They who have no voice nor vote in the electing of representatives, do not enjoy liberty, but are absolutely enslaved to those who have votes.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1774
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON, AUGUST 6, 1965
[American history] is not just a story of expanding the right to vote. It has expanded and contracted.
ERIC FONER, 2012
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
JAMES MADISON, AUGUST 4, 1822
Dollarocracy is the antithesis of democracy. Whereas democracy has as its purpose the redistribution of power from elites to the great mass of people, Dollarocracy seeks to take the power back for the elites. Dollarocracy and democracy cannot coexist because, though he used different terminology, Louis Brandeis was right when he wrote a century ago, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”1
This is not a complicated construct.
For Dollarocracy to prevail, democracy must not function as anything more than a spectator sport. And voting must be an exercise in futility.
There is no more important takeaway from the last election, from four decades of corporate pushback against the expansion of democracy, and indeed from almost 240 years of struggle to define the American experiment. Dollarocracy, in the final analysis, is all about reducing the effectiveness of the franchise—the capacity of the many to engage in effective self-government—and thereby increasing the power of those few with large amounts of money over those far more numerous without.
The measure of how entrenched Dollarocracy has become is demonstrated by the vast and growing distance between what significant numbers of Americans would like to see done to address the great challenges facing the nation and the feeble range of policy options countenanced in Washington and by government at all levels. What passes for policy “debate” studiously denies the will of the people, except in those cases where popular sentiment happens to coincide with the desires of powerful interests. When it comes to economics, that is rarely the case. So as America moves more and more toward Dollarocracy, America sees more and more inequality, corruption, poverty, stagnation, and decline.
That’s not going to change unless the pathologies inherent in Dollarocracy are countered with a great new embrace of democracy. And we propose nothing less.
The effective response to the crisis that afflicts America in an age of $10 billion campaign seasons and news cycles that have become spin cycles ought not to be a tinkering around the edges of the problem. The response should be robust enough to end, once and for all, the whipsawing of our democratic experiment and to realize, finally, Walt Whitman’s promise that we might “use the words America and democracy as convertible terms.”2
In this concluding chapter, we make the case that what is necessary at this point in American history is not a specific reform but a great reform moment in which an array of amendments, laws, rules, and structural and social responses are initiated and implemented. Without a broad popular movement of historic dimensions, no functional reform will be possible. We outline a few proposals and agendas that follow from our critique, highlight movements that have already developed in response to the crisis, and explore ideas that have earned other nations much higher rankings on measures of democracy. We err on the side of flexibility and innovation and of a deeply American faith that this country can meet any challenge.
But in our core conclusion we are inflexible. To generate focus and momentum, this reform moment must have at its heart a deeply democratic enterprise: the clear-eyed commitment to establish for the first time in America that we the people have an explicit right to vote. This must be settled, and accepted, as a preeminent American right. It must be understood that policies governing the electoral process and campaign finance, as well as guarantees of and support for a free press, can and should be structured to assure that voting rights are nurtured and secured. The notion of one person, one vote must become sacrosanct. Not as a public relations slogan but as a reality. This is the democratic response to what Dollarocracy has wrought. Hence this is the argument that guides our conclusion.
There can be no more blurring of the margins. America must establish an affirmative right to vote, explicitly defined in its Constitution. Only by establishing an explicit right to vote after more than two hundred years of American progress toward full enfranchisement do we enshrine that progress. And only then does democracy begin to become constant. This is a worthy goal, a fundamental goal, a goal sufficient around which to build a reform moment and allow the American people to “announce their future will.”3
America has never been a pure or perfect democracy. It began as a plutocracy where wealthy white male property holders could vote while the rest of the population was expected to pay taxes, fight wars, and hope for the best. The franchise was extended first to the landless, then to some African Americans, to Native Americans, to women, and, eventually, to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds.4 An African American man born just before the Civil War in a southern state might well have enjoyed the franchise, lost it, and regained it in a long lifetime, only to have his daughter’s ability to cast her ballot undermined by restrictive voter ID laws.
There is constant confirmation of Eric Foner’s observation that the history of the right to vote in America is one of expansion and contraction, just as there is constant confirmation of why this occurs.5 As Garrett Epps noted, “Every step forward in human rights has given birth to a desire to ‘purify the electorate.’ Some Northern Republicans wanted to exclude ‘disloyal’ pro-southern Democrats and newly arrived immigrants from the ballot; Southern Democrats were adamant that freed slaves should not vote. As democratic devices like the referendum and initiative took hold in the 20th century, the pressure to purify grew.” Epps highlighted Foner’s conclusion that “the more you enhance the power [of the people], the more [the powerful] want to make sure the right people vote.”6
In earlier chapters, we examine how the evolution of the right to vote in the 1960s and the 1970s, the federal oversight of redistricting and voting practices in what were once Jim Crow states, and the development of campaign-finance and ethics laws that made elections more genuinely competitive began to pose a serious political threat to the favored position of the contemporary equivalents of the Virginia plantation owners and Boston merchants of 1787. The modern “white male landholders” mustered their resources and organized a response that utilized some of the clumsy tools of old—legal and structural voter suppression, gerrymandering, and deliberately convoluted practices. But they also embraced new tools, establishing “think tanks” to “rebrand” unpopular ideas, buying huge stakes in major media, and lobbying for rule changes that would allow them to buy even more, thereby grabbing control of debates and popular forums away from nonpartisan good-government groups such as the League of Women Voters and using legal strategies and a new understanding of campaign contributions as “corporate investments” to flood the coffers of candidates with the largesse of special interests.
This latest devolution of democracy is different from the fits and starts of the past; it goes further in replacing the authority of the vote with the authority of the dollar. It is more sweeping and far more cynical. And it has been uncharacteristically successful, preventing a reform moment for the better part of four decades, longer than any other stretch in American history. As a result, the American experiment now teeters at a precipice between democracy and Dollarocracy.
Reformers of every stripe will tell you that something must be done. For the most part, they propose a precise fix. The place of beginning, however, ought not to be with a specific amendment, law, statute, or policy. It’s not even with a focus on a specific area of concern. What’s at stake is bigger than specifics. It’s overarching.
But it is not unprecedented.
The United States has from its founding faced unimaginable challenges, profound divisions, and the toughest choices. And it has met them not with cautious measures but with the broad sweeps that come during what can be identified as reform moments. These are the “critical junctures” in the history of a nation where unaddressed maladies and unrealized aspirations combine to make rapid change inevitable.7 Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that there are cycles of history where the United States shifts from periods of private-interest dominance to periods of public-interest response. During times of private domination, government and society neglect the popular will for reform and tend to “constrain democracy,” failing to address pathologies for so long that the pressure for progress becomes “inextinguishable.”8
In such a circumstance, signs and signals emerge, even for elites with a stake in the status quo, that fundamental changes must be made. This understanding ushers in a liberal or progressive period in which America will not only “increase democracy” but also utilize that increased democracy to initiate societal and economic reforms.
This is not, Schlesinger explained, a simplistic “oscillation between two fixed points.”9 It is an unsteady and unstable process that reflects and responds to reforms that have been made—and to human and technological advances—rather than returning regularly to some ancient point of beginning.
America, explained former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, has sometimes willingly, often grudgingly, accepted the concept of a “living constitution”—and with it an understanding that this country did not start as a perfect union. Asked on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Constitution to deliver an address on the “achievements of our founders,” Marshall responded:
I cannot accept this invitation, for I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite “The Constitution,” they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.10
This is why reform moments invariably witness expansions upon the Constitution; these are the historical turning points where a majority of Americans embrace an opportunity to rearrange and improve upon the underpinnings of the American experiment. This is also why reform moments are as painful, as frightening, as overwhelming, as the Civil War, the labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social and economic upheavals of the 1930s, and the civil rights, gender, and generational struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s. Though America was founded with a healthy rebellion against an existing order, it does not have a tradition of easy evolution. This country demands a “fierce urgency of now” to inspire a great mass of citizens to first demand immediate relief—an end to slavery, regulation of the robber barons, a real response to mass unemployment, respect for the basic humanity of people of color—and then, when they realize that it is possible, to make a more perfect union, to go deeper.
Every major reform period in American history, with the exception of the Jacksonian era, has been accompanied by numerous amendments to the Constitution, amendments that were deemed unthinkable until almost the moment they were passed. If the problems faced at this point in the American journey are going to be solved, history suggests constitutional amendments will be a significant part of the process. The measures of the moment are clear because the stakes are so high. If we are not entering into a new age of reform characterized by progress and the consolidation of gains, then we are accepting the certainty of an ever-deepening degeneration toward points unknown and unwanted.
Thomas Jefferson, writing not from some higher theoretic plain but in response to the news of an armed insurrection against economic injustice led by Daniel Shays, counseled that Americans should welcome the tension that ushers in fundamental change.11 Addressing James Madison from Paris in 1787, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence explained that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”12 A few months later, in a note to William Stephens Smith, Jefferson extended this point, arguing, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. . . . If [the people] remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”13
This talk of “storms” and “rebellions” reflects the reality that reform moments are times of upheaval. But it is a necessary upheaval, a crisis point where the failed policies of the past must give way to a new order, either through a peaceful process of political transformation (e.g. gay rights) or, if reforms are deferred too long, through more turbulent routes of civil conflict.
After the long campaign of 2012 finished with the long lines of Election Day—demanding six, seven, eight, even nine hours from the lives of those seeking a moment at the polling place—Barack Obama claimed his second term with an offhand reference to the most easily observed evidence of our democracy’s dysfunction. Said the president, “I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time.”
Obama paused. “By the way, we have to fix that.”14
We do have to fix that. And just about everything else. One reform won’t do it. The time has come for all the reforms. This is why it is wise to seek not a particular “fix” but rather a reform moment—every bit as bold, every bit as expansive as the Progressive Era, the New Deal era, the Great Society, and the upheavals of the 1960s.
The Progressives of a century ago launched their movements with the promise of “a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything.”15 We the people of this century should aspire to nothing less. No small measures. No half steps. Not mere reform. But a new age of reform.
The American people recognize that their country’s political system is in deep disrepair. A February 2010 CNN survey found that 86 percent of Americans said the system of government was broken.16 By January 2013 Gallup found that frustration with “government dysfunction” had—by a wide margin—displaced concerns about unemployment and taxes at the top of the list of what troubles Americans.17
Presidential candidates, members of the Senate and House, interest-group leaders, activists, and grassroots citizens we interviewed in preparing this book all came to the same conclusion. But frustration in and of itself does not make a reform moment. There has to be some sign that the people are prepared not just to be angry but also to believe that their anger can and should be addressed. Our read of the survey research says that the faith is there. In the same CNN poll that found 86 percent acceptance of the notion that America’s system of government is broken, there was another dramatic number. Of the disappointed 86 percent, fully 81 percent expressed faith that it could be fixed. Only 5 percent said the American experiment was “beyond repair.”18
We are with the majority on this one. But ours is not an optimism of the will. Rather, it is grounded in the cold hard facts of what is happening. As in previous reform moments in American history, the current crisis has caused patterns of upheaval—from Tea Party protests on the right (often managed by corporate interests but still sufficiently substantial and sincere enough to merit attention) to the much larger prolabor and antiausterity protests that swept state capitals from Madison, Wisconsin, to Columbus, Ohio, to Lansing, Michigan, in 2011 and 2012, and that paralleled the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.19 The upheaval is broad based and volatile, and there is clear evidence to suggest that mounting frustration has inspired a determination to cure what ails the politics of America.
With regard to elections, the days of imagining that it is possible to tinker around the edges of America’s historically dysfunctional system for funding campaigns with private dollars are over. There is no small reform, no “bright idea,” no quick fix that will begin to control against what former U.S. senator Russ Feingold identified as “legalized bribery.”20 And that’s made even winners under the current system, led by President Obama, recognize that it must change. And to make that change, proposals once dismissed as too idealist, too bold, or too radical will have to be entertained. Obama has responded to the Supreme Court’s 2010 obliteration of limits on corporate interventions in elections with an aggressiveness that may on the surface seem uncharacteristic: After calling out the Court in a State of the Union address in 2010, he acknowledged in 2012, “I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”21
Obama’s evolution toward an embrace of the constitutional remedy that was once considered extreme mirrors a dawning recognition that the work of campaign-finance reformers in America is no longer just about the simple “good-government” project of old. Now it’s about building a movement that goes to the heart of the matter of corporate control of elections and governance. That’s a significant transformation. And a popular one. In 2010 after the Citizens United ruling came down, veteran reformer John Bonifaz cofounded the Free Speech for People movement for a twenty-eighth amendment to the Constitution to address the ruling. “At the time, there were plenty of skeptics who thought an amendment movement would not have any staying power, could not be built and that people around the country would not get engaged with pushing for what is an ambitious goal,” he admitted. “But I think what we’ve found over the past three years is those skeptics have been quieted.”22
Campaign-finance reform movements have been around for more than a century in varying forms. They have always had popular support, and America has come close at various points over the past half century to implementing broad public financing of campaigns and replacing the slurry of thirty-second attack ads with the fair, equal, and substantially more responsible “free-airtime” models employed in most developed democracies. But never before have campaign-finance reformers produced the level of specific and sustained popular engagement that is now on display.
According to Free Speech for People, “America is now one quarter of the way to amending the Constitution to overturn Citizens United.”23 That’s a generous interpretation—as befits movement building—but it points to the popularity of the effort. Three-quarters of the states must approve an amendment before it can be attached to the Constitution; that’s thirty-eight states. By the end of 2012, eleven states had moved in the legislature or at the polls to call for an amendment, and the District of Columbia joined the list early in 2013. On November 6, 2012, Colorado (an Obama state) and Montana (a Romney state) both voted by roughly 75–25 margins for proposals urging their congressional delegations to propose and support an amendment to allow Congress and the states to limit campaign contributions and spending.
On the same day, more than 150 communities across the country weighed voter-initiated questions on the issue. Every single referendum won, and won big. We can find no other issue in our nation’s history that has had such an outpouring of support, without a single defeat or even any credible popular opposition, in so many initiatives.
In San Francisco 80 percent of the voters backed a Common Cause–endorsed proposal to overturn Citizens United. But so, too, did 65 percent of the voters in conservative Pueblo, Colorado. Despite editorial opposition to the resolution by the local newspaper, voters told their congressional representatives not just to back an amendment that declares, “Money is not speech and, therefore, limiting political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech,” but also to recognize that “the inherent rights of mankind recognized under the United States Constitution belong to natural human beings only, and not to legally created entities, such as corporations.”24 “In each community where Americans have had the opportunity to call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw corporate personhood, they have seized it and voted yes overwhelmingly,” noted Move to Amend activist Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap. “Americans are fed up with large corporations wielding undue influence over our elections and our legal system. Citizens United is not the cause, it is a symptom and Americans want to see that case overturned not by simply going back to the politics of 2009 before the case, but rather by removing big money and special interests from the process entirely.”25
The grassroots movement for constitutional change that has developed since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is real, and it crosses partisan, ideological, and regional lines “This is happening because the people want it to happen,” said Marge Baker of People for the American Way, one of a number of reform groups that backed “Money Out–Voters In” actions nationwide, held on or around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to launch a 2013 round of local and state initiatives. The movement has not yet reached critical mass, but the growing number of states backing an amendment of some sort—many different proposals have been advanced by groups and by elected leaders such as Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) and Congresswoman Donna Edwards (Maryland)—is highly significant from both a practical and a political standpoint.
Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, a veteran of many social change movements and an organizer of the ambitious “Democracy Is for People” campaign, explained to us early in 2013 that if the number of states backing an amendment via legislative action or voter initiative doubles in 2013 and 2014—as Weissman argued is entirely possible—then prospects for meaningful reforms that do not require constitutional interventions increase.26 That’s the vital point Obama was getting at when he said, “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.” Demands for a constitutional response—not “just band-aids,” said Sopoci-Belknap, but “a true and lasting solution”—make space for officials to act at the local, state, and national levels to address immediate challenges. And a growing number of elected leaders and grassroots activists are recognizing that what is needed is a reform moment in which every option is taken, every avenue explored.27
This is an important piece of the puzzle. Everyone knows constitutional amendments face daunting barriers: in a time of deep partisan and ideological divisions, it’s hard to imagine getting the U.S. House and Senate to approve anything by a two-thirds’ supermajority, let alone getting three-quarters of the states to embrace the change. But if we have learned anything from conservative movements for a “balanced-budget amendment” or a “right-to-life amendment,” or from progressive campaigning on behalf of an “equal rights amendment,” it is that the organizing that goes into amending the Constitution gives impetus to presidents, regulators, and legislators to act. “If we are to build a movement big enough to win a constitutional amendment, we are going to need near-term democracy victories that make a difference in people’s lives to sustain and expand that movement,” said Nick Nyhart, an experienced reform activist who serves as president of Public Campaign.28
The role of a powerful executive, a president with a vision and a will to carry it forward, could be definitional. The question is whether the executive is willing to spend political capital. Public Citizen campaigned in 2011 and 2012 to get President Obama to sign an executive order requiring government contractors to reveal political spending. The administration reportedly drafted an order that would have gone a long way toward revealing otherwise unreported “dark money” contributions by corporations. But by the estimates of DC observers, the initiative was “all but abandoned” by Obama and his aides during a 2012 campaign season that saw the president and his supporters raise and spend $1.1 billion, as compared to $1.2 billion in spending by Republican Mitt Romney and his backers.29 Obama talks a good line. But, clearly, in his second term, he needs to feel more pressure to act, not just by issuing a long-delayed executive order but also by encouraging regulatory agencies such as the Federal Election Commission to use their authority to crack down on corporate campaign abuses.
There is also much that could be done in the near term to address the collapse of responsible media. Noting the 2012 Free Press study, Left in the Dark: Local Election Coverage in the Age of Big-Money Politics, which revealed how broadcast and cable outlets make a fortune from campaign commercials but rarely inform voters about who pays for them, former Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps urged that the agency aggressively enforce Section 317 of the Federal Communications Act. That section requires on-air identification of the sponsors of political ads in a manner that will “fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person or persons, or corporation, committee, association or other unincorporated group, or other entity.”30
Likewise, as we discuss in Chapter 5, the FCC should be requiring broadcast stations to establish the veracity of third-party political ads before they air them, as they are supposed to do by law, and hold stations accountable if they do not. It is a national scandal that the Obama FCC snoozed through the 2012 election cycle and allowed stations to air countless hours of blatantly false third-party political ads that their own reporters had exposed as fraudulent. We have long argued that the president should be appointing FCC commissioners who are prepared to move on these fronts, just as he should use his bully pulpit to advocate for the restoration of reason to the licensing process for broadcasters. Surely, if a media company agrees to broadcast in the public interest, that commitment must be met by providing full and fair coverage of election campaigns. A license should also assure citizens that their local stations will broadcast several candidate debates—for all candidates on the ballot—for all federal and statewide races in their viewing areas.
And, surely, it is time to renew advocacy for a related public-service initiative: the “free-airtime” requirements outlined in the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform legislation initially proposed in the mid-1990s—not as a perfect “fix” but as an indication of how, even in the interim, reforms can be crafted that allow Americans who are not billionaires or in the service of billionaires to compete in campaigns for federal offices.31 The FCC can and should play a central role in addressing the absurdity of campaigns where, in many instances, television stations drown viewers in a slurry of crude thirty-second ads that actually make those viewers less capable of casting an informed vote.
Along the same lines, the president and his FCC commissioners must join with responsible members of Congress to advocate aggressively for dramatic increases in the funding of public and community media and for new funding initiatives and tax policies that will sustain journalism on broadcast, print, and digital platforms. Journalism, renewed and enhanced and freed from a debilitating relationship with the money that pays for campaign ads, is vital to the struggle against the money-and-media election complex.
Likewise, there must be a renewed effort to have strict privacy regulations for the Internet, with citizens having effective control over data collected from them as they are being stalked online by commercial interests, politicians, and national security agencies. This will go a long way toward making the Internet a central forum for America’s democratic future, as opposed to the Orwellian hellhole that some of the wisest analysts of the digital experience fear could be its fate.32 In particular, federal interventions can derail some of the troublesome digital practices—in areas ranging from data collection to political texting—that began to emerge in the 2012 campaign.
At every stage and in every way, reformers must call the bluff of the Roberts Supreme Court and continue to legislate toward a better system—not on the naïve assumption that the High Court will defer to the will of Congress or the American people but with the understanding that the rejection of that will by the chief justice and his narrow majority will make the need for constitutional interventions all the more evident. In the U.S. House, a task force has been developed by Congressman John Larson, a Democrat from Connecticut, and other top Democrats to explore every legislative avenue for challenging Dollarocracy. Members of the task force have renewed the proposal for the sweeping reforms outlined in the federal Fair Elections Now Act. Unfortunately, though that measure has attracted some bipartisan support, few of the members of Congress we interviewed in 2013 expected that it would get far in a Republican-dominated House. Why try then? Because building support for this plan to develop public financing for campaigns shows what could be done if Congress were freed to regulate the Money Power that Teddy Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and the Progressives took on a century ago—and if the Supreme Court, either with a change of personnel or under pressure from a constitutional reform movement, decided to remove the barriers to legislative reforms.
Another prime congressional vehicle is the DISCLOSE Act, which reads like the old bipartisan proposals for basic transparency from donors but is now officially opposed by the Republican Party in its platform. The League of Women Voters and other good-government groups continue to engage in the frustrating work of trying to get Republicans to back even this minor reform, and their prospects ought not to be underestimated. If in the coming years rational Republicans want to reposition themselves after Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” debacle, this is a vehicle they could and should embrace. Ultimately, however, it is far more likely that reform breakthroughs on the disclosure front, which the Supreme Court might accept, will come from the states. The same goes for most other immediate reforms.
Public Campaign, Common Cause, and a network of local and regional groups continue to do tremendous work in the states, and they’ve secured some key allies in the aftermath of the 2012 election. New groups such as CREDO SuperPAC and Friends of Democracy are going into state election fights with an eye toward exposing and challenging Big Money influence on elections and the candidates who bow to that influence. And a new post-2012 project, the Democracy Initiative, has brought together unions such as the Communications Workers of America with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and civil rights groups such as the NAACP to focus financial resources and people-power energy on reform fights in targeted states such as North Carolina, where they are challenging the grip on elections and policy-making that right-wing millionaire Art Pope has purchased with lavish spending in recent years. The genius of the Democracy Initiative is that it will systematically make the linkages between Big Money politics and everything from the assault on labor rights to fracking to privatization of prisons.33 That’s a message that another new group, United Republic, has delivered with particular skill, arguing that it is possible to build “a bold grassroots campaign to get millions of Americans—from Occupy to the Tea Party—actively supporting comprehensive legislation that reshapes American politics.”34 These coalitions are invariably easier to forge at the state and local levels than in the special-interest-driven swamp of Washington.
States such as Vermont, where progressives control the executive and legislative branches, and Montana, which in November elected a governor who has been in the trenches of reform fights, Democrat Steve Bullock, remain, to our view, the most likely locations for serious challenges to a broken status quo. But as we note in Chapter 3, Montana’s Bullock, a former attorney general, has already been shot down by the Supreme Court in an effort to defend state-based regulation of corporate campaign money. And that brings the discussion back to the fact of a High Court majority that has moved at every opportunity to expand the influence of corporations and major donors on our politics. Of course, President Obama may have an opportunity to nominate new justices, and campaign-finance and media-reform issues add a measure of urgency to what under any circumstance would be essential confirmation fights. But waiting for the right mix on the Court is not a strategy; it’s a gamble. A gamble that could cost democracy dearly. Most Americans don’t want to take the risk. Three-quarters of them tell pollsters they favor reforms that take corporate money and big donor influence out of our politics.35 When there is this much support for fundamental reform, and when the reform impulse is blocked by so much obstruction in Washington, it is not just right but necessary to recognize, as John Bonifaz suggested, that “the people are ready to take their country back. What’s necessary now is to build a movement that is big enough and bold enough to renew their faith that money can be beaten.”36
So Americans are going “the amendment route.” We know they are right to do so. And we are encouraged that President Obama, key members of Congress, and millions of voters have indicated a similar enthusiasm. But we are not content with the notion that undoing the Citizens United ruling, or predecessor rulings such as Buckley v. Valeo, will be sufficient to claw America back onto a democratic course.
To our view, it is necessary to think much bigger, as has happened in previous reform moments. Yes, campaign-finance reforms are necessary. But so, too, are media reforms that recognize the wisdom of John F. Kennedy’s observation that “only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, ‘enlighten the people generally and tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.’”37 American electoral structures, processes, and practices, many of which date to times when conservative forces sought to constrain, rather than expand, the franchise, represent a democratic disaster—not in the making but already made. And if this is to be a true reform moment, one that marks a genuine embrace of America’s democratic promise, we can and must borrow from the best ideas of a world that—inspired by that promise—has often done a better job of implementing it.
While it is true that America has in recent decades missed opportunities to define best practices for sustaining and extending democracy—to the immense detriment not just of our electoral politics but also of our governance—those practices have been established and well defined in other lands. We don’t suggest that the United States should, or even could, mirror all the practices of other countries. Some models would be hard, perhaps impossible, to replicate in so large and diverse a country as the United States. Constitutional issues and the challenges created by a system where states define so much of our election law will always make the broad reforming of campaign practices and schedules complicated, as will the immense lobbies of the special interests that benefit so mightily from the current system—first and foremost the broadcasters that have staked their futures on the new “cost centers” of multibillion-dollar campaigns.38 The radical reforms that are necessary to renew American democracy will ultimately be defined by the American circumstance. Yet to our view, Americans are still, as Thomas Paine suggested almost 240 years ago, well benefited by “frequent interchange” with the ideas and ideals of our fellow citizens of the world.
We begin outlining a reform agenda with the premise that underpins the whole of this book: that democracy demands full public financing of elections, a well-funded public broadcasting system, and subsidies to preserve print journalism where it is viable and to promote the development of “new media” journalism sufficiently substantial to fill the void created by the collapse of reporting by so-called old media. Yet recognizing that fresh ideas regarding the scope, character, and content of reforms can and should be entertained, we have looked to evolving democracies around the world for examples of approaches that are valid, transferable, and responsive to the challenges America now faces. They are not hard to identify, as many countries—often newer and more fragile democracies, but some of them rivaling the United States in their well-established structures and histories—have maintained the great tradition of democratic experimentation that must be renewed in America.
Here are four places to begin.
Free airtime is an essential building block for a functional debate, no matter how a country’s media system is constructed and no matter what constitutional, legislative, or political constraints may exist. Whether party campaigns rely on public funding (as is common in countries ranked as healthy democracies), a mix of public and private funding, or primarily private funding, dozens of countries around the world have rules that require public and private broadcasters to make free time available to parties and candidates.39
This is not some radical new idea developed in response to the rise of negative political advertising designed to suppress, rather than encourage, voting. Nor is it merely a contemporary strategy to counter spending by well-financed political parties, individuals, or corporations. Its roots go back to the definitional years of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the 1920s.40
The provision of free airtime is an old, yet still necessary response to the development of broadcasting. And it is an alternative to “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal,” which two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson decried when television was on the rise as “the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.”41
Free airtime has been a part of the democracy calculus from the beginning not just of the television age but even from the dawn of the “voice age,” when politicians spoke to crowds using the “enunciators” that would eventually come to be known as “microphones.” Though American politicians continue to debate the very idea of providing candidates with free airtime—having rejected it in the early stages of the debate over the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act42—politicians in most countries are able to communicate their ideas and their ideals without having to engage in the sort of election season cash grubbing that recalls another Adlai Stevenson one-liner: “The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”43 It is, to our view, entirely reasonable and appropriate to suggest that when nations make free airtime available and offer it to all candidates with sufficient ballot status to actually win so as to open up and enliven the debate, they create a politics that inspires the 70, 80, or even 90 percent election turnout levels toward which America should aspire.
Democracies with which the United States would want to compare itself allow and encourage political parties and candidates to take advantage of free airtime in order to communicate their messages. But they do not stop there. One of the key reasons that pluralism flourishes in countries that are rated by The Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House as the healthiest democracies on the planet is that they provide massive subsidies for public broadcasting and independent media that take as a top responsibility the serious and detailed coverage of election campaigns. Countries that are ranked as more democratic than the United States subsidize media at rates as high as 50 to 1 (in the cases of some small countries, 75 to 1) over what is seen in the United States. And the results are striking.44
Around the world, but especially in Europe, nations have developed and maintained democracy-sustaining public broadcasting systems (of the sort Lyndon Johnson and Bill Moyers imagined in the 1960s) and programs of subsidies for print and digital media.45 These systems and subsidies recognize and embrace the charge from the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and other global observers that states aspiring toward democracy must “create an environment in which a pluralistic media sector can flourish.” And that an essential obligation of that media sector must be “to ensure that the electorate are informed about election matters, including the role of elections in a democracy, how to exercise one’s right to vote, the key electoral issues, and the policy positions of the various parties and candidates contesting the election.”46
That’s a global standard that has been accepted in the modern age by countries that are serious about democracy. But it is not exactly a new idea. Thomas Jefferson observed at the opening of his second presidential term, “Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.”47 Americans like to reference Jefferson on these issues, as President Obama did in a 2010 commencement address at Virginia’s Hampton University. Quoting Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be,” Obama told the graduates, “What Jefferson recognized, like the rest of that gifted founding generation, was that in the long run, their improbable experiment—called America—wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out and left democracy to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart.” So Americans “got it,” and Americans “get it.”48
But Americans don’t do it. The United States makes a miniscule commitment to public and community broadcasting when compared with other countries, and much of that commitment funds cultural and children’s programming rather than election coverage. And America has not begun to implement democracy-sustaining subsidies that might maintain the newsrooms of the old media age in a new media age. The simple truth is that political journalism is a public good, and the market is not supporting it in sufficient quality or quantity. As Chapter 8 demonstrates, there is no reason to believe the market will in the foreseeable future. Providing independent, competitive news media has to be a high priority going forward; it is an indispensable part of any reform program.
Election campaigns in Japan last twelve days. That’s right: twelve days. Parties may name their candidates and organize in preparation for an anticipated election—although doing so is always risky, as elections are not held according to strict schedules. Rather, elections are called by the sitting government. Until the call comes, candidates cannot advertise, solicit votes, or otherwise promote themselves. When the call comes, they are still limited to what Western media outlets invariably describe as “old-fashioned campaigning.”49 As the 2009 Japanese campaign kicked off, Time magazine’s correspondent wrote, “With 12 days to go until national elections, candidates rode in vans, armed with banners, leaflets and loudspeakers for soapbox speeches at train stations and street corners across the nation. But as their names were blared out on the first day of political open season, their campaigns on Twitter and Facebook were silent. One thing that Japanese politicians aren’t armed with is the Internet.” In fact, they’re also strictly limited in their use of broadcast media.50
That does not mean there are no political discussions on TV, radio, Web sites, Facebook pages, or Twitter. But those discussions are driven by independent observers charged with examining the stated positions of the candidates and citizens. And the candidates are given more opportunities—not fewer—to address those issues in televised, print, and digital debates and panel discussions. There’s no lack of spin, but it can be challenged and examined. It does not simply flow in a slurry of attack ads and what can only be referred to as propaganda.
Short campaigns are common in democracies around the world, including Britain (on average, twenty-two days), Ireland (twenty-three days), Australia (twenty-seven days), and Denmark (twenty-eight days).51 Credible arguments have been made that longer campaigns allow for more “voter learning,” especially with regard to economic issues.52 But “longer” is a matter of a few more weeks, not a permanent election cycle. For the most part, however, countries with shorter election seasons have higher voter turnout and much less costly campaigns. And we would argue that the “permanent” character of American campaigning leads increasingly to voter burnout, as voters are marinated in negative advertising for months on end.
Direct observation and statistical measures of political engagement suggest that short, well-defined campaigns put elections in perspective and generate an excitement level that can play a role in focusing debates and boosting turnout.53 That’s especially true in countries with strong public media, substantial public financing of campaigns, and controls on the cost of campaigns.54
The most successful democracies are characterized by a commitment to constant assessment, review, and reform of existing electoral and media systems. There is an acceptance that what worked in the past may not work in the present and almost certainly will not work in a future redefined by new political demands and new media technologies.
In Europe it is common for countries to formally invite “Election Assessment Missions” from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to assess how campaigns are conducted.55 These missions produce detailed reports that include recommendations for how to update and reform electoral procedures and media structures and funding in order to end abuses and to avoid pathologies defining electoral processes. Those recommendations do not always go “on the shelf.” European and African states frequently refine and adopt proposals for how to increase the transparency, fairness, and functionality of elections—and of the media that cover them.
It speaks volumes about the way in which Dollarocracy assaults democratic principles that the notion of political parties coming together in earnest agreement to create fair elections with high voter turnout is now considered to be the stuff of pipe dreams. Today Americans are inured to what seem like endless, shameless attempts to suppress voting and rig elections. That must stop, and a culture that tolerates this attitude must change.
How bogus is this situation? President Jimmy Carter has won international acclaim for the work of the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which has monitored ninety-three elections in thirty-seven nations since 1989, “all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions,” as Carter puts it. Yet Carter, as we have noted, acknowledged some years ago that the Carter Center would be unable to monitor U.S. elections because “some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing,” requirements so minimal that they have been met in nations routinely singled out by the United States as extremely dubious in their commitment to fair elections.56
One of the Carter Center’s core requirements for nations to establish that they are committed to fair elections and the rule of law is to have nonpartisan national election commissions that are constantly refining processes and approaches to voting, counting votes, and managing elections. Countries around the world have developed such commissions, and they have ably, often courageously, administered free and fair elections. Many countries have gone even further, recognizing the need to assure that citizens are provided with the fair mix of information and ideas that allows for the casting of informed votes. Countries such as Britain and Germany have formal media watchdog structures in place to examine how elections are covered—and to take complaints from citizens, candidates, and parties that believe they have been wronged. These watchdogs do not seek to censor or constrain debate. They seek to assure that there is broad and free-ranging debate and that no voices are silenced or shouted down.
Commissions that oversee elections do not merely tinker around the edges of existing electoral systems. Where they see problems for the democratic process, where they recognize openings to make elections freer and fairer, they intervene. Often this leads to fundamental change. It will come as no surprise that some of the steadiest patterns of reform and adjustment are seen in countries that were formerly controlled by oppressive military (Brazil) or civilian (South Africa) regimes. But well-established democracies also reform themselves, often with dramatic results.
In 1994, for instance, Japan completely restructured its system for electing members of its equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, developing a hybrid system that allows for the election of 300 members from individual districts and another 180 members via a proportional representation system. This hybrid thereby allows for the election of local representatives who are closely identified with their districts and for votes that reflect broader ideological and partisan goals. At the same time, direct contributions by corporations and unions to parliamentary candidates were banned, and an existing system of public funding of political parties was strengthened—with parties receiving a specific amount of money for each vote won in an election.57 Since the change, Japan, which had experienced virtual one-party rule by the centrist Liberal Democratic Party’s machine-style politics, has seen dramatically competitive elections, with development of new parties and frequent regional and now national shifts in power from traditional leaders and parties to reformers.58
In New Zealand in the 1990s, there was widespread frustration with the political system, which was based on individual members of Parliament elected from individual districts—along lines similar to how the U.S. Congress is elected. The frustration stemmed from the fact that governments were frequently formed by a party that won a parliamentary majority but not a majority of votes nationwide. And there was particular dismay over the un-derrepresentation of the Maori, New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesian minority. After 85 percent of New Zealanders backed a 1994 referendum calling for development of a new election system, a second referendum endorsed a hybrid system where voters cast two ballots: one for a national party list and one for a local representative in the home district. Since the change, New Zealand has seen a flourishing of multiparty democracy (seven parties won parliamentary seats in 2011), stable coalition governments, and increased representation of indigenous Polynesian minority groups, women, Asians, and Pacific Islanders.59
There will always be those who want to imagine that what the United States or Great Britain or ancient Greece did provides the only model of democracy. But this is a dangerous game. Democracy is not a possession of one nation; it is a goal that all nations should aspire to. America in its history has provided models, shaped strategies, and achieved democratic advances that the rest of the world has followed. America again finds itself in need of “bold, persistent experimentation.”60 Poor choices were made in the past, but they need not define the future. The dissatisfaction that Americans feel with regard to dysfunctional democracy is real, but it need not be constant. Now is a time for trying new methods and for recognizing that there are ideas, there are options—some discarded, unwisely, in recent history, some readily on display in the family of nations—that can remake America.
There is more than sufficient demand for reform. And there are more than sufficient reforms under consideration. But to our view and that of many of the hundreds of elected officials, academics, journalists, and activists we interviewed while preparing this book, there is an insufficiency of focus. There needs to be a unifying theme that will galvanize the movement and enhance its power. From this enhanced power—and only from such enhanced power—can foundational democratic reforms emerge. This is the last great challenge in shaping the current moment for reform into a necessary transformational politics.
To our view, the focus must be on the act of voting that underpins any sincere democratic experiment. Not on the vote as it has been perverted, dumbed down, and diminished into a merely political act, but on the vote as Walt Whitman understood it when he wrote, “Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful strokes.”61 Voting can be made into a bureaucratic act, into something akin to a spectator sport, or into something even less than that: a “privilege” that must be attained at the end of a long line or after many leaps through the hoops erected by partisans seeking to constrain the franchise to include only “the right people.” But that is not how voting should be understood or protected. Bill Moyers argued that “the crisis of the times as I see it” is that Americans too frequently “talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don’t talk about what democracy means—what it bestows on us—the revolutionary idea that it isn’t just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.”62
It is this uncompromised definition of voting that we begin with in proposing that the reform moment necessary to establish American democracy must have at its heart a deep definition of the vote. That definition has been well established in other countries, often with the assistance of Americans, frequently at the demand of Americans. The theory of voting as a “privilege” is one the United States tends to regard as dangerous when practiced by other countries. The lawyers who were flown to Baghdad by the U.S. commanders occupying Iraq in 2005 scripted a constitution that declared, “Iraqi citizens, men and women, shall have the right to participate in public affairs and to enjoy political rights including the right to vote, elect, and run for office.” All citizens of Afghanistan now enjoy the constitutionally defined “right to elect and be elected.” General Douglas MacArthur and the U.S. forces that occupied Japan in the years after World War II scripted a constitution that declared, “Universal adult suffrage is guaranteed.” Germany’s postwar “Basic Law” is even more precise: “Any person who has attained the age of eighteen shall be entitled to vote.”63 Around the world, the right to vote is specifically established in national constitutions. Globally, there are just eleven democracies that do not guarantee the right to vote in their constitutions.64
Remarkably, the United States is one of them.
“While there are amendments to the U.S. Constitution that prohibit discrimination based on race (15th), sex (19th) and age (26th), no affirmative right to vote exists,” explained FairVote, the advocacy group formerly known as the Center for Voting and Democracy. “Because there is no right to vote in the U.S. Constitution, individual states set their own electoral policies and procedures. This leads to confusing and sometimes contradictory policies regarding ballot design, polling hours, voting equipment, voter registration requirements, and ex-felon voting rights. As a result, our electoral system is divided into 50 states, more than 3,000 counties and approximately 13,000 voting districts, all separate and unequal.”65
Rob Richie and the voting-rights experts at FairVote argued, “Many reforms are needed to solve the electoral problems we continue to experience every election cycle. The first is providing a solid foundation upon which these reforms can be made. This solid foundation is an amendment that clearly protects an affirmative right to vote for every U.S. citizen.”66
In 2001, one year after the Bush v. Gore debacle concluded the 2000 presidential election with the Supreme Court pronouncement that “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States,” several civil rights and reform groups proposed a “right-to-vote” amendment to the Constitution. Hailed by constitutional scholar Jamin Raskin as a “comprehensive package of democracy reforms,” it was introduced in the U.S. House as a proposal for an amendment that read:
SECTION 1. All citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall have the right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, any State, or any other public or private person or entity, except that the United States or any State may establish regulations narrowly tailored to produce efficient and honest elections.
SECTION 2. Each State shall administer public elections in the State in accordance with election performance standards established by the Congress. The Congress shall reconsider such election performance standards at least once every four years to determine if higher standards should be established to reflect improvements in methods and practices regarding the administration of elections.
SECTION 3. Each State shall provide any eligible voter the opportunity to register and vote on the day of any public election.
SECTION 4. Each State and the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall establish and abide by rules for appointing its respective number of Electors. Such rules shall provide for the appointment of Electors on the day designated by the Congress for holding an election for President and Vice President and shall ensure that each Elector votes for the candidate for President and Vice President who received a majority of the popular vote in the State or District.
SECTION 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Despite the fact that there was no concerted campaign for the amendment after it was introduced in the House by Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat, the measure eventually earned the backing of more than fifty members, including former House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan. Even though the amendment should have been an easy “sell,” House leaders on both sides of the aisle tended to shy away from it. At the time of the amendment’s initial introduction, the chamber’s Republican majority did not want to entertain any discussion that might reopen the debate about the miscount of votes in Florida. And Democratic leaders, hypercautious in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, were not prepared to question the legitimacy not only of a president who had lost the popular vote but also of a broken voting system.67
So the proposal went nowhere. And a decade later, the United States was again embroiled in bitter debates about crudely antidemocratic “voter ID” laws, restrictions on same-day registration and early voting, gerrymandering of congressional districts (and potentially of electoral votes), dysfunctional counts and recounts, and all the other aspects of a voting system so ill defined that it invites manipulation.68 Recognizing this reality, two members of the House were preparing as we completed this book not just to introduce a “right-to-vote” amendment but also to join in building a movement for its enactment. Congressman Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who cochairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Congressman Mark Pocan, a freshman Democrat from Wisconsin with a long history of working on voting issues as a state legislator, are taking up the gauntlet. Their decision to introduce a right-to-vote amendment is necessary, and it is energizing. “What could be more American than the right to vote?” asked Pocan. “It’s the one thing we should all be able to agree on.”69
Pocan is not naïve. When he says a guaranteed right to vote is “one thing we should all be able to agree on,” he knows there are reckless partisans who do not agree. But he and Ellison are right to take the debate to a higher ground, just as they are right to recognize the debate must be had.
The headlines of the contemporary moment lead us back to a core understanding: the time has come to end the expansion and contraction of the right to vote in America and to establish it once and for all in the nation’s constitution. Voting rights experts are correct when they argue that doing so will provide the clarity that is needed to achieve the following:
• Guarantee the right of every citizen eighteen and older to vote.
• Empower Congress to set national minimum electoral standards for all states to follow.
• Provide protection against attempts to disenfranchise individual voters.
• Eliminate those rules and practices that give some voters more power than other voters.
• Ensure that every vote cast is counted correctly.
But this, to our view, is merely the point of departure. Most rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution are negative rights. They protect against the encroachment of the government on a citizen’s right to speak, to assemble, to petition for the redress of grievances, to own a gun, to be secure from official intrusions. The assurance of a “positive liberty” to engage in the choosing of those governments, and by extension the process of defining its direction, ought to be recognized as the most precious of all freedoms.
To establish an affirmative right to vote, we can imagine an even simpler amendment than has been proposed; one that reads: “Every American citizen 18 years of age or older has a right to vote, to the information necessary to cast an informed vote, and to the assurance that their vote will count equally with others toward the formation of local, state, and national governments.” From such an assurance could extend protections necessary to establish real democracy and a more perfect union: not just equal access to the polls but equal access to news and opinions about the candidates and parties and issues; not just the assurance of the fair counting of votes for which there is currently no guarantee but also to voting systems and electoral districts that give those votes meaning. The possibilities are, as the poet Langston Hughes might suggest, “explosive.”
Judges who have suggested that there ought to be some kind of constitutional protection against gerrymandering would finally have the tool to prevent a party in power from drawing congressional or district lines that prevent meaningful competition and effectively disenfranchise citizens.70 Citizens might finally find the standing to demand the inclusion of minority parties in debates and the FCC to require broadcasters to provide free airtime to candidates and parties and more thorough coverage of issues and campaigns.71 Proponents of instant runoff voting, proportional representation, and other approaches that countries around the world have used to ensure diversity and a deeper political discourse would find an avenue for challenging inherently unfair “first-past-the-post” voting systems that saddle states across the country with one-party rule.72
Amending the Constitution to include a right to vote will not, in and of itself, establish a more perfect union. It will not even cure all the ailments of our democratic experiment. If the courts do not bar gerrymandering once and for all, then an amendment doing so will be right and necessary. And there is no question of the need to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College, as was almost done during Richard Nixon’s first term and as must be done if America is to achieve democratic stability.73 “The United States is the only country that elects a politically powerful president via an electoral college,” explained Texas A&M political science professor George C. Edwards III, “and the only one in which a candidate can become president without having obtained the highest number of votes in the sole or final round of popular voting.”74 No reform moment that has as its end the achievement of a more democratic United States can neglect the need to do away with the Electoral College. That is an essential democracy amendment.
But it need not be the only one to accompany the guarantee of a right to vote. There is a vital case to be made for additional amendments that also flow logically and necessarily from the right to vote. These include amendments that would pave the way for the District of Columbia and other American territories to seek statehood if they so desire.
To make those voting rights meaningful, we believe, it is absolutely necessary to assure that the people’s representatives can establish rules for how campaigns are financed and to establish once and for all—as Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has proposed, with the support of Progressive Democrats of America—that “the words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state, and such corporate entities are subject to such regulation as the people, through their elected State and Federal representatives, deem reasonable and are otherwise consistent with the powers of Congress and the States under this Constitution.”75
McGovern understands, as we do, that such an amendment would not limit the First Amendment rights of Americans, just of corporations. But the congressman goes the extra step and explains within his amendment that “nothing contained herein shall be construed to limit the people’s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, free exercise of religion, freedom of association and all such other rights of the people, which rights are inalienable.”76
This is a critical construct for reformers to recognize as they propose and advance constitutional amendments. Nothing about restoring the right of elected officials—or voters via referendums—to govern the financing of elections infringes on the free speech rights of citizens, as historically or currently understood by any but the most partisan political players. And nothing about the extension of a positive liberty, the right to vote, diminishes the American experiment as it was understood by Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, it provides, finally, for the realization of Jefferson’s best and final hope for America.
In the summer of his eighty-third year, Jefferson was asked by Roger C. Weightman, the mayor of Washington, DC, to attend a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. Jefferson declined but sent to Weightman what would be his last testament to the radical endeavor in which he had engaged. Jefferson did not spend much time reflecting on what had been. Rather, he looked forward, across the democratic vistas that would soon be charted by a young poet, Walt Whitman, who would declare his intention to “speak the password primeval . . . to give the sign of democracy.”77
“May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self government,” wrote Jefferson in his response to the mayor of the nation’s capital city. “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”78
If it is true that human beings have not been born with saddles on their backs, if it is true that they can refuse to be ridden by a “booted and spurred” favored few, then surely in a civil society the vote is the tool by which they must assert their equal humanity. This is the essential understanding for which countless Americans marched and organized. For which far too many perished. Surely, it cannot be left to chance. Not any longer.
The favored few have reasserted themselves, via their courts and their fortunes and their political connections. They have forged a Dollarocracy that serves their interest. But that very Dollarocracy strangles the will of the people and the forward progress of a great nation. The time has come, finally, for citizens to burst the chains and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. The time has come, finally, in this great reform moment, to heed the signal of America’s founding, to speak Walt Whitman’s “password primeval,” to give the sign of democracy.