Lawrence Lessig wants to be president. But when he gets there, he only wants to do one thing: enact a law called the Citizen Equality Act. Then he'll resign.
Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School and political activist, says that the amount of money in politics today has tipped the scales so far to wealthy elites that the system has stopped working altogether.
That's why he's proposing the Citizen Equality Act, which would accomplish three things: change the way elections are funded, end political gerrymandering, and make it easier for citizens to vote by abolishing rules like voter identification laws and making polls stay open after the average citizen gets out of work.
"We've got a government that most us believe just doesn't work. I think it's a crisis," Lessig said. "If you think about what is, at core, wrong with our system is we've allowed an incredible inequality to develop inside our representative democracy."
The most important factor in the Citizen Equality Act, says Lessig, is leveling the playing field in campaign financing. He points out that fewer than 400 families have given nearly half the money donated in the 2016 campaign. The Citizen Equality Act would move to a small dollar public financing system where, instead, voters could get a voucher from their tax rebates which could then be spent on political campaigns.
Lessig is no stranger to the issue of campaign finance reform. Last year, he launched the Mayday PAC with the mission of abolishing the PAC system itself, which allows corporations, unions, and individuals to funnel unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns. Mayday aimed to elect pro-reform candidates to office, but ultimately very few of them were successful.
Now, however, Lessig is aiming his sights even higher.
"My view is: we have to fix our democracy first if we're ever going to have the capacity of a government," he said. "That's why I think we have to fight a campaign about a big idea that we know America agrees about."
To hear more from Lawrence Lessig, tune in to Boston Public Radio above.
