 First, my name is Rick Hubbard and I'd like to say welcome to a conversation about the state of our democracy. As we get going, there are a few things to cover. First thanks for coming, partly because this issue that we're going to talk about tonight is really important. Tonight we are going to sort of consider what is the state of our democracy. How are we doing? We're going to analyze the problem. We're going to see to what extent you think we've got a problem. Now there are plenty of people out there that think we've got one, but we're here to get your views. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the parts of the problem, the things that may be detracting from proper representation in our country today that have been identified by scholars and people across the country. And then we are going to talk about what parts of those need to be put together in a solution if we actually want to fix it and not just make another incremental change that never gets us to the point where it ever really gets fixed. Along the way we'll talk about the risks to our democracy. Could we lose it? And finally, once we've got an idea of the pieces, and each time we'll go through, you will collectively decide these issues. And then at the end we will talk about the best way strategically if we're actually going to get this done. Is it reasonable to expect it from Congress? Or can we get it all done from the Supreme Court? Or if we can't, do we have to go the route our founders provided in case? Because they were convinced that there might be a set of circumstances where Congress would refuse to act. Do we have to go that route in order to get a complete fix? And what is the best strategy? Now I have to say that in all the years I've been watching over this issue and it's out 40 to 50 because I'm older than most of you, except for a couple of people in the audience. I have been on the National Board of Common Cause for half a dozen years and some other organizations that I participate with today. No organization has ever, when I've been around, asked their board of directors to go through and do this analysis. Think about that. So you are charting a very, you know, not tested very often ground and it's your responses that are interesting. And frankly, I'm quite curious to see how you respond. But because it's really important, we all bring our backgrounds and preferences and our biases to this conversation. I have a bias. My bias is that I strongly believe that government ought to work to provide proper representation for all of its citizens in terms of the way we structure and finance our political system. And since I'm now retired, I'm putting effort in various ways, whatever I think is most effective to peck away at that issue in concert with others around the country and other organizations and people that are pecking, mostly they're pecking away at pieces of the problem, not the whole problem. So in order to get through this whole presentation, and this is my fault and I apologize for it, I asked the library the best time to start this back about a month and a half ago before I had finished the presentation. I now know that we really need about two hours to get through this and have time for questions and answers and we've got an hour and a half. So I'm going to hustle along. The conversation that we're going to have is going to be mostly me trying to act as a fairly neutral presenter and I'll try and give pros and cons on the pieces. It'll be quick. These are more not totally informed responses you'll be giving. They're kind of gut reactions, but they're still telling. And so you will then register your response through these clickers. The eye clickers each have a power button, a little orange one and when you press it once the green light comes on. It will go out after a certain period of minutes. So if you start to press it and it doesn't seem to be registering, check the power button. You have to have a green light before it will register. It'll only register your response once. Once you click it by either the A, B or C button, they have two more. We're not going to use them tonight. In response to a question that I will pose that will present here on the screen, then I have to open it up for the voting by pressing a button. You then have time to vote. The sooner we vote, the sooner I can close it and then present your collective answer to the question on what piece we're talking about. So if we have time at the end, we'll open it up for questions but since they're going to kick us out of here at 8 o'clock, we may be hustling right out at the end. So let us go ahead and get going. So we founded our country largely over the issue of improper representation. Think Boston Tea Party taxation without representation. We fought a war against Great Britain. Thankfully we won and eventually some years later we gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to put our constitution together and after debating it all eventually we adopted that and we adopted it to do the job of governing us better. Our Declaration of Independence is shot through with examples of the grievances that we had about representation with Great Britain and when our founders were putting together the constitution, they were very adamant, clear. It's in the Federalist Papers, Madison, that we want this government and the people we are selecting to represent us to be dependent on the people and the people alone. Now if we're honest about it, that's the people that were getting elected to the House of Representatives. The good old boys were kind of hanging on to the way we elected the Senate and it took us a while to get to the point where we popularly elected the Senators. But they clearly put our government together to provide better representation and given that it's fair to say as we look at Congress, how have we been doing? So I'd like you to think about the last two or three decades and think about how Congress has been acting or not acting in response to the most pressing issues of our time that come up all the time. How are they doing in handling issues related to health care nationally? How are they doing in handling issues related to the environment and climate change? How are they doing in relation to making fiscally responsible decisions that allow us not to go too far into debt for future generations and shove the burden off on them? How are they doing in providing protections so that we have some confidence that the food we eat is safe or that we know the pros and cons? Same thing for things we come in contact chemical wise and go on and on. Just think of the range of issues and ask yourself and here's the question. In recent decades has Congress been properly representing the common broad interest of most Americans? And here are the possible responses. If you think the answer to that is yes, you would press A. If you think the answer to that is no, you press B. And if you're not sure or you have no opinion or you damn well don't want to share it with the rest of the audience, press C. And so I've opened up the voting. So go ahead and pick your, yes, check and make sure that you've got a green light. And 15, 16, 17, you can see it's registering the number of people that are voting. Is everybody, it only registers once. So is everybody in? Can I close it? All right, I'll close the voting. And now Bill, is it possible to drop the lighting here a little bit further somehow? So let's present the answers. What have you voted? 82% of you said no. Congress is not doing a good job. That's a little too much. A little more than that. I need a little more light up here. Okay. Okay, let's go on to the next. So how do we finance our federal system today? The first thing to remember, oops, Sally, what happened? The light just came way on. The first thing to remember is that 98% of all Americans do not give a dime directly or indirectly to any political party or political candidate in order to finance our federal political process. It's an astounding figure. 98% of the 2% of us who give something, I'm one of those. Probably several people in the audience are. Two-thirds of the money that comes in to finance our entire federal political process over a two-year cycle comes from two-tenths of 1% of Americans. And there is plenty of evidence out there that because money is so essential to the way our, I'll call it, dysfunctional political process works at the moment, that Congress, in order to get the money in outcomes of law, regulation, and policy is leaning to the green in the way they are deciding those issues in ways that prioritize not the broad citizen interest. But that's what, the broad citizen interests are what we founded our country over. So even though many people allege there's evidence for that, you get to decide these questions. In addition to that, if we say, okay, for the last go-around in 2015-16 for the entire federal election cycle, this is winners and losers for the Senate, the House of Representatives, President, the party conventions, the whole nine yards. The total amount of money in the past two years amounted to just about $6.5 billion. Now that may sound like a lot of money if you annualize it, because it's a two-year cycle, you divide it in half and you get about $3.3 billion. So hang on to that figure, because we're going to come back and use it as a reference point. If you take that $3.3 billion and divide it by the number of registered voters in America, it's only under less than $45 in a registered voter. So it depends on how you look at the problem. How many people have heard of Martin Gillins of Princeton and his book Affluence and Influence? Okay. He is a researcher, a political scientist who back a few years ago, four or five, published a book based on research he did. He used a lot of graduate students. And what he did was go back and through polling data, going back in largely, he did about a run of 19 years, most of it from 2001 through, excuse me, from 1991 through 2002. But then he did four years a little earlier than that and he did two years a little later than the mid-2000s that he added to the data. And he looked at all the issues that Congress made decisions about. And then the polling data, he could say, what are the public's preferences on this range of issues and how do actions of Congress line up with the public's preferences? And he was able to use income data to divide the public's preferences by decile, tense based on the level of income people had. And a pattern emerged. And his conclusion was that over this almost 20-year period, it divided into 90% of us and 10% of us. Now, he's working in desiles because that's the only data he could get. In fact, the top wealthiest 10% of us really is probably driven by the top less than 1% of us, but he had to work with 10% data by desile. And the conclusion was that whenever the preferences of the 90% of us differed from the preferences of the top 10% of us over this entire almost 20-year period, actions by Congress had zero statistically insignificant correlation with the preferences of the 90% of us. It's a very damning conclusion. The only time the preferences of the 90% were ever taken into account is when they agreed with the preferences of the 10%. So let's move on a little bit. Now, the next thing is how has Congress responded to these kind of bits of information data research? Now, this tall, very top-heavy, maybe it'll topple over a pile of books here is just my own personal collection of books that speak specifically to this problem. And it's only a fraction of what's really out there. You want a Nobel laureate, it's in there. You want a distinguished Harvard professor or a Princeton researcher, it's in there. You want ex-members of the Senate or House when they're not in any way involved in the political process anymore and commenting on it, it's in there. And Congress has effectively simply dismissed it all. It doesn't move them. It hasn't pushed change yet. And so the one thing Congress did do is back. This issue has been in the news and people and organizations have been pushing in the 70s, in the 80s, in the 90s, in the 2000s, and we're still pushing. The one thing Congress did do of note is that back in 2002, it passed the McCain Fine Gold Bill. That was the bill that chased the soft money out of the political process. Soft money is money from corporations that can be given directly to a political party for party building, but not directly to an individual candidate. And it was deemed to have too much influence. And so Congress made a decision to ban it. And they also did a couple of other things that were overturned by the Supreme Court, so I'll skip that. But soft money stayed. And out of the 2,000 total amount over two years to run our federal election system, then it was a total two years of 3.1, so divide it in half, about one and a half billion. Soft money banned out of the 2-year total, 3.1, it banned $488 million. Due to the math, it banished about 15%. It's really 14% to 15% of the money from the political process. So ask yourself, was the system broken before this? And when they banned that, did that fix it? And that leads us to the question, which is did McCain find gold law that banned that money? Did it stop the improper representation that was going on by Congress? And here are the potential answers, and I'll open it up for voting. So if you think it did stop it and everything was okay, press A. If you think there were problems before and after, press B and press C if you are unsure or no opinion. And let's see when we get up to everybody here. Are we there? Okay, I will go ahead and close it and present the results. Oh, look at that. So 94% of us think it did not solve the problem. Now that's telling, because that's the only thing Congress has done. Now let's move on to the next thing that's happened in this and talk about the Supreme Court. So let me get rid of this and move on. Whoops, excuse me, I pressed the wrong button. So the Supreme Court during this time had a long line of cases that started way back in the 70s where basically they attributed and conflated money and dollar, money and speech together. And there's a whole line of cases. I won't go into the details. And I said this briefly before, but in doing this, there's no way we can spend the time to go into all the detail to properly answer these questions. So we're doing it quick and dirty. And hopefully it gets us thinking when we walk out of here and we are prompted to do a little more thinking about the best way and get more information. So the question is this line of cases culminated seven years ago in 2010 with Citizens United. That was the case that basically in which the Supreme Court said corporations can now, we're overturning McCain Fine Gold and corporations can now give soft money directly to parties and they can give and this corporations includes nonprofits, includes labor unions, includes all the big organizations in America and they can also give money indirectly to 501c4 organizations that allow money to be collected without explaining where the donors are coming from and who's giving and that money can then be used. It's not supposed to be tied to a candidate but there have been a lot of cases where people have alleged pretty close collaboration despite that, but it can be used to tip election outcomes in the way it advertises and so forth. And so it's pretty clear and generally agreed that Citizens United opened the floodgates and most people are aware of that. But the question is before Citizens United if we roll things back to 2010, was everything fine? Did we fix the problem if we do that? And that's where we're going with this question. And so I'm going to open it up so you can vote. And the question is if you think it fixed the problem and everything was fine after that, press A. If you think it did not, press B. And if you're not sure, press C. Everybody in? Anybody still to go? I think that's about our number. Okay, I will close the voting and present your answers. 85% think that overturning Citizens United is not going to solve the problem. Now this is significant because if you think about it, there are hundreds of organizations today out in common cause, the NAACP, public citizen. It goes on and on. Some are conservative, some are liberal. Everyone, the main thing they're doing is trying to overturn Citizens United. So you have to ask yourself, is it going to be effective? And it raises that question based on the way you just voted. So let's close this out and go a little bit further. Now let's dig into three outcomes of just the process on legislation. Now I picked big ones. I warned you in advance. But there are hundreds out there that are listed in major part but not totally in those books. They cover all kinds of things. I just picked three. So I will tell you in advance that if you take the total amount of money to run the whole political system for two years, each of these examples exceeds it by huge amounts. The first one, if you overturn this first decision that Congress made, you could finance the entire political process of America for 46 years into the future. That's a one-timer. The second one, if you overturned the vote that Congress gave, you could finance the entire political process of America federally for 13 years into the future. But this isn't every year when you'd get that. You over and over and over. And the third one is so much bigger than the first two that it's almost incalculable. But it isn't clear on the third one whether we would completely have avoided the result or whether we would have got a lesser result. And so you can't really come up with a fair answer when I get to it. But now I'll go through what the three of these are. The first one is switching from analog to digital broadcast. Remember that? Now, CBS used to come in on an analog freak. Well, it was presented to us through analog technology. We realized we could switch to digital technology in the same amount of the public airways and Congress through the Federal Communications Commission regulates them on our behalf because if we didn't regulate them, there'd be chaos out there with everybody competing against everybody using the same frequency. So it has to be. But they do it ostensibly for us in our name. And it brings in huge amounts of money because in order to use it, people bid for it to use for cell phone frequencies and so forth. And it brings in billions and billions of dollars. And every billion that comes in is a billion you and I don't pay into our federal treasury and taxes. And keeping in mind that it's about 3.3 billion a year to finance our entire political system. Congress back in 1996, excuse me, chose to give this away for free instead of charging for it. Now the broadcasters had a big interest in this and they showered a lot of money in campaign contributions on Congress. And congressmen don't like to upset the broadcasting industry because we need them when we're going to get elected. That played into it probably. And so the bottom line is that the Congress gave away for free with the Federal Election Commission and several independent bodies themselves. We're on record as saying would bring in 70 billion dollars if we put it up to bid. That's 70 billion we wouldn't have to make up in our budget. And it's a one-timer because and so if you used it digitally, what's interesting is that on the same amount of frequency, six megahertz digitally instead of one CBS you can have up to six. So it's like you could have CBS number two and three and four and five and six depending on how you use the spectrum. That was tremendously valuable. If you're a broadcaster you don't have to pay to get on the airways to do that. All you got to do is you do have expenses. You got to gear up for equipment and you have to gear up for staff and you have to gear up for programming. But not to pay the big bucks to get the use of the digital frequency. And so Congress gave that away for free. And so if you simply went back and had Congress say hey folks, you're going to have to bid on this. If it isn't worth anything it wouldn't have brought in any money. But everybody knew it was phenomenally valuable. But Congress chose to override that. Yet CC staff was recommending they do that. So the question it poses is did Congress prioritize broad citizen interests in providing us with access to digital technology instead of analog? Because there is an advantage. Did they prioritize our interests over the broadcaster interests or vice versa? So if you think they prioritized our interests press A. And if you think it is broadcaster interest B and press C if you're unsure or no opinion. I think we're there. Everybody in? Okay. I will close it off. Present your results. 63% say that it was favoring broadcaster interests. 20%, 28% are unsure. And 9% said no. Okay. So let's move on to the next example, which is protecting Americans from bad drugs. Now back in the 80s, well pharmaceutical companies can sell at high prices in America because of patent protection as long as a drug is under patent. And back in the 80s and the Reagan years, Congress extended the length of time the patents applied by three and a half to five years depending on some variables. But that wasn't just for pharmaceutical companies. That's for everybody out there that's using patents. So in 1987, we had a different piece of legislation and it was called the Prescription Drug Marketing Act. Now here's what it was designed to do and then here's what many allege it was really doing. It was designed to protect Americans from bad drugs coming across our borders. That's a fair issue. You know, sometimes people are cutting drugs and not delivering them in the quantities we want. But a huge percentage of the pharmaceuticals are made in America, manufactured. Many of them used to be manufactured in Puerto Rico for some tax reasons. And they're sold in the States and they were sold abroad at anything over manufactured cost that the pharmaceutical companies could negotiate with various countries. And so around the world today and then you can buy the same drugs, same package, exactly same drugs we have in America, 30 to 40% less on average. Now, what really was going on is that up until 1987, it used to be legal when pharmaceutical companies made them here and sold them, let's say, for example, into Canada for a wholesale pharmaceutical company in Canada to buy them up in bulk, mark them up 10 or 15% and sell them back into the United States at lower prices. Ooh, the pharmaceutical companies didn't like that. That lowered prices and they couldn't make as much money. So what this legislation actually did, this is Congress that decided that we should have this outcome. It actually closed off the ability to have free trade in pharmaceuticals across borders. Now, most countries that want to deal with that issue of bad drugs set up an inspection and testing program and it's nowhere near as expensive as the amount at stake if the total market for pharmaceuticals goes up or down by 10% or 40% or whatever. It is much less expensive to set that up but Congress didn't do that. They just banned it. So today it is illegal, although not enforced for you and me, to order a prescription from Canada and have it shipped here provided that it's less than 90 days and only for my personal use. Because the pharmaceutical companies weren't trying to get at that. That would get people too upset. What they were trying to do was close off the big threat which was wholesalers buying it in bulk, marking it up. Now, the business today is about $440 billion in America total sales. If you reverse this one law and even though drugs are priced 30%, 40% less for the same drug around the world on average, prices in the American market only drop 10% on $440 billion. That is $44 million in citizen pockets compared to the entire cost of financing our federal election system today at $3.3 billion a year and it was less. It was about $1.5 billion back when this was passed. And you could today finance that 13 years into the future but every year it would come in again and again and again. And so when we talk about pharmaceutical prices today, basically being as high as the pharmaceutical company thinks it can get away with. I've got an MBA. I understand the way they price. It's really Congress that has chosen to have that result. Now, you don't hear it expressed that way very often. And it's Congress that refuses to change it because there are bills in all the time to change this and it never gets anywhere in the bottom line. So let's go ahead and present this question. Did Congress prioritize citizen interest over the pharmaceutical interest, industry interest and let's pose the results and then open it up for voting. Everybody in? Okay. I will close it and present the results. 91% think Congress was looking after the pharmaceutical industry. Now, think about this in relation to what you hear about nowadays. These are your reactions today. So let me close it out and let's go on to the next one. This is regulation of Wall Street. And let's go back into the mid-80s. And everybody knows that under our present political system, you've got to have money if you're running for Congress. Big money in order to get the TV ads and the cost of the ads is huge nowadays. Everybody needs to raise money. And every congressman and sitting senator also, they don't talk about it much, has to tie to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party and that's a big-time number every month. You know, it's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars averaged out over the course of a year. And the Democratic Party got caught a few years ago at an introductory meeting for freshmen telling them that out of every day, they were in a representative. They had to spend 30 to 40% of it, dialing for dollars or raising money. That's why Congress only spends on average three days a week working for us on actual issues. They're out of town. And they're spending lots of time raising money under the present system right now. And so if you go back to the mid-80s, the biggest contributor of money to congressmen for campaign contributions comes by industrial sector from banking, insurance and finance. That's the name of the sector. It is far bigger in volume than any other sector out there. So, it was going in the 80s a little bit too much to Republicans and not to Democrats. And Democrats wanted in. So how did, what happened? Remember the rebranding of the Democratic Party? The new Democrats? We're going to be more business-friendly in the early, mid-90s. Bill Clinton championed this. He got elected using it. And it worked. The companies give money to the people that are looking after their interests. So the Democrats said, we're willing to look after your interests a little more than we used to be. And so they got some money. And when Clinton was elected and you say, what happened with regard to the financial industry? Basically, Democrats and Republicans teamed up and they chose to go light on the finance industry. They did not regulate heavily at all. They backed off in various ways. In 1998 or 2009, they undid the so-called Glass-Steagall Act. That was the barrier that said that commercial banks that used our deposits and could invest them in mortgages and loans to companies and loans to people like they'd been doing. But they were not allowed, like Goldman Sachs, to trade and risky equity plays in the stock market. It removed that barrier. And banks jumped in wholeheartedly. And in order to make more money, it made sense to, gee, the more money that we've got to play with, the more we get invested, the more we can make. So we don't need that big of capital equity cushion. Let's reduce that. And they reduced it. And that let them invest more. And they could make more money that allowed managers to meet their bonus targets. They got bigger bonuses out of that. The problem is the government wasn't keeping very close track on what was actually going. And as new financial products appeared, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, derivatives, things like that, the government made a conscious choice. Rubin and Greenspan all pressured Bill Clinton who agreed that we're not going to, we're not going to regulate and push these people. Let them do what business knows how to do. So we didn't know. And they actually were really nasty to a woman named Brooksley Bourne who was in charge of the Commodities Future Commission at the time and believed there was huge risk here. And we should know. And if you don't get the information, you can't even quantify how big the risk is and so you can intelligently react. And she got chased out of there. And she lost her argument. And so this all led to less regulation which in turn led to 2008 in the meltdown. And when that meltdown occurred, it happened big time. And the amount of money that was lost, whoops, excuse me, in that meltdown was huge. 7.4 trillion disappeared in equity in stocks alone from your pension, you know, if you got money in stocks, it disappeared. It took years to build back up. While it was building back up, you didn't have the use of that money to earn interest and returns. So you were penalized. In addition to that, home value has lost 3.4 trillion dollars. Another huge chunk. We lost 5.5 million jobs. And the amount of income that disappeared from our GDP over what it would have been is estimated if you divide it back by the number of households in America to have cost an average of 5,800 bucks of income lost a year all over America, on the average. Now, I understand some lost more, others less. But the results were huge. And at all, people argue about what were the exact causes. Was it just that we pressed people to do too many home loans and let people in too high? That was a piece. That sort of started it, but the big risk, and most all the commentators agree, is that what really was going on is that we didn't regulate properly. Why didn't we regulate properly? Because of the way we financed the political process. And look at what cost us. That amount of money, it's tens of trillions of dollars. The entire productive capacity of America that year in 2008 was about 14.1 trillion dollars. And we're talking almost the whole amount that disappeared because of decisions Congress made. And so that raises the question, when Congress was doing this, were they prioritizing broad citizen interests over financial industry interests or were they looking after our interests? And so on to the choices, I'll open up the voting, go ahead. Okay, I think we're there. Oh, we got an extra vote this time, 34. Okay, now we'll present the results. Oh dear, we have had 100%. Now I want you to think about this in relation to the amount of money it takes to finance our entire political system. Suppose it got financed differently in a way that gave Congress incentive to put more citizen interest first. And we'll talk about that later. Okay, let's move on. So now we're gonna get into what must effective reform include. And there are about 10 factors that have been identified that have adversely in some people's opinions affected representation in Congress providing good representation. But you don't have to agree with those people. You get to decide for yourselves. So let's dig in. And I'm gonna try and go through these pretty fast because it's 10 after seven and we gotta be out of here by eight. The first one though is should voting be a right. And effectively right now the Constitution provides no explicit right to vote. The states decide that. Now we have 50 states. There are more than 3000 counties. And then within those counties are 13,000 separate voting districts. And because states make their own decisions about all kinds of rules as to who gets to vote and when and how and under what circumstances we get off kinds of different policies applying to the same act of citizen voting depending on where we happen to be. And it makes a big difference. Remember the hanging chads in Florida in the Gore election? That gets into ballot design which is all over the lot. Whether or not you have a paper trail when you use electronic voting all over the lot. If you are poor and minority what are the barriers that are put up as to whether you can vote? We even used to have a poll tax. That's been done away with. But there are all kinds of contradictory policies. If you're a student and you're away from home do you get to vote in the town you're in? Not always. Arizona got beaten back. They were trying actively to prevent all students from voting in Arizona when they were away at school. But some states do it. They don't let you vote. It varies all over the lot. In addition to that soldiers are treated differently. It's very difficult to get the vote back. The procedures all differ a little bit state by state. When they do get back they are often counted but in some counties if the vote's not close and in what people locally vote there's stories out that we don't even count the soldier votes unless we think it would make a difference. Gee, if I voted I'd sort of like them to count it whether it made a difference or not. And so we have all kinds of this. If you go to felony convictions that's the main reason we deny the right to vote. It can be anything from an axe murderer but it can be in much bigger numbers. Your kids, your neighbor's kids someone you know that had bought too much marijuana and got over the felony limit which isn't that high or maybe they bought it from the wrong person and they got caught for selling or buying. And so they've gone too often. They've gone to jail or to prison. They paid their dues. They're out. This can in many states follow them and they can't vote for a lifetime. Six million people are affected by that. So the question this poses is if we're trying to improve representation for Americans what do we want to do about this? And, oops, all of a sudden this isn't working. I'm not sure why. Let's see if it'll go back. I'm restarting it and we'll see. Oh dear. Okay. Nothing. I see why. This came off the back of it. Maybe that will make a difference. Excuse me. Let's try again. Oh dear. We're in trouble. No. No. This is working. Now I'd have to start it all over and reference it. But bring me up a couple of batteries, Sally, from another blue thing and I will substitute them and see if that makes a difference. I apologize. From these? Yes. Just one. I bet we just started strapping. Probably. We may have to if this takes too long. Let's see if we can get batteries out of this. I haven't even looked to see how that happened. So dear. Well, you just opened this one. No. It's done differently. I didn't say this. I meant to at the beginning. This is the first time I've given the presentation. So this is get first run, guinea pig run for me and for you. We will try over time to improve it and get better at it. So I apologize. Okay, let's see if this does anything. Okay, maybe what I've got to do, we're going to take a break briefly here, is go back and I've got to end the show and restart it and I apologize for this. Let's see settings. Okay, we've got the right clicker here. Tie it in, save it. That relates the instructor to the show. Now that should theoretically work. Yes. Finally. Okay. So let's back. Yeah. Okay, so here's the question. Should our Constitution provide all citizens of voting age with an explicit right to vote and I need to go back and use the slideshow presenter view here. And since I've restarted this, I have to do something else all over again that I did at the beginning of this before you walked in. This has to slide way over to the right. Oops. Okay, and then when we open this up, okay, fine. So now I can finally post the question. So if you think that our Constitution should provide citizens of voting age with an explicit right to vote to strengthen proper representation. And the flip side of what we talked about is that, you know, some states say, hey, we want to be tougher. We don't want to vote. Them people vote. So which way do we come down on this? What serves our interest in strengthening our democracy? So I will open it up so you can vote. Now you have to start from there. Okay, I'll close it off, present the results. Ninety-one percent say yes. That, so effectively we're saying that should be a piece of, that could should be a piece of the solution. And so let's eliminate this and move on. Should we strengthen federal and state election commissions? Now on the federal level, we have the federal election commission. On the state level, it's all overheld. Some states put that responsibility in the Secretary of State. Other states set up election commissions of one sort or another. Other states put the responsibility somewhere else. And so the question is, should we have a more consistent uniform system? Now, with respect to the federal election commission, it's Congress that has set up the federal election commission to operate the way it does. It is responsible for being the policemen for whether or not all our federal candidates are raising money the proper way, spending it within the proper limits, if they spend it wrong. And they do something that arguably tilts the outcome. It's up to the federal election commission to police that and to stop them because otherwise if we, if it tips the outcome of an election, it can affect the way we wanted it to turn out as citizens. And they are widely regarded as a joke in the academic circles. They have put three Republicans and three Democrats on that. And most of the time it does not do any of the policing. And it's really well known and often badly maligned by scholars. They've simply said it's better that we don't go after your side if you don't go after our side. Now, who wins in that and who loses? But that's the situation we have today. And that's the situation that has been maintained because Congress has chosen to maintain it that way. They could fix this. Now, California in regard to citizen redistricting, not setting up an election commission, has come up with a different approach. They've said enough of this. We are going to put some independent citizens in the middle of this. And we are going to require, we're going to have Republicans and Democrats on this committee, but they are not going to control it. And we're going to have a chunk of citizens in the middle. And we are going to make sure as much as we can, and this is difficult, that we have independent citizens that are looking after citizen interests. And in the legislation we are going to mandate that all of them are required to put citizen interests first and they are not to set up anything in a way that gives more advantage to one party or another. And so they have an application process. You apply and it takes a while. They have a group that then sifts through. They pick an independent body in their state in California. They pick the auditor because the auditor is supposed to be fairly neutral. They go through and interview the applicants and they winnow out the ones they feel aren't qualified. And then you get a big pool of people like university political science professors and researchers and people like that that are qualified. Way in excess of the number of commissioners of citizens they need. They then put it into a pool and by random selection they pick a small percentage of. The idea is so that you don't bias the result. And we could do something like that federally. Now it's unlikely that we're going to ask Congress to do it for us, but we could mandate it if we were just putting together a proposal that fixed it. So that's one way that some states have begun. There are a few other states that are beginning to move in this way. But there's a real problem with the Federal Election Commission. And another thing that goes on that relates back to Congress is if you're a congressman and you're running and for a representative you're Peter Welch or you're Bernie or you're Pat and you're required points in the election cycle to submit reports that explain to citizens how you're raising your money and how you were spending it. And it's up to the FEC to enable and promote that process. Now Peter Welch fills out his reports and they get filed electronically and bam instantly they're available to you and me. But Pat Leahy and Bernie fill out their reports and they get electronically sent to the U.S. Senate which then prints them out in paper and sends them over to the FEC. Why do they do that? Because once they get to the FEC somebody has got to take this paper and they got a laboriously keep bunch and put in all this data before and finally after a delay it is available to the public. Often that lags beyond the election and it's done deliberately. Mitch McConnell has a big hand in this on the Rules Committee and he's been involved in the Rules Committee for well over a decade and it's well known and it doesn't get fixed despite all of this kind of talk all the people in those books that talk about it it doesn't get fixed. So it just goes on. So if you wanted to have more uniformity you would have to probably go constitutionally to mandate it and then it would be up to maybe it to be implemented by the U.S. Senate but you'd have a standard to hold them to in whether they did it and then it would be up to the Federal Election Commission or the Citizens Election Commission to implement it and enforce it and that could be carried down so that it followed through on oh I was supposed to at the beginning of this ask you about that. Sorry. That follows down to the states and within the states the states on the state level police their own people within the states. They can do everything to implement what goes on the state provided it would stay within federal uniform bounds. So it depends on whether we value the uniformity or not and it depends on how much preference we want to give to citizen interests and so that raises the question should we mandate more nonpartisan and citizen focused election commissions. Would it strengthen democracy or not and I'll open up the voting. So if you think we should press A if you think we shouldn't press B and if you are unsure press C and I think that's everybody I'll close it off and present the results. 79% say we should 3% say no and 15% need more time or unsure. Okay. That's fairly telling. That's usually what most people would expect would be one of the more controversial things because it's a radical change from what we've been doing. So let's go to the next one and the next improvement is related to election financing. Now we could have started with this one obviously but we've already talked about the Supreme Court linking money with speech at the expense of proper representation. How else could we finance the process if we don't want to finance it the way we're doing it now? Well one approach that's been advanced since we need to raise $3.3 billion a year is to take that money right out of the public treasury from our taxes that we paid and give it back to each registered voter in the form of like a voucher or a prepaid credit card. It could only be used to allocate funds to candidates in the election based on the positions and appeal of their position so that 100% of the people get to vote for which candidates properly are best serving their interests as opposed to right now where 2% or really less than that get to. And I can hear some of you in the audience saying right now I don't want my good money to go to that bad candidate. Why would you want to do that? Anybody doing that? You don't have to fess up. But the question is given the examples we've seen in the broadcasting and pharmaceuticals if this gave our elected representatives a different incentive as to who they had to pay attention in order to get the money to run their campaigns would they make decisions in a way that better represents all our interests? That's the power in this idea. So it's a fair question. We don't have that yet. It does exist in certain cities around the country now. It's being played with a little bit but we certainly don't have it nationally. But it leads to the question of would financing elections this way improve representation over the present system? So what is your initial reaction to that? And I will open up the voting. 31, we need 33. I think we got it. Okay. Okay, we're a little more divided but not much. 73 percent think it's a good idea and 27 percent are unsure, undecided need more time and we are going awful fast on this stuff. So that's fair. But that's telling. Given what's actually happening or more likely not happening out there today in the real world. So let's move from there and move on to the next and get into gerrymandering. Now our founders believe that we citizens should have a big hand in selecting our own representatives whether it's in the primaries or in general. Congressman in Madison's words felt that representatives at least in the House of Representatives should be dependent on the people alone as I said earlier. So voters therefore should exert the important judgment on who we want to represent us. With gerrymandering today we're a political party that has a majority in a legislature. They set the lines in all kinds of ways and not to preserve the integrity of South Burlington or the city of Burlington but to basically pick their own voters so that they can have a majority Republican or a majority Democrat if the situation's reversed. How does that serve broad citizen interests? Our interests. And again, if you wanted to fix it the way to fix it is the way I started to describe for California. If you were looking for an alternate they set up a citizen's election commission and they did this because citizen in California can by petition put something on the ballot. We're not allowed to do that in Burma but they can and so they did. They put it on the ballot and they moved to put citizens in the middle of how they set up the redistricting and they won. And so now the districts are set up in a much different basis than they were before. And basically it was because voters, citizens not the politicians that initiated this it was forced by citizens. So the question is would that be an improvement? And I will go forward and push the here's the question should we mandate something that move more in that would that help? And there are the choices if you believe it would help press yes if you believe it wouldn't press no and see for unsure or no opinion. And I will open up the voting and if you voted once before I opened it up you may have to re-vote. We're up to 28 we need 33 I think. 29 anyone else? 30 you getting there? Okay I will close it off. And now we'll present the answers and 97% I think that would be an improvement. Now we don't have that in Vermont. That's not the way we do it in Vermont. Legislature makes those decisions. One of the characteristics is that we have the way we have six U.S. or six Vermont senators in Chittinburg County Jim Letty being one of them in the old days. That wouldn't pass muster in terms of one person one vote standards around the country. And yet we have it. I've been told that when you look at the mechanics behind the scenes in Vermont that if you adjusted at Chittinburg County would pick up a seventh person if you had each district picking up something. And that would come from up in the Northeast Kingdom and so the Republicans don't want to give it up and so we don't change the system. Joanna did you have something? I'm just a little confused about this because the district thing is determining how many House of Representatives, how many people we would vote for to be in House of Representatives. What is the purpose of it? We've got with redistricting and just based on how many people are in the state is how many representatives to get. Like I don't understand enough about this because I did vote for yes. May we take this up at the end? Because if we start this we'll never get through the presentation. If we have time at the end can we come back to that? Because otherwise we won't get through and I have to make a decision. But it's a fair question so thanks for raising it. So let's move on and now we get into who should select candidates for the general election? Well in civics class those of us who had a civics class in the old days I think that's isn't that supposed to be our job? But have you ever heard of this guy? Boss Tweed Tammany Hall in New York City mid-1800s. Oh boy was he corrupt. Democrat too. He ran the party machine and he wanted to have a political he wanted candidates that were elected to work with him because he was pulling a lot of money off the top for various corrupt graph kind of things. And so he had a famous saying I don't care who does the election so long as I get to do the nominate. Now think about that. He would as long as he knew because he had control in the back rooms of who got to get on the ballot if he could have people on the ballot each one of which would work with him. He didn't care who won he could work with anybody who got elected as long as he knew they'd cooperate with him. Now fast forward to the way the political process runs now. The Democratic Party was in the news a lot this year. Were they trying to tip an outcome? Did they believe that Hillary was much better known than Bernie or any of the other candidates? And if they reduced the number of debates and they gave less exposure in the debates and had a few fewer viewers by pairing them next to football games and things that would bleed off the viewers maybe Hillary would emerge at the end of it and people wouldn't have heard as much about Bernie as we have and maybe Hillary would emerge and she'd have an advantage. And Bernie broke through that pretty much but Lawrence Lessig didn't. They completely kept him from getting into the debates even though he had more more money support and numbers support than half the Republican candidates than either Jim Webb or John Chaffee. And then the DNC changed the rules on him without getting into the details to make sure that even though the people who'd heard him said, hey, this guy's not so bad. He was not given the opportunity to the rest of us across the country to hear about him and make up our own minds independently. They skewed the answer. They then went to court because Bernie sued him and they made the argument in court through their lawyers that the DNC is a private group and we don't have to do we don't have to provide a system that's equal for everybody. We can do what we want and that argument won and the court dismissed Bernie's suit and he didn't push it beyond that. That's the way they argued. The Republican Party did something similar back in 2012. They kept Buddy Romer out of the debates. Buddy, you know, you're a governor. He was talking on this issue and they didn't want him. Lessig was too, actually. And so, Buddy, you don't have enough percentage of the vote that knows about you in the polls. So Buddy did what he could do. He went to New Hampshire, went to every little, you know, Bergen. Lo and behold his poll numbers picked up. Gee, two, three, seven percent. Went back. Come on. Let me into the debates. No, nobody. You weren't you didn't have poll numbers to get into the first debate. We can't let you into any of the other debates. Whose job is it to pick our candidates? Yours, mine. Somebody else's. So the question is, if you wanted to get around that, and this is a biggie and I should have explained it, excuse me. I hit that by mistake. California has tried to get around this because in the primaries right now, tiny fractions of all the electorate vote in the Republican primary, the Democratic primary, 10 to 15 percent across the country, average of all the registered voters get to vote. If you're a candidate, you got to get through the primary and get elected. Who do you appeal to? The views and preferences of 100 percent of the voters or the preferences of the 10 to 15 percent are most likely to vote in the primary that you got to get through. And so small percentages of voters are picking the candidates that come out the end of that that everybody else in the general election gets to choose among. And the candidates that are voting on the Republican or the Democratic side tend to be a little more excited, interested, involved ideologically, maybe a little stronger and a little more in opposition. And it's part of what drives our political process further and further apart and makes it less easy for people to collaborate and cooperate in Congress. At least that's what a lot of researchers have concluded. So California decided to hell with this. And so they put together something that they call a nonpartisan blanket primary. And that means we don't have a Republican or a Democratic primary. We just have a primary and everybody that wants to run if they have enough support to get on the ballot and get above the threshold because you have to have that cut. They're all on the ballot, one ballot. And 100 percent of the voters get to vote. No party affiliation whatsoever. And they pick in California the top two highest vote getters. Well, if you have too many people, can we come back to that at the end because of the time? We've only got 21 minutes to get out of here. And they pick it by the top vote getter. But if you have a lot of candidates, that can reduce the amount of percentage that any candidate at the top is getting. There's a way around that if you have ranked voting where everybody ranks the candidates and you go through and without explaining the details of the process, you get above a majority for the people that you end up selecting. And so it comes down to, you know, does that provide you with better representation? If you have 100 percent of the people picking the people that then in the general election we're going to vote and choose between. And so I will move forward and open up the voting so that we can ask the question, would it improve representation if we mandated nonpartisan blanket primaries so all registered voters can participate? Up to 36, 7. Oh, somebody's playing with the clickers. No, I don't think you can. Okay, let's close it and present the results. Oh, 81 percent say that's a good idea. 16 percent want more information and 3 percent say, no, I don't think so. Okay, let's move on. So the next is, do we strengthen our democracy if we have all candidates that win with a majority of support as opposed to a plurality? Right now, first past the post, whoever gets the highest in a plurality in Vermont and in our national elections, they win. But would it be stronger if we had a process that took a little longer but required us to end up with half of us supporting who emerges? There are two ways to get there. One, you have a runoff election and secondly, you do it with this same ranked choice voting. But either one ends up with having a majority of people behind whoever it is that then is elected, whether it's in the primary or in the general election, you can even use it. And so the question is, and by the way, if you did this and you went with a majority, we pretty much negated the need for the electoral college but might have a little detail about how that played out. But it would be a step towards doing away with the electoral college. So let's pose the question. Should we mandate it? Would it improve representation? And here are the possibilities. If you think yes, press A, no, press B, unsure, no opinion, press C, and I'll open it up for the voting. Are we going to get to 37 or 8? 31, okay, I'll close it off and present the answers. A little closer on this one, two-thirds of you think it's a good idea, one-third aren't so sure, three percent say no. Okay, let's move on. And next, should we use our public airways ways better during the election process? Now, we don't have to have elections that go on for two years. In our system, it is so hard because of the way we structure the process for a candidate to get known that they have to start way in advance, especially if they're not, they don't have good name recognition. It gives a huge advantage to somebody who has name recognition. And so, other countries don't do it that way. They use their public airways. They have a chunk of time that is available free and they use it to have debates and to have conversations equally with all the candidates. It gets rid of an awful lot of negative advertising. You want to throw mud at your opponent. You throw it when the opponent is on the stage next to you and they're going to get to respond after you throw the mud. And what happens is, again, it tends to bring things in away from the extremes, more towards the center, more towards, you know, it makes it a little bit more able to collaborate and work together if you use that kind of approach. It would also shorten the election process big time if we chose to do it that way. However, if we did that, you know, there's a whole crew, a whole line of thought that says that money equals speech and if I've got enough money, I should be able to spend it any way I want and it's a First Amendment right and if I have more money than you do, I get to have a bigger megaphone and I can amplify, use that to amplify my speech, repeat it over and over in the national media and effectively drown out your speech if you're not as well funded. And that's a First Amendment right. The ACLU supports that and there was a big fight in the ACLU back about 20 years ago and every former executive director and board member said that that was wrong and they went back 20 years. Every one of them except one in the government and they wrote a long letter and they disagreed with the group that changed the ACLU approach on that. I support the ACLU but that's one of the things we have a mix in an organization and that's one of the things that happened. So the question is if you did this, broadcasters would scream bloody murder. You're taking away our right to make money using that free airway that you gave us. The response to that is hey, it's a public airway. You have certain obligations that can go along with that. If it was mandated, if citizens put together the approach we used, you have to live with it. If we took 5% of the total time during a shortened election period, you would have to affect and it's going to be prime time so it would have a higher value than other late night times but maybe it's 10-15% difference in income to the company. They would have to raise their rates and the advertisers that were advertising would bear that and you have to decide whether that would be a public benefit on balance to make that happen or not and that basically raises the question should we mandate the use for moderated debates and discussion among all qualifying candidates so we all got an equal shot at hearing from each candidate. We're not going to like them all and then we could make our own decision on which one we like better with based on roughly equal information from each in a shortened period and so let's there are the possibilities and I will open up the voting. I see Jim looking at his watch. We've got 15 minutes. Okay, are we there? I think so. I'll close it and present the results. 88% I think that's not a bad idea. 12% aren't sure. All right. I'm going to slide through these so we can get to the strategic part pretty fast. The next one is should election cycles be shorter? Well, we've talked about what you'd need to do in order to make it shorter because you can't easily make it shorter without it being unfair if you kept our present system. But if we coupled it with other improvements should we mandate shorter election cycles? And let's open up the voting. Okay. Close it off. Present the results. 79% think yes. 15% not sure. 3% no. Okay. Should we improve disclosure? Right now we talked about the Senate and the way they play with disclosure. Trump's tax returns or lack of tax returns have been in. Should we mandate through our citizen election commissions more uniform required standards so that we learn more about the candidates? Would it be a good idea and would it strengthen our representation on balance? The other side of that argument is that, hey, I've got a First Amendment right to my own privacy and I'm damned if I'm going to share it with you elect me without knowing. And so which one is in citizen's interest in terms of better representation? And so here's the question. Should we mandate prompt and open disclosure? And there are the choices. A for yes. B for no. C for unsure and the voting is open. Okay. I'm going to close it off and present the results. 93%. Yes. 7%. Not sure. Zero. No. Okay. And on to the next. Now, should we make changes to improve voter participation? There are a variety of things you could do. If citizens have more confidence in the process, more will participate. If you had, if you changed the way we financed it, you'd give people more incentive to participate because if you got to make a decision on how to allocate 50 bucks in a voucher, you got to learn enough about candidates to make that decision. You got 50 hot bucks sitting there. So that would probably motivate some people to spend more time thinking about it. If you had a process that allowed us to learn more evenly about candidates, that would help. Should we have broader, more equal standards? It means more federalizing and less states' rights if you did that. Would that, would that basically be a positive development? And so, there's the question, should we mandate that sort of thing in order to achieve those goals? And here are the answers, potential answers. Oh, I forgot to open the voting. I apologize. Okay. Close it. Oops. Last one's in. Present the results. 83%. Think that's a good idea. All right. Now, could we lose our democracy? Other countries have lost their democracy. Germany lost its democracy in the early 30s when the Nazis came in and they didn't get it back till after the end of the war in 45. And we've all heard stories about how that played out. Russia got its democracy for the first time in decade, I mean in centuries, back in the mid-1990s. And it was a fledgling democracy. They didn't have a strong court system and independent judiciary. And today, it's widely acknowledged. Russia doesn't have a democracy. They got a nautocracy now. There is no debate among political parties. Your sidekick, you're not given an opportunity if you disagree to raise your opinion. And they've slid backwards. And it happened in the last 96 to now 11 years. So the question is, what about us? And here are some of the factors that have helped other countries slide and lose their democracy. By the way, as Benjamin Franklin exited the convention in 1787, a group of people stopped him on the street and said, hey, what kind of a government have you chosen for us? And his answer was a republic if you can keep it. So here are the factors. They're negative indicators. First, citizens are denied proper representation. Well, you've already answered that one the very reason we found in our country. Second, one party rule is established. So just think out loud how we're doing on that front. Third, political leaders deny objective truth in favor of glorious myth. Basically, they stop using fact-based for their arguments. Fourth, slowly but surely people are marginalized. Newspapers or courts, certain laws, certain organizations, certain groups, certain individuals are denigrated first and then they're isolated and they're diminished. And when all that happens and you could come up with more criteria than this. When all that happens and you get to the end, it all turns on how citizens respond to that. If majorities of citizens choose to comply, I don't want to say that that's wrong in the way they're handling that class of people because they might turn against me. If enough people sit on the sidelines and are silent, that's what leads to losing the democracy. If too many people sit on the sidelines, it goes. So the question it leads to, are we on track to diminish or lose our democracy? And there are the possible responses and I'll open up the voting. Okay, I think we're there. I'll close it, present the results. 73% say yes, 21% say not sure, 3% say no. Okay, on to the next. Now, how do we, this is the strategic part. We've got seven minutes for we're supposed to be out of here. So there are three ways we could fix this. One is Congress could fix it and initiate and propose either through statute, but they could have done that for the last 40 or 50 years and they haven't or through amendments that they vote out. But if Congress does that and it's normally Congress that does vote them out, they voted out every amendment that we've used so far. But it takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress. That's 435 in the House and 100 in the Senate, two-thirds of those. Those aren't all Democrats and they're not all Republicans. And either side can, either side can block the other right now. So we don't get anything at the present. The question is, and we haven't. You've seen what's happened. We've talked about what's happened or not happened over the last 40 or 50 years. So there are bills that are produced. There's a bill right now in the House and a companion in the Senate that would propose a fix. It's H.J. Rez and this House and S.J. Rez 8 in the Senate basically. It would make some, it would give Congress the right to make some improvement. It doesn't mandate, they haven't decided to do it. It says instead of the Supreme Court deciding this will give Congress a chance. But even that, you say, how much support does it have? Will it, you know, things are introduced all the time. Do they ever see the light of day? The House has out of 435 and has 0 Republicans and 117 Dems. In the Senate, it has 0 Republicans and 38 Dems and 2 independents out of 100. How likely is it that either of those is ever going to make progress? So it leads us to the question, are we going to get a fix that incorporates the things you have identified tonight realistically out of Congress? Are Congress likely to do that? And here are the possible results and go ahead and vote how you think about that issue. It could happen by statute any time over the last 40, 50 years or now or it could happen by constitutional amendment at the same time. Oh, sorry. There we go. No, not yet. There we go. Oh dear, it's done it again. Here we go. Oh no. How does that happen? Boy. Show of hands, show of hands. Okay. Let's do it quick by show of hands and I'll have to use an eye clicker to advance these but we're running out of time. Just a minute. Okay. How many people that think it's likely that Congress will fix this for us in a real comprehensive way? Oh dear. It's hard when you have to show hands. How many think no? How many are unsure? Okay. On to the next. Supreme Court. We talked about what the Supreme Court has done or not done and the question is given what the Supreme Court has done, the line of cases, the people that make up the Supreme Court today, the likelihood of who's going to be appointed to the Supreme Court in the future. How likely is it and given what isn't in the Constitution because the Court only only can decide based on what they're interpreting within the Constitution. How likely is it that under the present Constitution the Supreme Court is going to broadly solve this for us? I guess we got to do a show of hands I apologize. This is how many people think the Supreme Court can fix it? How many people think they probably aren't going to fix it? How many people are undecided? Okay. And so let's go on. Well, if we don't have much coming from either of those to think about that. Most organizations today are either knocking on Congress's door to fix itself. Hundreds of nonprofits or they're knocking on the Supreme Court to fix it. And if they're not we're not going to in your opinion get progress. Then we have to go to what's left which is Article 5 in the that's how we amend our Constitution. And believe it or not our founders had a big debate about this way back in the beginning 1787. And basically in draft it said what we know Congress initiates and a guy raised his hand I'd like to think it was oh Shucks from the Virginia George Mason from Virginia and he said I can't support this because I believe that if Congress ever gets to the point in the future where they are acting in his words oppressive to the broad interest of the people today we would say congressmen are putting their own reelection interests the interest of their wealthy and influential backers campaign backers money backers and the influence or the interest of their political party ahead of the broad interest of the voters that Congress the founders concluded that one the argument one the day that Congress would never properly reform itself so they built in a way citizens could use citizens have never used it it's controversial but it's the one way citizens could propose amendments broad enough to fix this and build a movement for support and it requires you to go through our state legislatures it takes two-thirds of the legislatures that's 33 you've got to get over to propose a resolution calling for a convention to me it makes sense that you wouldn't do that until you had a proposal that people were behind that would actually fix it and go forward from there and at the moment there is a group that is using that approach it's a conservative group Koch brothers have funded affiliate groups and they're pushing hard on their vision of less regulation and a diminished governmental role in our lives and the first thing up is a balanced budget amendment and that would make it harder to respond to things like the financial crisis where you had to spend money ahead of what you were bringing in and they are got they are well on their way to getting to the 33 threshold how many are aware that they have already racked up 28 states five more to go and they racked up a lot of them in the last few years it's quite likely they're going to get there so what's the response to most organizations if they get there the people that will be selected as delegates are people who think that's a good idea that are passionate about that approach there will not be they'll be the only voice in the room there will not be a debate on an alternative approach that would actually more broadly fix this now many of the organizations led by a common cause we're going to force them to kick us out of here are opposing this the best thing to do is play defense in this regard you know they're too far ahead they've already anticipated rules and they got legal briefs and they're anticipating all this and they're saying the best thing to do is play defense and not to move forward the counter to that is come on if we're not going to solve this problem with congress or the supreme court the only solution we've got is to go this other route and you know let's play offense let's fight for what is important to us as a country imagine if we didn't respond when rusher put up the first button and they were ahead of us imagine if we didn't respond as a country when the confederate states is seated and we just said oh they're too far let's play defense let's let let's not stand up that's the choice we face there's no reason we've got bright people plenty there's plenty of law there's no reason except the will to do it that citizens couldn't do that and so the final question is if we did that and we did it via building a movement and then presenting it through citizens to state legislatures given the math because it still takes two thirds can you do it if you only if you don't collaborate across all ideologies conservatives and liberal and we all have a common interest in making our government work for us if we leave the other issues like abortion reform things that we're never going to agree on off the table and you just focus on the things we're talking about tonight we all have a common interest in that can we do it I can't say for sure but I can say for sure if we don't try we've you've pretty well rendered judgment on what we're going to face it's more of what we've been talking about more of the problems and so the final question is basically I guess we'll do it way show of hands and I apologize if you think that's a good idea raise your hand whoops I apologize can Article 5 amendments by citizens and state legislatures be adopted without collaboration there are two questions here that's the first one so everybody who thinks that you can do it without collaborating across lines raise your hand for a everybody who thinks that you can't make the math work raise your hand for b and everybody who's unsure or needs more thought and opinion raise your hand for c okay he just said they are that they've already got 28 well that's that's a one-sided approach okay so the next the next one is is it likely that we citizens and our legislators could propose more comprehensive reform that we had a shot of moving forward via the Article 5 process then we are going to get out of the Supreme Court and out of Congress and again the choices are here if you think the answer is yes raise your hand if you think no whoops I apologize raise your hand if you think no and if you are unsure or don't have an opinion raise your hand yet needs more thought okay so what can you do to help there are many things number one as we talked about most organizations today are lobbying Congress to reform itself for the 40-50 years we haven't been making much progress the ends double ACP isn't making much progress on voting rights common cause isn't make making much progress on a whole lot of reform governments public citizen on a whole host of issues public citizen is pushing if they're all lobbying Congress and they're not getting results there's a question about whether the board at some point needs to reassess what its role is and whether it's being responsible if it's following a strategy that isn't bearing results so if you think that it makes sense for them to be rethinking this with your letters with your money to the organizations you have an ability to influence that another thing you can do is to walk out and repeat this discussion with friends you know talk about it think about it vigorous discussion and debate is good for the soul as well as for our nation so you can have some effect that way if you'd like to be kept in the loop I have an email list out there and if you sign up and give me your permission periodically and I don't do a lot of social media so I promise I won't beat down the inbox but if I hear of something that looks promising I will try and pass it on for people to consider and once in a while I write something and I pass it on so that's another thing you can do and mostly I know okay so mostly it's time to say thank you for coming and this is really important and thank you for giving it your thought and it rests with us it rests with citizens what happens in the future so thanks very much and good night