Campaign finance reform advocate and Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig announced Tuesday that he is forming a committee to explore entering the Democratic primary for president—a job from which he says he would resign as soon as Congress passed a package of pro-democracy reforms.
“I want to run,” Lessig wrote at the Huffington Post on Tuesday. “But I want to run to be a different kind of president. ‘Different’ not in the traditional political puffery sense of that term. ‘Different,’ quite literally. I want to run to build a mandate for the fundamental change that our democracy desperately needs. Once that is passed, I would resign, and the elected Vice President would become President.”
He calls it “Presidency as referendum,” meant to address “the deep sense that most Americans have that their government is not theirs.”
Lessig’s campaign and potential White House residency would be solely focused on passing the Citizen Equality Act of 2017, which he says aims to restore “the right that all of us have in a representative democracy to be represented equally.”
“That right has been violated in America today—and brazenly so,” he said. “In the way campaigns are funded, in the way the poor and overworked are denied an equal freedom to vote, and in the way whole sections of American voters get written into oblivion by politically gerrymandered districts that assure their views are not represented, we have allowed the politicians to cheat us of the most fundamental commitment of a democracy: equal citizens. And until we find a way to create a mandate to demand equality for citizens, we will never find a way to make real change possible.”
Among other things, the Citizen Equality Act calls for overturning Citizens United, instituting Ranked Choice Voting, and adopting a campaign finance proposal that would give every voter a voucher to contribute to fund congressional and presidential campaigns and provide matching funds for small-dollar contributions to congressional and presidential campaigns.
As for his successor, Lessig told the Washington Post that he would pick a vice president “who is really, clearly, strongly identified with the ideals of the Democratic Party right now,” offering Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as one possibility. He said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has railed against big money in politics on the campaign trail, was another option.
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