Not from the US, but I wanted to congratulate everyone involved in this historic event.
I think it is inspiring, apart from being inherently relevant worldwide.
I like the irony of raising money to "reduce the influence of money in politics".
At the same time, well done. $5 Billion dollars raised is an incredible feat. I'm not American, but hopefully if they are successful in actually implementing the changes they propose, other countries will follow suit.
My concern is that if corporate $$ buys less influence in Washington, it might enable them to buy more influence in other places (eg. Canada), and that corporate influence could have a negative effect not only on Canada itself, but retaliatory effects on the US. Think if the Oil industry doesn't get it's way in the US, they start influencing Canadian policy to not ship Canadian oil (or less of it) to the US, resulting in a cost spike for the states. Similar things could happen with other natural resources.
But well done for Lawrence Lessig and the rest of the MayDay gang. As he states, this is just the beginning of a very challenging and amazing initiative.
I was really surprised for a second. 5 billion raised is a huge sum which would mean either mass contributions from extremely wealthy individuals or that pretty much everybody is US chipped in. 5 million though is less than 1% of what was spent on presidential elections alone by each side (Obama side spent 779M, Romney side 704M [1]). This is not counting what is being spent in congressional, state, local, etc. elections and what is being spent on one-issue campaigns. For example, just prop 8 campaign in California took 70M [2].
I am not sure what exactly these guys plan to do (my conviction is any law compatible with the First Amendment can not prevent political spending as public speech on national scale costs a lot of money and content-based regulations on such speech to exclude political speech are in direct contradiction with current understanding of First Amendment both by the courts and the public) and their descriptions are very vague ("agnostic about the specific legislation") - I don't think 5 million is going to take them too far. They might support some candidates from the left that already campaign on the issue of "big money stole our politics" (while taking big money like everybody else of course) but those guys were already for it anyway, and I don't think you can tip too many congressional elections with 5 million. We'll see I guess.
The most recent bills that I saw Lessig speaking in favor of provided candidates with public funding that was equivalent to what they could get from the PACs and gave voters vouchers that they could give to the candidate of their choice who agreed to the public funding.
It's compatible with the idea that super PACs are legal, but provides a more voter-friendly alternative source of funding.
1.5 billion of public funding? That's quite fat piece of change from public coffers, and that's just for one presidential campaign. But more importantly, availability of public funding does not solve the problem of restricting political speech in any way. So imagine we put 1.5 bn of public spending in the campaign. What prevents the candidates from spending another 1.5 bn of private money? The private money spending is limited only by the amounts people are willing to spend to support their causes. Adding public money to that does not change it (unless you somehow conclude people would not be willing to donate anymore, but this is an unsupported assumption). So unless you prohibit people from spending money on political speech - I do not see how public funding changes the picture.
1) Most likely there are diminishing marginal returns from more advertising. That is true in most industries, based on may understanding (I have no expertise in the field). I suspect, though I have no evidence, that the returns diminish significantly.
2) Public funding would remove large amounts of money as a barrier to entry into campaigns. Even if the candidate didn't have much as those with other sources, they could run a realistic campaign.
3) Public funding would greatly reduce the need for elected officials to spend time fundraising, which many say takes significant time from their responsibilities of governing.
4) "1.5 billion of public funding? That's quite fat piece of change from public coffers": It's not a small number, but it's $5/citizen. I think (and I think many Americans would agree) that it's a very small price for removing money from politics.
1. There probably are diminishing marginal returns, the question is are we at that point? The amount of donations solicited suggests the returns are still pretty good. The politicians don't take big money because they love the dependence - nobody loves it. They take the money because they expect the money will make them more likely to be elected. And so far I haven't seen any campaign saying "well, we don't need money anymore, thank you, give the rest to the Salvation Army".
2. That's true - however, if somebody can not find enough supporters that want to put their money where their mouth is - how likely it is this candidate would be elected? If the candidate is so marginal nobody want to back him/her - the public money would be just wasted.
3. That would only be true if other form of political campaigning were banned, which, as I previously said, is incompatible with the First Amendment. Otherwise, the candidate that does public funds + fundraising would win over the candidate that has just public funds, so fundraising will continue and the only thing achieved is that the politicians would get some free taxpayer money to play with. Don't they already have quite enough of that?
4. It's $5/citizen for one campaign. And that includes citizens that never paid any income taxes, due to being poor, underage or otherwise exempt. And those are quite numerous. Real figure per taxpayer would be much higher, and it's not like we have huge surplus in the budgets waiting to be spent. And, of course, as I mentioned, this won't remove money from politics - and it can not, since money is just a form of expressing one's desires, and if the citizens want to participate in the politics, giving money to the causes they like is how they do it. If you ban it, you replace citizens giving money to causes with bureaucrats giving money to causes. I don't think I'd pay even 5 cents for this.
You think if this happened earlier the Supreme Court would have different view on the First Amendment? The SC has powers to overturn any legislation, including one proposed by people supported by this campaign. Short of FDR-style tricks I don't see how you could overcome that.
True, but the chance of passing an amendment of such a controversial topic is virtually nil, so I did not consider this as a real option. The bar for the Constitutional Amendment is very high.
A Constitutional Amendment is where the legislative effort on the issue in Congress is focussed now; if MayDay.US is successful in pushing the legislative balance farther in favor of efforts to reverse the effect of Citizen's United, I hardly imagine that the effort would shift to less powerful remedies than those that are already the focus.
> For Constitution Amendment to pass, it's not enough to get a couple of House members.
True, but so what? First, the Constitutional Amendment currently on the table in Congress has a lot more support than that (the version in the Senate has, IIRC, 43 cosponsors), and, second, a PAC aiming to increase legislative support can target both Congress and state legislatures, and, third, as the issue cannot be addressed legislatively except by a Constitutional Amendment, since the Supreme Court has already determined that legislation in this area violates the Constitution as it currently stands, so no other mechanism is meaningful.
Edit: For those downvoting, I was just quoting the article (I realise this was perhaps not the best quote, but felt it was the one most fitting given the question).
The downvotes that you got and i got are something normal, internet trolls are everywhere, although i asked a real 100% valid question, the title of this post and the first couple of paragraphs didn't give me a background about why this is in the front page, those who downvoted me obviously thought i was trolling so they whipped out their swords and fought like real knights ... dumb motherfuckers.
