Full Disclosure

-->This past July (7/24/2012) Larry Lessig testified before a Congressional Committee investigating the effects of Citizens United and the rise of Super PACs (a video of a small part of his testimony posted is at http://www.rootstrikers.org/nbastek).  

Just recently Ezra Klein of the Washington Post published an article, “The DISCLOSE Act won’t fix campaign finance.”  I have posted a link to Klein’s article on the home page of my website (scrootstrikers.org).  In his testimony Lessig presented an unsettling list of who (by percentage not name) in America contributes to political campaigns and candidates.  In part, he stated, “… in the current presidential election, 0.000063 percent of Americans — fewer than 200 of the country’s 310 million residents — have contributed 80 percent of all super-PAC donations.”  The full video (over 1.5 hours) can be found by here.

President Obama supports the Disclose Act, but Klein writes, “The deeper problem is that the Disclose Act is addressing the wrong problem. Citizens United focused attention on the failures of our system of campaign finance. But it did not create them." As Lessig puts it, “On Jan. 20, 2010, the day before Citizens United was decided, our democracy was already broken. Citizens United may have shot the body, but the body was already cold.”

Sitting next to Lessig during the testimony is Charles “Buddy” Roemer.  In my post last week I wrote I was skeptical of the positive effect of politicians calling for campaign finance reform.  Buddy Roemer is an exception to that skepticism.

Buddy Roemer is my political hero in this cause.  How many remember that he was a Republican candidate for president this year?  He was, but he was not allowed to participate in any of the debates.  Why?  We were told his polling numbers weren’t sufficient.  Buddy served the State of Louisiana as governor and in Washington as a member of Congress.  Suffice to say he has experience in public policy.  The same cannot be said of, say, Herman Cain.  Cain had “star quality”, a celebrity factor (later one of notoriety) but no experience in government or governing.  Yet he was practically featured in the debates.  Polling numbers or ratings numbers?

The real reason Buddy was excluded was because he was running on a platform based on campaign finance reform.  Buddy said you had to “run like you would serve – Free to Lead.” Leaders must be free to lead and not be dependent on who is ready to finance them.  He offered a very different formula for campaign financing:

1.     Fully disclose every contribution;

2.     Accept no contributions above $100; and,

3.     Accept no PAC money, Super PAC money, corporate money, or lobbyist money.

This is a simple formula, one that any candidate could adopt if they really wanted to break the corruption cycle.  This is the challenge.  But it is also the opportunity.  We can (and should) make our candidates abide by those simple rules and reward or punish them with our votes as they abide or choose not to do so.