Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig hates corruption. He hates it so much, in fact, that last year he announced he’d be shifting away from his work on copyright and trademark law — on which he’s one of the leading experts in the country, especially when it comes to emerging digital, broadcast, and Internet technologies — to focus on it. He hates it so much he considered running for Tom Lantos’s seat in Congress, at the behest of an Internet campaign to draft him. (After a few days of soul-searching, he decided against it.)
The shift to studying politics isn't a dramatic as it may sound, however. Lessig was a teenage Reaganite, and later a noted libertarian, before drifting leftward — he now calls himself a “progressive Democrat.” Along the way he clerked for judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, widely considered one of the most influential jurists of the past century, and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
Also, Lessig has long been active in the “free culture” movement. He is the founder of the
Center for Internet and Society, CEO and founder of
Creative Commons, and a board member at that
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Lessig recently discussed these and other issues with
National Review Online.
NRO: Tell me more about your plan to remove money from politics.
Lessig: I wouldn’t call it a plan to remove money from politics. The idea is to really get us back to an earlier place, but the strategy would be that members or candidates would make a pledge. And the pledge would have three components. One, you’re not going to take lobbyist or PAC money, whether it’s PAC money from corporations or PAC money from unions. Number two, you’re going to vote to abolish earmarks. Hard to do to figure out exactly how you’d structure such a proposal, but that’s the commitment — you want the economy of earmarks to disappear. Three, you would support public financing of campaigns. And that’s very vague because I don’t think we actually know right now what would work best or how to do it.
But the point is that if a significant number of members commit to these proposals, that would change the economy of influence for how things function inside Congress. I want to be very clear about what I think the problem here is. I don’t think anyone is being bribed although, of course, there have been cases of bribery. And though there are many people who think there are a lot of really sleazy things happening with earmarks and benefiting local congressman, I’m not attacking these because I think somehow that congressmen are feathering their own nests. I think that what the research about lobbying practices shows is that the only thing it does — but this is an important thing — the only thing it does is shift the focus or attention of members of Congress toward those issues or those positions that happen to be well-financed and supported.
While many times these positions will be right, and that’s why they’re well-financed and -supported, it skews the process of consideration in a way that makes it easy for really pretty important policy mistakes to get made. As I outlined in a talk, the most catastrophic of these has been the global-warming debate, but if you look across the range of policy issues, the effect of this kind of special-interest influence is to make it harder for policymakers in Congress to focus on what the right answer is, as opposed to what answer makes it easier for them to get a fundraiser at some cocktail party, or what answer makes it easier for them because they’ve got a pile of research provided by a set of lobbyists.
So I don’t want a world where there are no lobbyists — I think lobbyists are essential. I think the message of lobbyists and the training of lobbyists is essential. Just like I think that what lawyers do before the Supreme Court is essential. But just as I think everybody would think it weird if a lawyer before the Supreme Court would send $100,000 to the Justice Roberts Retirement Fund or $100,000 to the Renovate Justice Roberts’s Office Fund, I think we better recognize there’s something perverse about a member of Congress having one of the people who is trying to persuade him what the right answer is raise $100,000 for his campaign. That’s the link we’ve got to break.
NRO: There's been a lot of talk about different schemes, ways for politicians to avoid taking tainted money. The conservative answer to this is that the only surefire way deal with the negative influence of money and politics is to route less money through Washington and decrease the scope of what Washington regulates.
Lessig: Well, I think that’s profoundly correct. In fact, one of the reasons why the Framers were small-government people was not a deep belief in libertarianism but a recognition that the more money flows through Washington, the more risk of corruption. John Quincy Adams’s administration was the first one that blew out because of the extraordinary amount of corruption in the crude sense, because of the expansion of government bureaucracies at the time.
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