Lawrence Lessig Explains the Unique Evil of Mitch McConnell

Well, it seems complicated to people when you try to explain campaign finance and you try to explain contributions to candidates and contributions to sitting senators and congressmen. It's complicated and there's so many different things to think about when you're discussing this that to a person who's on the outside, well, how do you fix this? Well, what are the laws now? Well, how do they get that way? Well, how about make it so they can't give them money? And there's all these like real simplistic views of it from the outside, but it seems that it at the very least limiting the amount of money that someone's allowed. What is the maximum amount of money someone can give to a candidate? Right now in the primary and the general, it's $5,400, $2,700 in each. And that goes up according to inflation. And that's pretty small potatoes compared to what the super PACs are doing in the election. So you have these people running who expect they're going to raise the money to run their office from their direct contributions, but they're counting on the super PACs to come in and spend ungodly amounts of money, like tens of millions of dollars to support their candidate or to oppose their opponent. And so the supporters for those super PACs are even tiny. Those are the Adolfs in America. People named Adolfs, this tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who are contributing to those things. But you're right. Look, there's no reason why most Americans should understand the complexities of campaign finance law, and they don't need to. What they need to ask is, do we have a system of integrity in the way we select representatives? And if you're not brain dead in America, you believe the answer to that question is no. We do not have a system of integrity. There's no representational integrity. It is corrupted in all the obvious ways. Nobody should be forced to study campaign finance in order to have the entitlement to say, hell no, this system has got to end. And so I think you're right. People are forced to articulate all the 34 different changes that have to happen. We're never going to get there. But let's not go there. Let's just start and end with, it is a corrupted system, and we want politicians to fix it. And if they don't fix it, we'll throw them out until we get the politicians who do. And if we could build that as the movement, the recognition, the core message of 2020, I think there's a real shot, because we've primed the Republican Party. There are a lot of people in that party who are now so disgusted with the corruption of this system. Not necessarily Mitch McConnell. He loves it. But ordinary Republican voters. And the Democrats have now committed themselves to fixing this corrupted system. This is the moment to do that, and we don't have to get into the details of how much you should be allowed to contribute, to say there is a way to fix this that would give us a representative democracy. Maybe not again, but for the first time. Why is Mitch McConnell so uniquely evil? This guy has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington to end any regulation of money in politics. He engineered the selection of the FEC, this is the Federal Election Commission commissioners, so that they would block basically every enforcement action of the FEC. The FEC does nothing now, because it's a commission that has half Republicans and half Democrats. So if the Republicans disagree from the Democrats, then nothing gets done. They can't enforce the most simple rules anymore, because Mitch McConnell has populated the FEC with people who don't believe in campaign finance rules. He has said Citizens United, this decision that said corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to independent political speaking, says one of the greatest decisions of the Supreme Court. And he has said he's going to fight like hell to defend it. And when this proposed HR1 was raised to him, Mitch McConnell said there is not a chance in hell this will ever even get a debate in the Senate. This man is obsessed with the idea that money should have the power in Washington that it has right now, and people who are talking about reforming it are the enemy. And so the thing about Mitch McConnell is he's actually an incredibly smart man, and he's an incredibly smart strategist. And he's been playing this game for a long time, and I think he's responsible for 85% of the judicial structure that makes it possible for this to be blocked. There's an amazing series of debates happened 20 years ago between John McCain and Mitch McConnell. This is when Congress was passing something called the McCain-Feingold law, which was the last great effort to deal with this problem. It was flawed in a bunch of ways, but it was an important success. Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and said, Mr. McCain says that the Senate, well, you can't say Mr. McCain, he said the Senator from Arizona has said that the system is corrupt. I want him to name the corrupt people. And McCain stands there and said, I'm not talking about particular individuals. I'm talking about the system. It's the system's corrupt. And then McConnell, almost clueless, just said, if the system's corrupt, there must be corrupt people. If there's not corrupt people, then the system's not corrupt. So the only corruption he could imagine was corruption where somebody was taking a bribe. And if that's the only corruption we're allowed to remedy, then the whole system of influence we have right now is not to be touched. But I think McCain's point was you can have a system filled with lots of honest Congress people and lots of honest senators who never engage in bribery, but they know how to bob and weave and bend and speak and say the right things to attract the right kind of money. And that's as much corruption as bribery is. And McCain's view was we had to end it. So he was the last great Republican fighter for reform of this corrupted system. There had been many before. Barry Goldwater was an incredibly vocal opponent to the role of money in politics. But I think what we have to do is find a way to revive that and to leverage from this president's assertion that this is a corrupt system and we have to change the system into actually building the political power to make that change happen.