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Lawrence Lessig Wants To Run For President So He Can Resign
An anonymous reader writes: Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has announced his intention to explore a bid for the U.S. presidency. By Labor Day, he will decide whether he has the support necessary to enter the Democratic primary. His goals are rather unusual — he says, "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."
His top picks for a running mate include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Lessig calls it a "Presidency as referendum," a hack for the U.S. Constitution to give more power back to the citizens. "In no plausible sense do we have a representative democracy in America today." In an interview with the Washington Post, Lessig added, "Until we find a way to fix the rigged system, none of the other things that people talk about doing are going to be possible."
His top picks for a running mate include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Lessig calls it a "Presidency as referendum," a hack for the U.S. Constitution to give more power back to the citizens. "In no plausible sense do we have a representative democracy in America today." In an interview with the Washington Post, Lessig added, "Until we find a way to fix the rigged system, none of the other things that people talk about doing are going to be possible."
So, he's announcing a priori that he'll be a lame duck. Chances of Congress cooperating with him: 0.01%
>> shift election day to a national holiday
I'd love to. How about April 15 when the feeling of just having paid our taxes is fresh?
You are talking about communism, not democratic socialism like in parts of Europe. In fact, you can't have free market capitalism without restrictions on money in politics, and still have any kind of democracy.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Europeans have social democracies, not democratic socialism. From Wikipedia:
Yes, the difference matters a great deal. I know of no European country that is governed as a democratic socialist country. Many countries nominally have "democratic socialist parties", but they largely do not actually pursue democratic socialism anymore.
What is it that you miss so much from the Bush years? the trillion dollar war searching for nonexistent WMDs? the insanely mismanaged response to Katrina? the disastrous economy with bank bailouts and huge unemployment? the political outing of undercover CIA agents? the debunked evidence of yellow-cake uranium presented as fact to the UN? Abu Ghraib prisoner torture? How about his complete failure to find Osama Bin Laden? Or do you just genuinely miss having the rest of the world hate us?
No thanks. I'll take the current economy with its strong dollar & 5% unemployment, 15+ million people newly with healthcare, no more wars, a nuclear agreement with Iran, regularization of relations with Cuba, legalized same sex marriage, strengthened bank regulations (without hurting the economy), a dead Osama Bin Laden, DADT repeal, etc. BTW: it's also nice to have a president who can speak in complete sentences.
Good luck with Jeb!
That usually doesn't work, a common analogy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
The founding fathers were very adamant that there must be certain inalienable rights, and a balance of power between the have's and the have not's.
And thus, a republic was born.
Yeah, sure: he only wants radical leftists as 'running mates'.
they cheerfully and successfully painted the Tea Party as right wing, racist, radicals
A fairly large certain percentage of left wingers and right wingers agree that the govt is broken. The centrist response is to keep the status quo. The left wing response is to blame money in politics as having undue influence, hurting democracy and turning it into an oligarchy, and the fix is to limit money, and impose higher taxes on the super wealthy to try to create a more balanced society. The right wing response is to blame government for being bad at governing, and the solution is to dismantle the government, in particular using the starve the beast methodology, to cripple the power the government has by limiting money, and reducing taxes.
The tea party, so named after an anti-tax movement, has as its core ideology, the idea of lowering taxes and preventing government from functioning. That is a radical idea- that govt works best when it is completely broken and can't act at all. This naturally would create a power vacuum where corporations and oligarchs would gain power. I don't understand how the solution to a broken government is to break it more? It's an irrational platform, designed at its very core to shift power into the hands of unelected power brokers. Needless to say, that goes against Lessig's goals, and is why he chooses a left wing running mate.