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from the he's-in-but-does-he-have-a-chance dept.
TechDirt reports
Larry Lessig Dumps His Promise To Resign The Presidency In An Attempt To Get People To Take His Campaign Seriously
We've written a few times about Larry Lessig's somewhat wacky campaign for President, which was premised on the idea that it was a "referendum" campaign, where his entire focus would be to push Congress into putting in place serious campaign finance reform and then resigning from the Presidency. As we noted, the whole thing was a bit of a gimmick. And apparently that gimmick hasn't been working too well.
Earlier this month, Lessig noted that he was being shut out from the Democratic debates, despite being a Democrat running for President and polling roughly on par with a few of the other nobodies in the campaign. The problem is that the Democratic National Committee apparently chose to ignore the campaign and because it refused to officially "welcome" him to the campaign, pollsters aren't including him and thus he didn't have enough polling data to be invited to the debate.
[...] Late on Friday (not exactly the best time to announce anything but bad news...) Lessig announced that he's dropping the promise to resign, because while it may have gotten some attention as an initial gimmick, it was also dragging him down (including potentially keeping him out of the debates).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @08:44PM
The Democracy (not "republic") of ancient Athens had massive citizen involvement. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dissidentvoice.org]
("Jury size" will be a real eye-opener for you.)
Your attempt to construct a metaphor falls flat here.
.
[Lessig] can't do anything about [the injection of money into politics], except promise to appoint justices with different views
First, you missed the appointment of appellate judges who can rule on stuff.
If SCOTUS decides not to take a case, that lower ruling stands.
...and, in thinking that tweaking the membership of the judicial system after someone quits|dies is the -only- power a US president has, you are showing your ignorance once again.
Thomas Jefferson said that there should be a constitutional convention once a generation and the founding documents should be rewritten if found to be lacking regarding the current state of
the republic.
(That dude was actually pretty radical.) [google.com]
A small but meaningful tweak that a president could get going, as leader of his party and leader of the nation, would be an amendment to put a term limit of let's say 12 years on federal judges instead of the originally-specified "during times of good behavior" (i.e. lifetime appointments).
Lessig's campaign is all about fundamental change to the governmental system via significant constitutional amendment(s).
He's about putting the influence of the Chief Executive behind the position that Money is not speech; corporations are not people.
http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan [wolf-pac.com]
https://movetoamend.org/ [movetoamend.org]
-- gewg_