The article below might seem unfair to Dems since it focuses on the Obama
presidency and does not report on how much worse the Reps are. However
Obama did campaign on changing this system.

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How to fix our broken Congress and get our democracy back
By Lawrence Lessig
SF Chronicle
Sun, 7 Feb 2010

We are now one year into the Obama presidency, and it is already clear that
this administration is an opportunity missed: not because it is too
conservative or too liberal but because it is too conventional. The
president has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign, which promised
to “fundamentally change the way Washington works.”

Obama once decried allowing “lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig
the system.” The reason he was running, he said, was “to challenge that
system.” Without a fight, he said, fundamental change “will keep getting
blocked by the defenders of the status quo.”

But this administration has not taken up that fight. Instead, it has played
a political game no different from the one George W. Bush or Bill Clinton
played.

And as it stands now, Obama will leave the presidency with Washington
intact and the movement he inspired betrayed. The movement for change needs
new leadership. On the right and the left, there is an unstoppable
recognition that our government has failed. But both sides need to
understand the source of its failure.

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not
financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt.
Increasingly, faith in Congress has collapsed. Just 21 percent of Americans
approve of how Congress does its job. Why? Because Congress has a
pathological dependence upon campaign cash. The U.S.

Congress has become the Fundraising Congress.

This corruption is not hidden. Consider the story Robert Kaiser tells in
his fantastic book, “So Damn Much Money,” about former Sen. John Stennis.
No choirboy himself, Stennis was urged to solicit campaign funds from
military contractors for his 1982 re-election bid while he was chairman of
the Armed Services Committee. “Would that be proper?” Stennis asked. “I
hold life and death over those companies. I don’t think it would be proper
for me to take money from them.”

Is such a concept even imaginable today? Compare Stennis with Max Baucus,
who when controlling health care in the Senate gladly opened his campaign
chest to more than $4 million in contributions from the health care and
insurance industries. Or Sens. Joe Lieberman, independent-Conn., Evan Bayh,
D-Ind., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., who took millions
from insurance interests and then opposed (in their states) the wildly
popular public option for health care. The list is endless, the practice
open and notorious.

Members of Congress insist that this money has no effect. But if money
doesn’t affect results, what could possibly explain the failures of our
government? From the perspective of what the people want, the Fundraising
Congress is misfiring in every direction. That is either because Congress
is filled with idiots or because Congress depends on something other than
policy sense. In my view, Congress is not filled with idiots.

As someone who has known Barack Obama for almost 20 years, I would have bet
my career that he understood this. If you had told me in 2008 that Obama
expected to radically remake the American economy without first radically
changing this corrupted machinery of government, I would not have believed
it. Yet a year into this administration, reforming Congress is nowhere on
the administration’s radar.

There was a way Obama might have governed differently. It would have been
risky, but in his first speech to the nation, he could have built on the
rhetoric at the core of his campaign. On Jan. 20, 2009, Obama could have
said: America has spoken. It has demanded fundamental change. I commit to
work with Congress to produce it. But if we fail, or more precisely, if
Congress allows the special interests that control it to block change, it
will be time to remake Congress. Not by throwing out the Democrats or the
Republicans, but by throwing out both. If this Congress fails to deliver
change, then we will change Congress.

Had he framed his administration in these terms, the failure to implement
his agenda would not be the failure of Obama to woo Republicans. It would
have been what America was already primed to believe: a failure of this
corrupted institution.

We can hope that Obama recognizes these missteps. But as we’ve seen, hope
will only get us so far. What’s needed now is a citizens’ movement to stop
the Fundraising Congress. We need to demand change, including publicly
funded elections, a seven-year ban on lobbying for any former member of
Congress and amendments to the Constitution to assure that reform can
survive the Roberts Supreme Court.

Nor can one exaggerate the need for this reform. Our government is, as New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, “ominously dysfunctional” at a
time when the world desperately needs at least competence. Global warming,
pandemic disease, a crashing economy — these are not problems we can leave
to distracted souls. We are at one of those rare moments when a nation must
remake itself to restore its government to its high ideals and the
potential of its people.

Copyright­ 2010 the Nation

Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, and is
co-founder of the nonprofit Change Congress. Send your feedback to us
through our online form at SFGate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.