Then to disseminate the most important ideas in america in the most nonpartisan constitutional form and we have several events that i would like to plug including on december 2 we will host a raking news town hall on what the constitution says about impeachment and we will bring together a range of legislators and scholars to discuss the history and constitutional dimensions of the impeachment process. December 5 we have the federal Judicial Center on the Fourth Amendment and privacy, historical objectives and december 26 will be a moving program, its called the girl in the picture, remembering vietnam and it will include the heroic human rights activist kim who as a child was immortalized in the napalm girl photo, remember her running down the street. She will be with mark roden, atlantic journalist from vietnam and the prophet and composer, animal looking day was written an oratorio paying tribute to him and i think it should be an extraordinary evening. Now were going to start either a special program. Were going to begin by discussing the extremely important new book by lawrence, Lawrence Lessig they dont represent us, reclaiming our democracy. Lawrence lessig is one of americas most constitutional theorists and has a new book out on how to interpret the constitution and at the same time he has published this culmination and refinement of his thoughts about constitutional reform that bring them together in a galvanizing important way. This is the first stop on his book to her and im so honored that he will be here with us at the constitution center. Join me in welcoming Lawrence Lessig. And after larry and i talk a bit about his great new book, i will bring in two very distinguished interlocutors to join us on the question of whether we need a Constitutional Convention to achieve the reforms that he and they urged and each of them is an american leader for a different reform. Howie rich is the chairman of the Organization Us term limits which works to establish and defend term limits at all levels of government and he has some very powerful ideas about term limits and then daniel epps has just written a very powerful article about how to change the composition of the Supreme Court that pete booted judge cited in the last president ial debate. He is an associate professor of law at Washington University in st. Louis and his most recent article how to save the Supreme Court cowritten with ganesh souter, and published in the yale law journal as i say has been getting widespread attention. Join me in welcoming howie rich and daniel epps. Okay, larry, im so honored youre here with us to talk about the book and when of the many striking notions you begin with was with an apology. You say youve been talking a lot about the importance of campaignfinance reform but have come to realize that just one part of a larger problem of an unrepresented america. Tell us what you mean about how america and the american constitution is unrepresented i think the important confession is that i dont feel ive been disciplined enough to talk about this in a way that could actually bring all americans into the fold. We liberals find it easy to talk about our issues in a selfrighteous and convinced way. In a way that speaks primarily and maybe exclusively to liberals so talking about the money in politics part triggers for many people a signal. Are you a liberal or not . Even though there are many great conservatives who also are concerned about money in politics. Its a dividing discourse as opposed to uniting discourse so when i wrote this book i thought iactually believe that the kind of enthusiasm you demonstrated , you said this was your congregation and you demonstrated to the congregation, when you got so excited about the idea that this is a nonpartisan effort and i think this is extremely important. The book ends with the stories of these incredible Reform Efforts led by people who have a single central rule, that politics, partisan politics is not allowed to be part of the conversation so this woman katie fahey who twentysomething put up a Facebook Post and said is anybody interested in working on gerrymandering in michigan and within a couple months and 4000 volunteers and a couple months after that had collected 400,000 signatures to get a ballot measure to end partisan gerrymandering and in that effort she had a discipline that never can you say democrat or republican, that we have to inspire people to want to be part of this movement as citizens first because we are citizens first and we all embrace that somewhere in it, theres such a deep desire that we should be able to talk about this without the hate and division which defines politics so that was the motivation to write this book and what i realized as i thought about what i was upset about when i talked about money in politics is that it is an example, one example of the way that weve allowed our Representative Democracy to become unrepresentative. Many conservatives will tell you that we have a republic. But of course by a republic the framers meant a Representative Democracy. And its kind of built into the title, the thing about our Representative Democracy is its supposed to be representative. Its supposed to allow all of us to feel like we have the samepolitical power. The fact that your white doesnt mean you have more power than your black or that you live inkansas versus texas but that weve allowed the system of our democracy to evolve. So that we on many dimensions dont have equality in our system so money in politicsis the most obvious. Members of congress, candidates for congress earn between 20 and 30 percent of the time raising money to fund their campaign. But theyre not raising money from the average person, theyre not just randomly dialing numbers on their telephone. There raising money from the tiniest fraction of the one percent so thats 150,000 americans have enormous influence relative to the rest of america. Thats the one that we liberals like to focus on what gerrymandering. Its a way of rendering us unequal in the way that we exist in representative reelection by our members of congress. That congress is divided into districts which states draw with the objection to create safe seats in their district so if youre in a safe seat republican district, you know if youre the republican representative youre not going to be beaten by a democrat and if youre a safe seat democrat you know of your representative youre not going to be beaten by a republican but youre not worried about the party from the other side, you are worried about somebody from your own party. You could be beaten by somebody in your primary but what we know about primaries is the people who win primaries are even more extreme versions of the people they are challenging so if youre a republican, what youre worried about is that an even more rightwing republican. If youre a democrat what youre worried about is an even more Leftwing Democrat which means in these districts 85 percent of congress in safe seat districts, what theyre doing is constantly focusing to their extremes. Which means the extremists have in normas influence over our congress way beyond their numbers. Way beyond what theyre entitled to if you think about making everybody representative or think about the Electoral College. We have this impression that the United States of america elects our president. Thats not true. We have delegated the election of our president to a country called swing state america. Swing state america, the 14 or so states in like pennsylvania which is close enough to go either way, is the place that selects our president. In 2016, 99 percent of Campaign Spending was in 14 states. 99 percent. Which means these are the only states that a president cares about and theres all sorts of Empirical Data to show spending and regulatory policy bends to make swing states happy. You might not feel happy but youre happier than a lot of people out there because you matter. The new jersey people, they dont matter at all soit would be like look at this administration when trump came to office, he immediately ended the offshore drilling ban. Almost overnight, florida got an exemption from that. New jersey cant even get a hearing because who cares about new jersey . New jersey was a solidly blue state. Its never going to matter to a president ial election but florida is a critical swing state but the thing about swing states is they dont represent america. Your decent citizens, i come from pennsylvania and i will i am a Williams Porter swing stators in general dont represent america. Their older, their wider, their industry is not the cutting edge industry of america so you should be represented like anybody else but you shouldnt be representedmore. This and then the way we suppress both the point is abbys altogether , and what this means is that on any number of dimensions weve built a Representative Democracy that does not represent us. Sometimes it benefits the rich, money in politics. Sometimes it benefits the extremists, gerrymandering. Sometimes it benefits the swing stators, the Electoral College. Sometimes it benefits the party in power was suppressing the vote to the party out of power whether democrats or republicans. The point is the core promise of aRepresentative Democracy that we are equally represented has been defeated in our democracy and thats the core reform weve got to find a way past. Such a powerful analysis and it is powerfully bipartisan or as you say nonpartisan. Your constitutional theory book talked a lot about translating the values of the framers in light of a new understanding and changes in society. To what degree did the framers anticipate and unRepresentative Democracy and to what degree is our current unRepresentative Democracy a violation of the hopes of the framers and maybe start with the senate which has changed over time but you argue was not what they expected the senate was a great compromise, especially for madison as you know. Who, but also wilson looked at the senate as a terrible conflict. Madison for a while said it was not even going to agree to the constitution which he had helped birth because of this insistence that there be people representation for the states and the senate. Because he thought it didnt make sense to have a Representative Democracy with a branch that was essentially unrepresentative but many people thought of that branch not as representing the people but as representing states. This was the moment in our constitutional history where the idea of mixed representative governments was familiar. To the british model where you had the crown and the lords and the commons. Each representing a different part of british society. And many people thought of our constitution in the same way, not that it was representing the aristocracy but the framers representing states and house representing the people and the president representing everybody so the senate was a compromise. But i think the challenge for us is to figure out what we understand the senate to be today because as much as they think seriously the senate as representing states and they made senators appointed by state legislators, we dont have senators appointed by state legislators anymore. There appointed by us through elections and the gap between big states and small states is humongous compared to that. Then the difference between delaware and pennsylvania was like 17 to 1 and now the difference between california and wyoming is Something Like 70 to 1 so the unrepresented as caused by the senate is massive and huge and so i in this book acknowledge that i think that representative governments in both branches without representing people, weve got a real compromise. But the challenge with the senate is that the constitution explicitly makes it on amendable that there would be two senators from every state. Two things in article 5 ofthe constitution , that are said to be on amendable. One of them was the closet of protected slave trade until 1808 and the other was the closet that requires equal representation in the senate, neither of those two things can be changed without changing article 5 so in my book and im saying is we are stuck with this but what can we do to change the way the senate works, try to get it as close to representative as we can and my own sense is if we can solve all theseother problems , this is a relatively small problem that would be remaining in this Representative Democracy. Part of this book argues that our institutions are failing because in ways the framers did not anticipate, they are failing to represent the considered and thoughtful views of the moderate majority of the American People and instead have been pulverized and made more extreme by these institutional failures but youre also critical of we the people for failing to educate ourselves about important constitutional issues and to perform the duty as you call it a citizen in a way the framers anticipate and you have all sorts of explanations for that including our fractured media landscape but tell us about how we the citizens are failing our constitutional values. The congregation of the National Constitution center probably doesnt recognize this but not everybody is as focused on these issues as you might be. And part of the reason this is such a problem is a kind of unappreciated coincidence that happened in the 20th century. So the familiar thing about the 20th century was the explosion of broadcasting and we had this period of time which people like mark pryor from princeton referred to as the period of broadcast democracy whenamerica is focused , all of us essentially the same sources every single day. Television is on the same time every day. Its the news. The news is delivered to us in amiddleoftheroad way. You cant help but be exposed to it and what youre being exposed to is essentially the same story and that period from 1950 to 1985 for us defines our conception of what american democracy is. But the second thing that happened during this period that we dont think about is this is the birth of polling. Polling captures the National Imagination with the election of fdr in 1936 or the then dominant straw Poll Technology that said landon was going to beat fdr and George Gallup said no, i can talk to 1000 people and i can tell you not only will house slander lose and lose by a lot but ill tell you by how much hes going to lose and everybody laughed at George Gallup but when roosevelt won the largest majority in any contested election in the history of president ial elections, people were convinced there was something to this technology and that gave birth to a technology where we can hear, the people were legible. We knew what they brought and those two things grew up together during broadcast democracy and we could watch the people progress on many important issues whether its civil rights which obviously is driven dramatically by television, confronting people with the reality of the horrors that are going on in the south and we all had a response to that or vietnam or the impeachment of Richard Nixon or the environment. These are all issues where we grow up and we can see us growing up because we can pull. Weve now left broadcast democracy. We in some ways have got back to the 19th century. We live in a world where media is partisan and fragmented and we all live in our little bubble. And the consequence of that is profound when we think about Critical National issues we as a nation need to addresslike impeachment. The striking thing about the impeachment of Richard Nixon is if you look at the polls and the views of republicans and democrats, republicans like nixon more the democrats but the support for nixon is almost perfectly correlated between republicans and democrats. They like him at a certain point and at exactly the same moment everybody is not liking nixon and thats because were all watching the same news and its the same story and you might have a different reaction if youre a conservative republican than if youre a liberal democrat but the facts are the facts and you begin to that the facts and nixon goes from 85 percent support among republicans, 50 percent support among republicans and thats when the Senate Republicans walked over to the white house and said you need to resign. Inthis environment thats not the reality. In this environment, we watch our shows, they watch their shows and regardless of what happens, theyre going to come out of this some of us taking i cant believe this is what happened and the other part of us thinking i cant believe anybody didnt know that this was going to happen. Regardless of what happens going to have people who dont understand , dont even understand the other side. This is the part that i asked people can you explain to me why that person disagrees with you . Its not just that we know that he disagrees, you dont even know why he disagrees and this is because we built this environment, these media environments where we live in the separateuniverses. Barack obama two months ago said watch foxnews, you live in a different reality than if you read the new york times. When you live in a democracy , theyve got to address the same issues together, what happens when we all are living in a different reality . Heres where the important connection with polling comes in. In some sense this was true for the whole of Human History except broadcast democracy. In the 19th century people also lived in their own reality. North and south lived in their own realities. Thats what led to