International Law

More on Change Congress

Information Week gives us an update on Larry Lessig's Change Congress project:

Government-reform advocates plan in two weeks to launch a system for members of Congress to pledge to reduce the role of money in government, Lawrence Lessig said. The Change Congress project will ask members of Congress to make three commitments: To reject contributions from lobbyists and Political Action Committees (PACs), work to ban earmarks, and support public funding for elections.

Officials who take the pledge will be allowed to wear a badge -- like a Creative Commons badge -- indicating which of the three reforms they support, Lessig said Wednesday night at a presentation at the O'Reilly ETech Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

Lessig, a Stanford University law professor, author, founder of the Center for Internet and Society, and proponent of Creative Commons, said Change Congress will ask citizens to donate $5-$10 per month for several months to politicians who agree to take the reform pledge. And the group will also look for "citizen candidates" -- not professional politicians -- to run against politicians who fail to take the pledge. Even if the citizen candidates don't win, they'll force incumbents to address reform.

The movement won't reform government immediately, Lessig said. It will require at least two to four election cycles to achieve critical mass -- which can be a relatively small segment of the population, far short of a majority. But small numbers of people can make big changes. Wikipedia has about 2,000 authors, and 50,000 people nationwide working at their desks, or sitting on their couches with laptop computers, can revolutionize government, he said.

"If you can actually make members of Congress imagine a world where they don't have to spend all their time raising money, they would like that world," Lessig said. Members of Congress now spend two to six hours every day working the phones for campaign contributions. They're prohibited by law from making the calls from their Congressional offices, so they typically rent small, dingy offices near Capitol Hill and rush to those offices between votes to work like boiler-room telemarketers raising money. Most members of Congress would welcome the opportunity to do what they ran for office to do: Govern based on their judgment, Lessig said,

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).