of her party and then the speaker of the House when took over again. But it turns out she was genuine. And after the Democrats took the house in 2018, beginning in 2019, she moved HR1. And within the first six months she had passed it. And she had set the standard for the Democratic Party. And that standard is not just the easy stuff, not just the idea of ethics reform, though that's important, it's pretty easy. It was also gerrymandering reform, restoration of commitment to an equal freedom to vote, and most importantly, from my perspective as we'll discuss campaign finance reform. And because she did that in 2019, it set the standard for Democratic candidates running for president in the 2020 election. And we, equal citizens, along with many other organizations, represent us. And Citizens United, began to get the candidates for president in the Democratic primary to commit to HR1 reform or better. And every single major candidate by the end made, made that commitment, including Joe Biden. And that commitment was extremely important because it set a basis, a standard against which to measure the candidates and measure the parties. And it was clear that 2020 would be an election in which the party would determine whether reform was possible. And Joe Biden was elected and he had committed to supporting reform. The Democrats held the House though much more narrowly than people expected. And initially it seemed we had lost the Senate. But now that we have the Senate reform is back on the table. And the architect of that reform is John Sarbanes. Now John Sarbanes, the Congressman from Maryland. He's been in Congress, it must be for about 15 years now. His father was Paul Sarbanes, Senator from Maryland, extraordinarily influential and well loved and respected leader, especially in ethics reform. Sarbanes Oxley is a regulation to assure the integrity inside of the corporate world. And so this was an extremely important value in his career as a legislator. It's been an important value in the career of his son. Sadly, Paul Sarbanes died this year. John lost his father this year. And so his father won't be able to see the extraordinary success that John Sarbanes will have accomplished when HR1 Senate 1 is passed. And however important Paul Sarbanes career was in the history of the American republic, if John Sarbanes is successful, his will have been an order of magnitude more significant. Because if we can pass this bill, then we will begin a process of repairing this democracy. A process that will benefit the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party. If those parties are aiming to represent the people those parties care about, making sure that their views and their values and their priorities reflect the people. The Wall street journal attacked HR1, that HR1 was a democratic power grab that echoed the rhetoric of Mitch McConnell when he refused to even consider the bill after Nancy Pelosi passed it in the House. But let's be clear. HR1 is a Democratic power grab with a small D. It is a power grab for democracy to assure that every citizen, every entitled voter has an easier equal freedom to vote. That their votes weigh the same regardless of their district. That's the gerrymandering part. That their voices are not elevated because they happen to be spending more money in contributions because the funding change makes it so a wider range of citizens participate and congressmen are not dependent on the very few. This change would radically improve our democracy. And so we are extremely honored to have a chance to talk with its architect, John Sarbanes, a friend and really a hero of this movement and certainly of mine. So, Congressman, thanks so much for talking to me. I guess we're kind of surprised we're here. 12 weeks ago tomorrow, one wouldn't have expected we would be at this place, given the results of the election and the expectation that Mitch McConnell would be the majority leader in the Senate. When did you regain your optimism that there was a fight to be had here?

Well, coming off the election and understanding that the efforts around democracy reform were going to still have to come out of the Democratic corner in Congress, although obviously we believe that the reforms are ones that are very appealing to people across the political spectrum, we realized that either we were going to have to depend on a lightning strike in Georgia to get the numbers in the right place of possibility, or we were going to go into probably a slow, steady build into the 2022 election cycle. So we were trying to get ready for both. And we got the lightning strike. We got two senators elected in those runoff elections in Georgia, and that put the senate at a 5050 tie with Kamala Harris to break the tie, which reintroduced the possibility, the very real possibility, we think, of getting the for the People act over the finish line in both the House and the Senate and onto the desk of a Democratic president. So we were ready to go, but now we're very much in a blitz mode.

Yeah. So I guess there was still a possibility that the Senate would signal that they were not willing to carry the burden of trying to pass this. But Senator Schumer has been quite emphatic in his commitment to the idea of getting this passed just as much as Nancy Pelosi has. I guess it's not probably a surprise to you, given you're right in the middle of all of this, but you recognize how it's a surprise to us. Right. This is really extraordinarily hopeful and something none of us would have bet on.

To have before the People act be designated as a first priority item, the first priority item on both sides of the capitol with the HR1 designation in the House and S1 in the Senate is pretty remarkable. That has not happened much in recent history, but it signals the emphasis on this. But you know, as much credit as I want to give to, to Senator Schumer and to Speaker Pelosi for making it a first priority item, real credit has to just go to Americans out there who have been clamoring for this change for years now and are the ones that pushed it forward into that first post position. And I think lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol in the House and the Senate understand they need to respond to that appetite for change. And that's why it's occupying this first position. And we think it gives a terrific momentum out of the gate and we're going to try to push it forward as hard and as fast as we can.

So you and I have known each other for about a decade. I think we met just after my first book about this came out. And originally you were.

We met because of your first book, because I called you up and wanted to get together after I read it.

Yeah, that was really honored by that. And originally you were looking for a way to deal with what obviously that book put at the center of the problem, the corrupting influence of money in politics. And you worked very long and carefully to develop a plan that could get buy in from the wide range of members of Congress who would, given our Constitution, have to voluntarily choose to do it. And that was hard work. But, but what's striking about HR1 and now S1 is that it's much more ambitious than just dealing with the money and politics problem. And so let's just make sure everybody's on the same page. When you think about the most important elements, there's a lot. I mean, I've done a summary for the new version of my book coming out, so there's a lot to it. But when you think about the ones that will really matter, what are the ones that come to the top of your thinking?

So I think about what I call the load bearing walls inside the architecture of HR1.S1. These are the key core elements that I think hold it up and frankly meet the expectation of the public. So you begin right in title one of HR1 with all of these voting rights reforms which were really pushed forward for five, six Congresses in a row by our former colleague John Lewis. He authored something called the Voter Empowerment act. And that's right on the masthead of HR1. So these are things that would create automatic voter registration, same day registration across the country, a certain number of days of early voting, make sure that mail in voting opportunities are broadly available to people everywhere in the country. But also, Larry, pushing back on voter intimidation, voter suppression. So all these key voting reforms, that's obviously a central part of HR1. Another thing that is important to show respect for voters is to fix partisan gerrymandering, which really angers the electorate out there. And we understand that. So we want to set up independent redistricting Commissions that can determine how lines are drawn for congressional districts across the country. That's fundamentally respectful of the electorate because it makes it an objective process instead of being mixed up in politics. A third key component is a whole set of ethics and accountability reforms so that when lawmakers go to Washington either to serve well in that case in the legislative branch, or they go to serve in the executive branch, they behave themselves, which the public has a right to expect. So really strong reforms there to create transparency, deal with conflicts of interest, put ethical codes in place, and so forth. A third thing that you mentioned, campaign finance reform, disclosure on where the big money is coming from. Because that's really demoralized a lot of people out there, but not stopping there. Creating a small donor matching system so everyday Americans can be the ones that lift up candidates and send them to Washington. That also helps diversify the candidate pool because people who hustle and get out there and work and collect small donations can be competitive and viable. So that's a key piece as well. Last thing I'll just mention, because it's really important, and as you say, there's many other things, but a central part is robust measures to combat foreign interference in our democracy, make sure our election systems are resilient and sound and robust so that Americans can have confidence that when they cast their vote, it's going to be properly tallied and counted. And that's critical as well. So these are all really, really fundamentally important reforms, but the three big ones that I would put up as the highlights, voting reforms, ethics reforms, campaign finance reforms.

So the campaign finance reform one is obviously the one we've talked about for the longest period, and you've constantly emphasized just the practical day to day reality of raising money in Washington. I think when we first met you said something like, I've been in Congress so far five years and I might have had lunch with members of Congress five times in those five years because if you have time to have lunch, you have time to be raising money, and you need to be raising money, you don't have time for lunch. And so part of the objective of all of these reforms has been in a certain sense to liberate these Congress people, to do the right thing, to do what is in the interest of their constituents or what their political principles would tell them to do rather than their funders. Now, when you've tried to sell small dollar public funding to members of Congress, what's the argument you make to them that helps them see why they would be liberated if this is the way they could fund campaigns rather than lobbyist funding or large check funding?

Well, it's a combination of things. One is, I think that the fact that the members of Congress are so dependent unfortunately on high dollar donors and PAC money and so forth is because it costs a lot to run a campaign in America. The average congressional campaign winning campaign now is about 1.7 or $1.8 million every two years. So campaigns are expensive. And I think the fact that members have to go chase that money from those sources makes them feel a little bit guilty because they know that the public has a different expectation. The public wants the attention of lawmakers to be on them, on everyday Americans and their concerns. They want the time that members of Congress spend to be spent with their constituents, reaching out, listening to them, being in their living rooms, not hanging out in K Street conference rooms with a bunch of lobbyists. So you can develop a kind of split personality as a member of Congress where you want to lean towards your constituents, you want to be in those town halls, but you have to spend an incredible amount of time going, raising money from these sources. And that's not what most members signed up for. I mean, they really do want to do the job. I think that's the important thing. And you used the word liberate. I really do feel like many members of Congress feel that this system has taken them hostage because it's the only way you can be competitive and raise money for your campaigns. But I don't think they like it. So if you present them with a viable alternative, one that can make them competitive still as candidates and allow them to raise sufficient dollars, but one that now allows them to lean back towards their constituents, towards everyday Americans, I think they will choose that in a heartbeat. And when I talk to my colleagues, they're very much interested in that.

Now.

They're nervous too, because even if you don't like the system you're in, it can be tricky and you're apprehensive about leaping into a new system. But we've been able to show them that based on certain assumptions, if they chose to participate in a small donor matching system that put a six to one match behind small donations out there, that they could be viable and they could be competitive. So we had to show them that it would work for them. And we did that. And that was a very powerful argument. But we also showed them, Larry, and you're aware of this because you've studied it, that increasingly across the country at the state and local level, these systems are being put in place. And when you see that happen. You also see an electorate that gets more engaged, more excited, feels more empowered itself, and that just lifts up civic engagement to a new and better level. And since those systems have been working around the country, that's a very important lesson for my colleagues in Washington as well. At the end of the day, we want to be able to stand in a living room with our constituents, 30 or 40 people, and have them be the number one priority in the work that we do. If you create a system of funding campaigns that democratizes how those campaigns are powered from a finance standpoint and make that everyday voter or engaged citizen the center of the system, you can transform, I think, American politics and how policy gets made. And that's the last thing I'll say. Members have seen how the influence of money, the corrosive influence, the dependence that it creates in Washington fundamentally alters the priorities when it comes to public policy. If you are dependent on some big money interest, their priorities start becoming your priorities. Not because you're necessarily conscious of that, but it's human nature. So let's get back to where government is dependent on the people alone, as James Madison once said. And you do that with this small donor matching system. And I just have to salute you because your advocacy on this over the years has been tenacious and I think has helped us push that narrative forward.

Well, there's so many people who've pushed it, but I want to talk about, let's call them friendly skeptics. So let's talk about Ezra Klein for a minute. You know, Ezra Klein obviously is someone who's keenly interested in our government working better. And he's been focused forever on the question of why our politics is so pathological. And his fundamental diagnosis is the polarization. And I love his most recent book, why We Are so Polarized. But in that book he expresses the skepticism that has been echoed by some even in the academy, that shifting to a small dollar matching system might amplify the dynamic of polarization. And if all you're getting money from, if you're depending on these small dollar givers, then the people who are putting up their own money tend to be the most partisan or the most extreme. I wonder what your reaction to that is and whether this is something that we should be watching or careful of.

I've heard that comment. I don't agree with it, Larry, because I think, in fact, you have to step back and understand what this perspective on the part of average folks out there is on how campaigns are funded and politics is sort of controlled. And when they see that big money has this role of kind of overpowering the voices of everyday Americans, it creates a real cynicism, a sense of helplessness. And that then contributes to people opting out of the political town square. As I often say, they kind of leave and hunker down and say, I don't want to be engaged in politics, because frankly, my voice doesn't make a difference. What happens is if you get sort of your typically or formerly civically engaged person who decides to withdraw from the political town square, then that creates a kind of vacuum and you start to see extreme elements rush in and they take over the political discourse, which is, I think, what's happened over the last few years. I view that those citizens who vacated the town square, the ones that volunteer in their community, are civically engaged but have turned off of politics. They can be sort of the ballast in the ship estate. When they vacate, then the ship starts to kind of teeter from one side to the next because those extreme elements find a real opportunity to enter and take over the conversation. So I actually think that if you created a system where people have more confidence that the elected officials that they vote for are going to keep representing their interests and not get hijacked by the big money, they would come back into that town square and they would add their voices, and it would actually diminish the influence of these extreme elements. But under the current circumstances, that's not what's happening here. So I think if you have a system that creates more confidence, more trust, more appetite to re engage civically from a broader number of people, you actually moderate the influence that some of these extreme voices have had on our politics. So my prediction of the future, if you have a system like this in place, is that more people start pouring back into that political space. They add their voices, they contribute to a discussion around policy and ideas that then can lead to the kind of compromise and policymaking that the public and the country wants to see. If you don't do this, if you don't find ways to create that confidence and restore trust, we're just going to keep going in the same direction where a smaller and smaller group of louder voices ends up dominating the political conversation. And we know that that's not been working recently. So let's go build a system that restores trust broadly. And I think these money reforms are right at the heart of that.

So your proposal, HR1, also has an alternative, which you and I have talked about a lot. And people listening to this podcast have heard A lot about which will be a pilot study for the system that Seattle has adopted for its local elections, a voucher system. And one of the arguments that those of us who support vouchers advance. I agree with you. I'm not convinced by Ezra's argument. But to the extent there might be something to Ezra's argument, it could be resisted if more people actually were participating in the project of contributing to campaigns. If you could kind of flood the zone with lots of ordinary people who wouldn't necessarily be motivated by single issue extreme questions. So if you had vouchers inside of the system complemented by the matching funds, then I guess your view must be given. You want this pilot to be conducted, that, that, that might add something more, or do you think it's something that might mitigate the concerns around this polarization point?

Yeah, I think it's a very important proposition to test, and I do think that it could, it could add value to this overall effort of pulling people back into the, the political space as we're, as we're discussing it. So the voucher idea is one that we ought to take a look at in terms of how it could relate to federal campaigns, congressional campaigns. We've seen the success of it in Seattle. There's good data that's come out of the use of the vouchers there in terms of diversifying the voters and donors that participate in that, leading to broader voter engagement, not just donation engagement, but voter engagement, et cetera. So by all of the measures you would want to use to judge whether you're running campaigns and designing a system of financing them that would broaden civic engagement, that effort has done very, very well and I think pointed out the potential of it. So I think it's one of the reasons that we felt strongly, really, from the outset of designing this small donor system that we would want to pilot. How is that affected? How can it be enhanced? What are the. What sort of kinks do you need to work out with a system like that around vouchers if you were to do it at the federal level? So we've created this opportunity for states to step up and make application and be part of a pilot or demonstration program that could test what this looks like, and then you pull the data from it, along with the other results of what the program is yielding, and then you may be able to build that in as you, as you move forward. So I think once you establish the baseline, that you're fundamentally going to restructure opportunities around campaign finance that lift up the voices of the broad community, the opportunity for refinements or building on top of that, I think grow and look. That's what is at the heart of all of the reforms in HR1 is to put everyday Americans. I keep using that phrase. I don't know that there's a better one, but put them back at the center of their politics. Whether it's voting or the respect for the public interest that many feel lawmakers have fallen away from, or whether it's redesigning how we fund campaigns in America to show respect for the public, all of these things are designed to say that Washington has learned is trying to fix the politics and the way we govern in a way that lifts up the voices of people out there. And I think the voucher system, as we've seen at work in Seattle, is something that ought to be tested and piloted as we move forward and potentially then incorporated into a broader model of campaign finance reform.

Your use of this word data is really important. It leads to the next question. Maybe it's a proposal, but a question that I'm eager to hear your response to. You know, there's this entity called the Administrative Conference of the United States. And what that body is is basically a bunch of ad law geeks who look at the process of administrative law and they try to figure out how to make it more efficient. It was an idea that was born immediately after the launch of the New Deal bureaucracies, as people were very skeptical of what these bureaucracies were doing, and they saw incredible inefficiency for a couple. Eisenhower created a temporary commission. I think JFK created a temporary commission, and then Johnson made it permanent. And what it does is convene a regular process of evaluating the data about how the administrative state works and makes very technical, sometimes fundamental proposals about how it should work better. What's striking about democracy in America is we don't have any equivalent, we don't have any ongoing structure for evaluating the effectiveness of our democracy. I'm sure we do that for other democracies. I'm sure that, you know, we monitor Iraq or we monitor, you know, African nations to see how well their democracies are doing. But we don't have an ongoing process for looking at our own democracy and saying, hey, look at what Arkansas is doing. And Arkansas is demonstrating that its technique for voter registration or whatever is much more efficient, much less costly, much more reliable. And maybe this is something we should test other places or with this voucher idea, like to systematically try the voucher idea in a way that could give us real Confidence about the results that requires a certain infrastructure. So here's the question. I wonder whether, given the incredible work you've done in figuring out the details of this massive reform, which is the most important democracy reform since the 1965 Voting Rights act, whether there have been moments where you've almost wished that there was an infrastructure of reliable analysis you could fall back on and look at and say, here's why we know this works. It should be 6 to 1 match versus an 8 to 1 match versus a 3 to 1 match. And whether maybe after we've passed this, we should think about building that infrastructure so that we had ongoing system for refining or reforming the system of democracy in a way that could build confidence across the political spectrum.

I think that has a lot of merit and I think it is something that we could look at in the future, in the near future. Because you're right, I very much just when it came to the component of HR1 around the small donor matching system, there have been times over the last few years where I wished that there was a place where best practices were being gathered up and kind of looked at and compared with one another. And then you could get a sort of comprehensive download of what made sense. Why do you put it at 5 to 1 match versus 7 to 1 or 8 to 1, et cetera. But in all dimensions, I think how our democracy functions deserves that kind of step back and digest and analysis and so forth. And so creating a structure that could pull that information together, distill it in a way that lawmakers could benefit from that input. I think that's a good idea. Something that we should consider. I mean, we have something called the Election Administration Commission or Assistance Commission, which has certain functions in that regard. But I don't think comes with the comprehensive perspective that you're suggesting. And it's funny, at one point I wanted to convene in Washington all of the various legislators, or as many of them as we could get our hands on, who had participated in the small donor public financing systems across the country at the state and local level and convene them in a sense for this very purpose, first of all, so they could meet each other and they could be reinforced in their appetite for a system like this, but where they could talk about what worked, what didn't work, what's the perspective from the conservative side of the aisle versus the liberal? Because we know again, at the state and local level you get participation across the political spectrum by candidates. What's the confidence level in the public about these systems? So I think it's an idea that merits a lot of consideration as we move forward and create this positive feedback loop around democracy reforms and the strengthening of our democracy as we move forward. Let me just say this though, very quickly. One of the reasons we've got to break free from the influence that these big money players have had, who tend to focus on a very narrow agenda that benefits their own interests and not the broader public interest, is because for years now they've tried to intercept or front run or cut off initiatives like the one you just described, even before they get started. If we can break free of the hold that they've had on our democracy and the way we govern, then we can start to put forward some of these strengthening exercises for the democracy and get to a high level. I mean, America should be the gold standard, for example, when it comes to how you vote anywhere in the world. But we're nowhere near that now. We need to be. And there's voting reforms in HR1 and S1 that I think can start getting us there in a dramatic fashion. But we need to keep building on those things. The kind of structure you're suggesting could help us do that.

Now, one of the most unfair charges that I've heard raised against HR1 and S1 is that it's not bipartisan. And I know that's unfair because I know that you've spent endless hours trying to persuade your colleagues from the other party to join you. And it's been very hard to make that happen. And that points to a skepticism which I'd really love to know which side on this, you come down about where the Republicans are on democracy. It seems a lot of the efforts, especially after the 2020 election, are being discussed in the states are efforts at making it harder to make a democracy work, efforts that make it harder for some people to vote than for other people to vote. When the Wall street journal attacked HR1 as, you know, entrenching the new Democratic majority, I thought HR1 was designed to entrench the Democratic majority, but with a small D. I mean, the whole point is to make it easier for everybody to express themselves and to make that efficient. But there's a real question whether your colleagues on the other side are aiming for that or whether they're aiming to hack a system that makes it that just enough of their people can participate to at least maintain their competitiveness in this extremely unequally entrenched system that we've got in the United States. So just from your experience talking to them, where do you think it is. What do you think is motivating the inability to come to common ground on what should have been a really common agreement, that we need a democracy that works efficiently, where everybody has an equal freedom to vote?

Well, at some level, it's kind of a head scratcher why my colleagues on the Republican side that serve in Washington wouldn't want to embrace this. For starters, when you look at the support for HR1 and all of its components out there in the country, you see that there's strong support among conservatives, just as there is among independents and Democrats. So in the country, there's nothing partisan about what we're proposing. All the polling shows support at 70% or greater for the key elements of HR1S1. So then the question becomes why are the people that the Republican elected officials so seemingly out of step with their own constituents on this? And I don't quite know the answer. I mean, I theorize that kind of over time they've gotten themselves boxed into a model of holding on to power that is fundamentally flawed and really at odds with what the broad public wants to see. So in other words, if you get used to a system where there is voter suppression that shrinks the electorate that you're accountable to, where there's extreme partisan gerrymandering, which means that the representation in Congress doesn't fairly represent the voters out in the country, where big money can help spread extreme disinformation, if those become the mechanisms by which you are successful and get and hold power, then you can start to become attached to those and resistant to the broader reforms that would undo that kind of a system. The other thing I'll mention, Larry, because it's. I think something we've seen recently is that if your political ecosystem is one again, that means you're less accountable or you have less incentive to be accountable to a broader audience of Americans, then it's easier for extreme elements to get traction inside that ecosystem. And I think the Republican Party itself has suffered because of a lack of attention to that broader electorate and that broader set of expectations, because it means that more extreme elements inside the party have been able to kind of take hold with impunity. And if the kinds of reforms we put in place with HR1 were to become law and create that broader accountability for all parties, including the Republican Party, that party would have an incentive to kind of police the conduct of its own candidate pool in order to make sure that they're competitive to the broader electorate, where it's the merits of your ideas and the program you want to Bring from a policy standpoint that determines your success, not your ability to manipulate the size of the electorate or to draw district lines a certain way or to spread disinformation. So they've gotten used to a toolkit for holding on to power, political power that's very toxic to the broader public, but is hard to let go of because it's become your means to success. I think HR1 actually can kind of help the Republican Party break free from that model and get out there and compete in a compelling way, like every party should do and every candidate should do for public support. That would get us back to a place, I think, of being able to make policy with debate, discussion, compromise, and then moving forward as a collective in the public policy arena, rather in this fractured state that we have now.

Okay, but so imagine there was no pressure from leadership in the Republican Party in Washington. I mean, right now I don't think you have any Republicans on the bill, is that right?

No, not on HR1 or S1. That's correct.

So if there was no pressure from leadership, just given what you know, because you've spoken to them, I'm not asking you to name names, but how many do you think, in their heart of hearts in the Republican party would join? HR1 would believe in what HR1 is trying to do, would want the system HR1 would create?

I don't know what the number would be. I think we would have some, though, I think based on conversations, based frankly, on some of the components of H R1 which come from bipartisan bills that have been introduced over the years. I think you would see some rank and file members of the Republican Party stepping up behind it, both because they understand that it's a tonic for what ails our democracy right now, but also because, frankly, I think they would view it as a way to get the Republican Party back to a place of acting more responsibly than we've seen over the last few years. And many of them, I think, are anxious to see that kind of restored Republican Party in terms of how its leadership operates in Washington and elsewhere for that matter. Sadly, you're already seeing in many places across the country a reflexive return after this last election to some of these techniques of voter suppression and voter intimidation at the state level, the kinds of things HR1 would combat. And that's moving us in the wrong direction. So I think if leadership like McConnell and McCarthy and others weren't leaning so hard against this and characterizing it, as you say, as a big D Democratic power grab, but conceding that no, it is a small d return to democratic principles and values in terms of how things operate in our country that you would see some rank and file Republicans stepping behind this. And let me just say this, I haven't given up on that prospect. I mean, this was reform, as I've always said, that was going to come out of the Democratic corner. But that doesn't mean we can't hope and expect to get some support from the Republican side of the aisle. So we're certainly carrying that message. And again, I just point my colleagues to the fact that according to the polls and just the discussions you have with people out there in the country, these reforms are ones that are deeply supported by people across the political spectrum because it's about how you set the table to go. Then have the debates on other issues that are so valuable, so critical to have, whether it's tax policy, environmental policy, gun safety policy, whatever it might be, where there's legitimate debate out there in the public. You can't really get to a meaningful debate or policy on those issues if the fundamental democracy isn't operating at a high level. And whether you're conservative or liberal or independent or what have you, you have a stake in achieving that level. And that's what we're trying to accomplish with HR1.

I want to make sure we end on what is a really important issue to be clear about. There are a lot of good people who are insisting that HR1 is too big. What we ought to start with is basically the restoration of the Voting Rights act, which obviously you support. There's no question about whether you support it. But responding to the Supreme Court opinions that have the Shelby county opinion that basically decimated some of the key provisions in the Voting Rights act. And I believe, and I think you believe too, that it would be a huge mistake to start with, that it would be a trap, because it's going to be very hard to meet the standards the Supreme Court has set. And it's very likely that whatever Congress does, the Supreme Court just slaps it down again. So you spend a year passing this law and then three years litigating it, and four years down the road we're back to square one. So I wonder where you see that debate developing. And what do you think the most hopeful ways of keeping people focused on keeping their eyes on the prize, as we might say, would be?

Yeah, I mean, there's a more practical reason that you can't start with the Voting Rights act fix, which is HR4 in the litany of bills we introduced back in 2019 and we renamed that, by the way, for John Lewis last year after he passed away. So it's now the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The reason you can't start there is because the Court, Supreme Court, made very clear in the Shelby case that if you're going to come back in and put these fixes in place on the Voting Rights act, kind of restore its robustness, if you will, that you have to build a pretty extensive record. You have to show with evidence that there's a need for it. And so the voting rights community understands that they have to go build a record, have hearings, gather evidence, make sure that the reason, the basis for the kind of pre clearance formula and other things that exist there, that those reasons are still there and valid. So it would take a while to do that, Larry. Whereas the reforms in HR1 are very much ready to go right out of the gate. I think if we pass HR1, you then create momentum that can benefit HR4 as that record is being built and ultimately as that reform would come to the floor of the House and the Senate and hopefully be passed there and sent to the President's desk and then be able to withstand whatever scrutiny the Supreme Court would bring in, an inevitable legal challenge that would follow. So you have to really, when it comes to the way the Voting Rights act works, you have to be very careful and deliberate about the process, and that will take some time to do. Well, as you also put it, you don't necessarily want to put all your eggs in the H.R. 4 Voting Rights act basket because it's it is vulnerable to challenge and who knows what this new court would do with it. And it does deal only with certain parts of the country with historic discrimination in place and so forth. So the broader reforms in HR1 are still absolutely critical and hugely consequential. And I want to point out, if I haven't done it yet on this podcast, that John Lewis, even though his name is attached to the Voting Rights act now, and I think that's an appropriate place for it to be, he is a Central figure in HR1. I mean, the voting rights part of HR1 is Title 1, which was the bill he introduced year in and year out during his legislative career, and really speaks to why he is central to HR1. And frankly, passage of HR1 I think, is so central to John Lewis's legacy. So we're leading with that. It's a critical component of the for the People Act. And if we can get the for the People act across the Finish line. It just sets the table and creates the momentum to get the voting rights acted reenacted in a way that can make a huge difference in critical parts of the country.

Yeah. From a law geek's perspective. And we're going to have a law geek as the next participant in this podcast series, Guy Charles, who's a law professor from Duke. From a loggy perspective, what's exciting about HR1 is that it's grounding its authority in Article 1, in the power Congress has to make sure that its own elections are free and fair and equal. And it's surprising, but the jurisprudence around that is both less developed and simpler. There's not this heightened scrutiny problem because you're invoking race as a particular category. You're just advancing the objective of trying to make sure elections are free and fair. In the Voting Rights act context, you trigger a very complicated 14th amendment, 15th amendment analysis about whether you are properly responding to concerns about race. And that's what makes it so expensive, so costly, so difficult to prove. And so I think that if you opened it up with HR1 and you began to fuel a jurisprudence around what should be obvious, that Congress has the power to make sure that its elections are fair, we could do a lot of reform without worrying about proving that people are racist or proving that there's a sufficient level of racism in the society to justify.

I think this is why Lewis kept introducing this bill, because he understood that it is relatively simple to fix voting in America. There's the constitutional grounding that comes from the time, place and manner clause in the Constitution. Use that leverage that to insist on a certain set of basic uniform standards for how people can access the ballot box across the country. And so it wasn't ever the Constitution that was the problem. It was powerful forces with a lot of leverage over how the system works, particularly the way power is distributed and controlled in Washington, who just kept getting in the way. But in terms of the reforms we needed, Lewis understood that those were the same reforms from one year to the next. It's not brain surgery. It's like this is what you need to do to make a difference so that people don't have to run that obstacle course every two years. And nobody understood the challenges of voting in America and the promise of fixing voting in America better than John Lewis did. And so we're very. We're excited that the legislative effort to fix voting in America that he considered so critical throughout his career is right up front as title one of HR1, the for the People Act. We think it's really the beacon for this reform package. And it comes at a moment when I think Americans desire to fix voting in America is at a peak if we can respond to that and do it in time. So that when Americans go back to the polls in 2022, they're seeing the benefits of the kinds of reforms that John Lewis understood were so powerful. What a wonderful message that would be that we're listening and that we're trying to fix this system.

Well, that's what you've been doing for a long time, Congressman, and we're incredibly grateful for your time now and for the work you've been doing for the last more than a decade. And I look forward to the celebration post pandemic when we can get together and talk about the accomplishment of passing HR1 and S1 and seeing Joe Biden sign it into law. Thank you.

We can get this done. It will be a great celebration. Larry, thanks for all your work and support around this issue for so many years has made a tremendous difference. Thank you.

Thank you. So that's the first episode of our HR1 season. Stay tuned next for the contribution of a friend and colleague and future colleague here at Harvard, Guy Charles, who's an election law constitutional scholar from Duke until he comes to Harvard and has been an extremely important advocate for changing the way we think about what reform here should be. As you've just heard, we had a discussion at the end of this podcast about the trade off between the Voting Rights act, Restoration coming first versus HR1. This is a view. This is a problem. This is a question that Guy Charles has been focused on. These podcasts are produced and supported by citizens us. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us anotherway. Please share the podcast. Please share your ideas or questions on the webpage. I love the questions as they're fed to me and I'm eager to answer them and love your ideas about who we should turn to in talking about this reform. My hope is that by the end of the season, which will end when the law is passed, we will have covered a wide range both at the federal level and the state level. And by the end you will see why I think this is the most important thing that Congress can do right now. This is Larry Lessig. Thanks for tuning in. Until the next episode.