One Way Forward (8 page)

Either way, this is an obvious second step that every citizen should help make real: We need to “occupy”
AmericansElect.org
. Become a delegate. Today. Make reform your number-one issue. Work to convince other AE delegates that this number-one issue for you should be the number-one issue for Americans Elect. And then cast your ballot only for a candidate who promises reform first. Forget Democrat or Republican. Forget Left or Right. Forget mushy centrism. Vote for the candidate who could make change something other than a slogan.

But if the candidate is not a reform candidate, then I am not a supporter. There is a “dime’s worth of difference” between the major party candidates. I don’t believe in gambling over that difference, unless there’s a real chance that something important would be gained. A real commitment to reform would be, in my view, sufficiently important. Fine-tuning the gap between R and D is not.

As I’ve said, some may believe that it is enough to pass (at least the right version of) public funding for federal elections. The Grant and Franklin Project, for example, would bring about a substantial change in the way Congress works without requiring any change in the Constitution.

But I’ve become convinced that in the long run, constitutional change will also be required. Even with the right version of public funding, independent expenditures will still turn our representatives into shape-shifters as they bend to please their super PAC of choice. We have to remove the need for this shape-shifting by amending the Constitution to give Congress the power to limit, not ban, independent expenditures.

Article V of our Constitution provides two paths to amendments. The only one that’s ever been used requires two-thirds of Congress to propose an amendment, and then three-fourths of the states to ratify it. The alternative requires two-thirds of the states to call on Congress to “call a Convention for proposing Amendments.” Those proposals too would then have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states before they became part of the Constitution.

We can’t wait around for Congress to act. We need to begin the process of forcing Congress to act, by organizing to get state legislatures to call for an Article V convention.

This alternative scares people because it has never been done before, and they sensibly fear the uncertainty of trying something radically new. What if the convention “ran away”? What if it abolished the Bill of Rights? What if it criminalized homosexuality? Or (the fear of the John Birch Society) what if it instituted a Stalinist form of government? (Seriously.)

I understand the worry. I don’t consider it to be fatal. Sure, there are a million questions to answer. And, sure, anytime you invoke the term “convention,” you invite people to reflect upon the most basic power of the sovereign (us) within a republic—the “unalienable Right of the People,” as Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, “to alter or abolish” government. Truly, scary stuff.

But the convention that I’m talking about is not a “constitutional convention” in the ordinary sense of that term. It is an
Article V
convention—meaning a convention as specified in Article V of our Constitution. That convention has just one power: the power to propose amendments. Those amendments have no effect unless thirty-eight state legislatures (or state conventions, but not popular referenda) ratify them.

Thirty-eight is a huge number. One house each in thirteen states could block any amendment. And I trust that even the most cynical would not believe that thirty-eight states are going to ratify the ideals of Stalin or abolish Madison’s Bill of Rights.

But I get that to win this argument, we need to show people why an Article V convention makes sense. We show people by modeling a convention: by building a “convention in a box” and running serious mock conventions to demonstrate that ordinary citizens can think sensibly about constitutional change. At the same time that we mobilize to get legislatures to make the call for a convention, we must get citizens to show one another that a convention could work.

CallAConvention.org
is taking both steps. A cross-partisan organization that advances no single agenda for constitutional reform,
CallAConvention.org
is intended simply to facilitate a national call for an Article V convention. Its board is politically balanced. The rules of the organization forbid it from pushing for any particular substantive reform. But as well as enabling state-based organizations that would push state legislatures to make a call on Congress for an Article V convention, the organization will also organize the push for mock conventions as a means of demonstrating why We, the Citizens, are able to make the change this government needs.

You can help this process, too. Go to
CallAConvention.org
and sign up. Become a supporter of the mock convention process. Become a member of your own state organizing committee. And then, with that state-based organization, begin to occupy your state legislature, to build the campaign to get them to ratify a resolution calling on Congress to call an Article V convention.

For even if we don’t get the necessary thirty-eight states to make the call for a convention current and binding, the very process of collecting states calling for reform will have its own effect. This is a quintessentially outsider process. It is the one clear way the Framers gave us for making an end run around a corrupted Congress. Any substantial push for an Article V convention will have an effect on what Congress does.

That is the lesson that history teaches. We’ve never had an Article V convention, but we’ve been very close twice. In the 1980s, the states were close to having enough resolutions to demand a convention for the purpose of passing a balanced budget amendment. That push led Congress to adopt the most important budget reforms in half a century. And exactly a century ago, the states came within one vote of calling for a convention for the purpose of making the Senate elected rather than, as it was at the time, appointed. Congress, in response, quickly proposed an amendment to achieve the same end and, before the final state could pass its resolution calling for a convention, three-fourths of the states had ratified the Seventeenth Amendment, fundamentally changing the nature of the Senate.

The same effect would happen here. Politicians don’t believe in giants—until they see them, up close and in person. And the giant that is the sovereign of this nation needs to stretch its muscles and show itself to the politicians. The cross-partisan process of pushing the nation to a convention is the chance to show the insiders that the outsiders are here. And we’re not going anywhere. Until we change them.

Here’s what conventional wisdom says about this fight: The people don’t care about it. They don’t care about campaign finance reform. It doesn’t move votes. It doesn’t elect candidates. And it certainly won’t drive a constitutional revolution.

The conventional wisdom is right. It has been about a hundred years since America rallied to such fundamental reform. It will take extraordinary effort by each of us to convince enough of us to do it again.

Yet this we must do, by drawing more of us into this cause. And we do that by getting more of us to recognize what you certainly see: not that the problem of money in politics is the most important problem facing the nation, but, instead, that the corrupting influence of money is the
first
problem facing this nation. That unless we solve this problem, we won’t solve anything else. Unless we press pause on the endless game of “hacking at the branches of evil” and spend at least a cycle or two “striking at the root,” we won’t get anywhere fighting any of the many evils that motivate all of us as citizens.

So you need to recruit your friends, your neighbors, your school, your followers on Twitter, to help us strike at this root. You need to recruit root strikers—those rare and powerful souls who can get others to see why we must first solve this if we’re to solve anything.

Now, when I tried to persuade Jon Stewart to become a root striker, he didn’t much like the name. He suggested “batmen” as a better moniker. Much less geeky. Much, much cooler: That’s Stewart versus Lessig in a nutshell.

But whether root striker or batman, the point is the same. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize this argument. It simply takes someone willing to connect the dots. Become a member of this campaign—
Rootstrikers.org
—and help us show others how these dots connect. And how we can reform the system that connects them.

These four steps are a start. They would begin a process that would push the politics of reform that this nation desperately needs.

But alone, they are not enough. The core argument of this book is that the reform we need will require a critical discipline by all of us. It will take each of us, and the networks that constitute us, learning to work with people who are different—who believe in different things, who want a different politics. This reform will require us to learn how to work with the other side to make the ultimate fight with the other side fair, and effective.

There’s no website for this. There won’t be a commander or any single entity that will make this happen. Instead, it will require an alliance that is organic and authentic and that builds from the grass roots up. Occupiers must invite Tea Partiers to coffee (or tea). Tea Partiers must have sessions at their conventions about whether cooperation is possible. The Coffee Party must reach out to the organizations pushing to amend the Constitution: Everyone must take the first steps to allow a wide range of different groups to begin to work together.

The simplest way to enable such coordination would be for some to take the lead in constituting a Citizens’ Convention. The Citizens’ Convention would aim to do nothing more than provide a framework within which a common platform for change might be developed. As with
CallAConvention.org
, it would be cross-partisan. But it could begin a regular process, meeting virtually (maybe every month) and physically (maybe twice a year) to gather and hash out a common platform of demands.

This alliance must affirm, not hide, its differences. It must recognize that it speaks not for a single movement but for allies aiming at a common goal. Eisenhower should be the model. Diversity—like an alliance that could include the Soviet Union as well as the United States—should be its character. Its focus should be the single common enemy that has corrupted this Republic. Its aim must be to map the process by which we, #outsiders, defeat that enemy. Together. As one people, but not one network. As a federation, with radical differences among us, committed nonetheless to the one end we all must achieve: a government that we could have reason to trust.

Our age has given us many different leaders, from Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) to Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) to Meckler and Martin (Tea Party Patriots). They reflect a diversity of networks, working on every important issue. They sometimes represent power enough to make the insiders listen.

Let us learn how this diversity can act now as one network, as an inter-network, as a cooperating crowd, embracing the open-source principles that define our age, and using them to restore this Republic.

In 2008, Iceland, like much of the rest of the world, suffered a major economic collapse after its recently privatized banks suffered a catastrophic default. The legalized gambling that the world’s banking system had become left Iceland’s three major banks holding nine times the country’s GDP in debt. When the collapse of Lehman Brothers ended their ability to refinance that debt, the banks entered bankruptcy—the largest collapse, relative to the size of a nation’s economy, in the history of the world.

When a coalition government tried to bail out the banks—with a package that would have required each Icelandic citizen to pay about one hundred euros a month for fifteen years at 5.5 percent interest—the citizens revolted. A national referendum rejected the bailout in March 2010, with 98 percent voting to reject.
⁴⁴

As the frustration with Iceland’s failure grew, there was a growing recognition that this economic failure was a governance failure, too. Iceland had failed to insulate its government from cronyism and corruption. Both fueled irresponsible monetary and banking policy and, eventually, economic collapse.

So the citizens of Iceland launched the most ambitious crowdsourced-sovereignty project in modern history. As a first step, a network of private grassroots organizations called the Anthill gathered a statistically significant portion of the nation to brainstorm a vision for the country. This “National Assembly” of more than fifteen hundred Icelandic citizens used open-source principles to “energize the wisdom of the population,” as it was promoted, and “to crowdsource a socio-economic political manifesto.”
⁴⁵
The idea, according to the assembly’s architect, was to “focus on the process. With a process it is something that can scale. It’s like how Linux competed with Windows. … The process … can scale so clever people all over the world can participate.”

The National Assembly set the stage for the next extraordinary step of popular sovereignty. In June 2010, the Icelandic parliament passed the Act on a Constitutional Assembly, delegating the “intensely legalistic task” of writing a constitution to a group of citizens acting in a constitutional council.

That council then convened a National Forum in November 2010, which “crowdsourced the norms and values of the population of 21st century Iceland,” through a series of questions and interviews. Then, building on the results from that survey and the work of the 2009 assembly, the forum divided citizens into groups focused upon particular themes.