Why the System’s Rigged—and How to Unrig It - Jeff Clements

0:28It's okay not to be perfect with finances. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and LifeLock has tips to protect your identity. Use strong passwords, set up multi-factor authentication, report phishing, and update the software on your devices. And for comprehensive identity protection, let LifeLock alert you to suspicious uses of your personal information. LifeLock also fixes identity theft, guaranteed, or your money back. Stay smart, safe, and protected with a 30-day free trial at lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers.

1:04We were returning home, and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. If you have money, if you've got power and you can deploy a lot of capital, you can get what you need out of politics.

1:35For most Americans, not at all. And people know it. We want to fix it. It's going to take a heavy lift. We've got to amend the Constitution. It's basically a battle of power. Can the American people win this fight? And I think we can. Congress has a 14 % approval rating when they poll. This is slightly above Kim Jong, the North Korean dictator, which is slightly above. People hate the Congress. Yet, if you're an incumbent in the Congress, you have a 95 % incumbency success rate. So square that circle for me. It's about the money, basically. So go ahead, square the circle for me. Yeah, yeah. Even good people going into the system who want to do good things in Congress are stymied because we have a structural, systemic problem of the power of money to prevent the delivery of what the American people are looking for from our Congress.

2:23So you have exactly that problem. You wonder what the 14 % are thinking, because most Americans are not getting what we would expect out of our representative government in Congress. And yet, because it's a battle of money and the parties, both parties are using super PACs and dark money channels, even getting foreign money now coming in to elections, there is a great power to be reelected. And the further up you go, the more control over the money you get in terms of seniority and committee assignments and things like that. The money just completely has corrupted this process. And that's the big divide, what Americans see in terms of how the Congress is performing, and yet what happens on Election Day.

3:03Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me now is Jeff Clement. He's the CEO of American Promise. He is also a huge proponent in repealing something that's near and dear to my heart. He's an author of a book about it and several articles about Citizens United, which we're going to get into in a second, Jeff, but it's great to have you here. Let's start with your journey. You've been a lawyer, an advocate, and now you lead American Promise. Why is campaign finance reform the fight that you've decided to get yourself into? Well, Anthony, I think, and thanks for having me on.

3:41It's good to see you. And, you know, I, like a lot of Americans have watched what's happened to our country and how the money has poured into our political system in these last 15 years. I had something of a front row seat as a lawyer. When I practiced law in Boston a long time, I did a brief in the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case, which struck down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act back in 2010. I did not think that was going to end well. I was still practicing law though. So I went out to Montana. Steve Bullocks, the attorney general at the time, he's trying to defend laws that the states have had on the books for a long time to prevent unlimited spending in their elections, all the money coming out.

4:25What we now see is the dark money super PAC problem. We win in Montana, the Supreme Court strikes that down. So it seemed to me that we as citizens, as Americans, had to get a handle on the money in politics problem if we're going to be able to solve any other problem. And I think that's what we're seeing now. And the issue though is constitutional. The Supreme Court says we're not allowed to solve it. Most Americans actually know we have to, but to do that, we need a constitutional amendment. So that's the journey that brought me to campaign finance. I was not a campaign finance wonk. I was a lawyer representing big companies in Boston or serving in the attorney general's office.

5:07But like a lot of Americans, I saw the problem of money in politics, how it was tearing us apart as a country, how it was preventing us from solving some big problems, and how it was increasingly leading to a systemic corruption of our system. And I felt like I could do something to help. There's a lot of people that listen into this podcast, many from outside the United States that don't understand the nuances of everything that we're talking about. I want to set the course for this. I want to talk a little bit about campaign finance. And so basically in January of 2010, Justice Scalia said in the Citizens United case, and I'm paraphrasing, if you have money, it's your First Amendment right to use it as you see fit.

5:49You have limitations in direct campaign donations, but you have no limitations if you want to set up a political action committee to support a candidate or to present an idea or to support or fund a policy. Do I have that right, Jeff, or do I have something wrong about what I'm saying? No, you have it exactly right, Anthony. And I think it's interesting to look at, like, why did we get that system? We just had a$20 billion election in 2024,$20 billion. We have had a$100 million Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. We have super PACs and local council races now. So we have this system exactly because of what you said, which is the Supreme Court essentially made up a rule about the First Amendment, that there's a free speech right to spend money unlimited as long as you're not doing it directly to the campaigns and you're doing it in the so-called independent, what we now call super PACs, ways.

6:45No American ever voted for that system. This was not a choice of the American people about how we should fund our elections. for 200 years, the First Amendment had nothing to do with money and politics. And we had any corruption laws. The states had them. Federal government had them. The mid-1970s, the Supreme Court, a case called Buckley v. Vallejo, essentially made up this theory that you described pretty well, which is First Amendment, free speech, unlimited money in elections if you've got the money. So we've been on this sort of several decade pathway to where we are now because of a doctrine that was invented by the lawyers and the Supreme Court that is just failing.

7:26It's not protecting free speech of Americans for the most part. It's corrupting the system. And the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum want to fix it. Okay, but tell us why they want to fix it. Because when I look at the data since January of 2010, the legislative agenda has been wildly skewed towards big business, big food, big pharma, tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare. Hello, Mr. Politician. Let me light you up with PAC money and lobbying and donor money. That was the book, The Wolves of Cage Street, okay, that I was referencing. And then what happens is they do exactly what those people want.

8:09And the little guy in the big, beautiful spending bill, the little guy got torched and the big guy benefited. So am I right about that or am I wrong about that, sir? And if I'm right about that, what can we do about it? Well, you're absolutely right about it. And it's not just you or me saying this. You can talk to virtually any American and ask them. This hits home. This is not like the old 1990s McCain-Feingold campaign finances a big bore. This is hitting people where they live. And reducing money in politics is now the number one priority, according to Pew Research. Americans ranked it ahead of the economy and terrorism after the 2024 election.

8:54And the reason is not because everybody's sort of wonking out on policy. It's because of exactly what you're saying, which is Americans understand most people are not represented in the system. If you have money, if you've got power and can deploy a lot of capital, you can get what you need out of politics. For most Americans, not at all. And people know it. That's why we're seeing the support we're seeing for how we can fix it. And, you know, the beauty of it, Anthony, you've talked about constitutional amendments before. That is a power that the American people have. We want to fix it. It's going to take a heavy lift.

9:35We got to amend the Constitution. And we got it. It's a it's a basically a battle of power of can the American people win this fight? And I think we can. All right. So take us through the process, though, of amending the Constitution. I, like you, am an entrepreneur, and I believe we can do things like this. But cynics would say it's pretty hard to amend the Constitution. And don't give Donald Trump any ideas about amending the Constitution so he can run for a third term. But go ahead, do your best to split that baby. Go ahead. Yeah. So we set out when we launched American Promise in 2016 to prove the cynics wrong, because I and many others had seen all over the country, Americans actually weren't that cynical about this, very cynical about the political process for good reason.

10:19But in terms of our own power to actually do something about it, I think Americans have been looking for this kind of opportunity to do something big because we know the small solutions aren't going to work. So how do you amend the constitution? We've done it 27 times, starting with the Bill of Rights, over and over again, we've done this. You need a two-thirds vote in Congress. You need ratification in 38 state legislatures. Now, people will ask, the government can't even fund itself today. How's Congress ever going to vote two-thirds? Well, it turns out the secret is always the same. Since the Bill of Rights all the way to women voting, to the amendments we did in 1971 to lower the voting age, it's always happened the same way, which is you go to the people in the states, The states start passing formal measures to get behind the amendment.

11:10That builds the pressure on Congress. It builds the political reality that if you want to get elected to Congress, you better support this kind of a constitutional change. That's what we've been doing. And so we now have 23 states that have formally passed measures saying we want a constitutional amendment to put power back in the hands of Americans to limit the power of money in the political system and get our representation and voice back. And now the support is building in Congress. We've got hundreds of members of Congress now on board. And we had just brought in a whole bunch of supporters, including state legislatures from the Republican side to Congress to talk to their Republican colleagues about getting behind this and leading this.

11:56And so we are proving every day and we invite all Americans. We don't care who you vote for. We don't care what your party is. You want to join this fight. We're going to get it done. You wrote a great piece in the Boston Globe where you're drawing a parallel between the American Revolution 250 years ago and today's finance crisis. You're saying basically this is a second revolution moment. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, it'll be 250 years next July 4th since our revolution began. And it's a continuous theme in American life. In fact, in human life, democracies are rare. Self-government and freedom is rare.

12:35It always tends to collapse into concentrated economic power. And the founders, the framers of our constitution knew that. That was the struggle against a monarchy, aristocracy. And we had a chance and we've made a very good run of it to prove that human beings can actually be free people governing ourselves and get closer and closer to that promise. That promise, that's why we're called American Promise, of freedom and equality for everybody. But the stakes are high now, and we should just be really clear about that. We could lose this thing if we're not deadly serious about what's going on. And the biggest thing is that concentrated economic power.

13:21It's getting more and more concentrated. You have hundreds of millions of dollars from individual donors now. and if we don't work to get our government back to the government of the people, we will lose it. So that's what I mean is that it's big stakes. It's a big opportunity though. The framers gave us this tool of constitutional amendment. It's how we've always used it. And it's never been easy. It wasn't easy for women to get the right to vote. It wasn't easy when the American people demanded to elect senators. And so the Bill of Rights wasn't something that was handed to us. the American people demanded it and amended the constitution.

14:00So it's how we've done it. And I think it's time to do it again. The Congress has a 14 % approval rating when they polled it. This is slightly above Kim El-jung, the North Korean dictator, which is slightly above. People hate the Congress. Yet, if you're an incumbent in the Congress, you have a 95 % incumbency success rate. so square that circle for me it's about the money basically so go ahead square the circle yeah yeah you know it's it's uh statistically true now there's always exceptions people will say oh money doesn't always win but statistically money almost always does win uh and incumbents have a big advantage in raising money because they can they can you know give the rewards uh and so that's always a big advantage.

14:51The entrenched incumbents is a real problem. And then even good people going into the system who want to do good things in Congress are stymied because we have a structural systemic problem of the power of money to prevent the delivery of what the American people are looking for from our Congress. So you have exactly that problem. 14 % is, you wonder what the 14 % are thinking because most Americans are not getting what we would expect out of our representative government in Congress. And yet, because it's a battle of money and the parties, both parties are using super PACs and dark money channels, even getting foreign money now coming in to elections, there is a great power to be reelected.

15:41And the further up you go, the more control over the money you get in terms of seniority and committee assignments and things like that. The money just completely has corrupted this process. And that's the big divide of what Americans see in terms of how the Congress is performing and yet what happens on election day. You know, the people, I mean, it's just astonishing, staggering to me that there are other countries, democratic systems that won't allow the money in. So you write about corruption being normalized. Let's just go over some of the things. Donors getting government jobs, tax breaks for billionaires, laws drafted by lobbyists, just turn the whole law over to lobbyists, and then they try to put it in the congressional register.

16:31Do you think Americans don't get it? They don't understand or they're underestimating how money is shaping the laws that govern them? Or do you think they're starting to get it? Or do you think they're still relatively uninformed? I think Americans get it. I've been blessed, Anthony, to be all over this country this past 10 years since we launched American Promise. I've been in probably every state. I've talked to Americans across the political spectrum. They come out and they vote for this. We have volunteers standing in the snow getting signatures on clipboards. They come for lobby days. Americans really get that our political system is not going to be able to deliver unless we change how it is funded.

17:12And I think the biggest enemy that we have is cynicism and our sense that we're powerless, that an amendment, if it's going to take a constitutional amendment, that's too hard or we're too divided. You know, and I got to tell you, I was talking to a Republican in Texas who looked at our map of the 23 states on board and he sees our states like New York or California. He says, wow, you're getting the Democrats. I can't believe they're going to support this. And then we talked to the Democrats and they see, you know, Utah and the Wyoming Senate and strength in Texas and West Virginia on board. And they're saying, wow, you're getting Republicans.

17:51So we have to get over the idea that we're too divided to do big things. Our political system can't always deliver that. But when we work together, like on this constitutional amendment we're doing, we over and over again show that we can deliver states red or blue, doesn't matter, and we can get the votes in Congress. So I think we need to trust ourselves that we actually have more power than we think, because I think that is what we're most cynical about is the question of whether we have the power or whether we're too hopelessly divided that we just can't get this done. So I hope people will get in this.

18:32They'll see what we can do and we'll really be able to pull this off. What would be in the amendment? What would be the steel trap that would prevent the money influence? What would be the idea? Well, there's no steel trap that will, you know, this isn't like, you know, waving a magic wand and everything's fixed. But the constitutional language is really solid. It fits on a napkin. I'm holding it and show you right here. It's really tight, like all good constitutional language. And it's about power and who has it. That's what the Constitution does. It is not a campaign policy law of, you know, a thousand pages.

19:13It's very simple. It moves the power to the American people, to our state legislators, to our Congress, to our local legislatures, to pass effective rules if they choose about how money is used in the political system. That's the simple version. It's three short sections. And what that does is give us the power to do it. The reason it's not a magic wand is because we'll have to do it. But the judicial overreach, the courts striking down our anti-corruption laws over and over again, that will be over. We will have anti-corruption laws. We will stop foreign money. Up in Maine, 86 % of the voters passed a law saying foreign governments cannot spend money in Maine's elections.

19:58Seems like a no-brainer. The judicial, the courts, federal courts struck that down under Citizens United. That law would stand after this amendment. So people might think like, oh, we won't be able to pass laws, but that's not true. We keep passing them. We have always done it before, and we've always had limits in anti-corruption laws until this judicial overreach, and we'll do it again. So that's what the amendment does. It gives us the ability to do it, but we're going to have to do it as a democracy, not only now, but 50 years from now, 100 years from now. That's what this constitutional change is so important for.

20:33It gives us a chance. Well, you're an incredible patriot to have this sort of a vision. So let me ask you a visionary question. If the amendment were to pass, and let's pray that it does, what would politics look like in the United States 10 years from now, in your opinion? Well, it would look very different in the sense it would be representative. Again, we'd have competitive elections. We'd have a lot of debates. I'm from Boston. I know you're from New York. It's, you know, politics ain't beanbag in either place. It's not like we turn into angels. Well, I almost – given the Yankee defeat last night, I almost canceled the podcast on you, but I decided, you know, what am I going to do now?

21:14Yeah. I'll just say, nice to see the Red Sox winning. But it's not over yet, as you know. These are two tough teams, by the way, but what a great pitching contest last night. Yeah, really, really good to see. Give me some hope. Give me some hope for my fellow citizens, Because to me, and I think you've heard me say this is how we got together. I want to end Citizens United, pass a constitutional amendment like this. I also think we need to end the gerrymandering, actually. I think that's another big disaster for the country. But give me some hope. What's the vision? Well, and this is the hope.

21:50Look, when we do constitutional amendments in this country, we do them in bunches. So we did four amendments between 1960 and 1971. We did four amendments between 1910 and 1920. Those were periods a lot like our own. the wheels were coming off in this country both times. The American people rallied. We didn't just do amendments. We passed a whole bunch of laws too. And so usually it is more than one thing. And we definitely have more than one thing we got to fix in this country, including gerrymandering. So we get the for-our freedom amendment across the finish line. And I think we will in the next few years.

22:22We'll then start passing anti-corruption laws. We'll take on gerrymandering. The politics will be realigned. It'll be more responsive to the people. And we will see again, and again, the vision doesn't come from me. It comes from what I see in the American people. And you look historically, we always go about every 50 years into these periods where it just seems like the country is going to fall apart and Americans rally and we pull it together and we come out of the other side, but we never have done it without constitutional change and new new constitutional rules and new political alignments.

23:01And I think that's what we're going to see in the next decade. And that's the hope that we can actually turn into reality. Well, I want to help you raise your profile on this. I certainly want to help you make this a reality. And this is types of things that we have to do in America. We have 27 amendments to a 236-year-old document. So as you're pointing out, that would mean an amendment once every eight or so years, yet we've had no amendments since 1993. And that was a procedural one. We both know the real big amendment happened 59 years ago, which is the Civil Rights Amendment. So we are all overdue for these amendments.

23:39But this is the sclerosis now in this sort of very tight duopoly where these ancient leaders just want to sit at the top of this political structure and do very little for the American people and do a lot for themselves in terms of their self-service. It's almost like we had public servants, now we have public self-servants. It's a little bit of a bummer. Okay, so we're down to the five words. I went through your writings with my staff. I'm going to give you a word. I want you to give me a one or two-section sentence reaction to the word. Ready? So I say the word freedom. You say what? America.

24:17Okay. I say the word trust.

24:25rebuild. Renew. We got to re-engineer, recreate, right? Yeah. What about the word corruption? You hear the word corruption. Yeah, I'd have to say the American political system right now, and it's systemic. Yeah, it needs to be changed, right? I think everyone looks at it. It's just something's really wrong. System's rotten, even if the politicians don't want to face it, the American people have, right? Yeah, it's pervasive. Lincoln once said something. They were arguing over whether or not the Americans were smart. And Lincoln once said, yeah, you guys may not think they're smart, but they've got a good nose.

25:00They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement. That's one of his lines. And boy, there's something really rottening right now. I say the word revolution. You say what?

25:17I would like to say peaceful. I think the amendment process is how we do peaceful revolution. But if you don't respond to the constitutional obstruction to freedom, revolution, as Thomas Jefferson said, that's the ultimate right of the people. And I think I would like very much to respond peaceful revolution. right well that's the whole discourse that's the whole reason for this sort of discourse that was the whole thought behind the constitutional convention and the federalist papers that you you know politics that you know dick gephart used to say to me you know why we have politics we don't have a war we're beating each other's brains out you know you have the ugliness of politics and the verbal abuse we give each other to save ourselves from physical violence so i'm with you on that okay i'm going to say the last word but i'm going to give you the last word um i say the word future, what do you think about?

26:14Well, I think about a lot of things. I think uncertain. We can't predict the future. I think there's reason to be concerned about some of the threats of various kinds. But in the end, I think it is in our hands in a lot of ways to make a contribution to it, to do what we can where we are. And I think of my kids and my granddaughter, and I know neither you nor I will be here in the future at some point. And what I like - Speak for yourself, Clemens. I'm planning on living for 200, okay? Well, that's good. I'm like Chuck Grassley. Chuck Grassley's been in the Congress for the last 600 years, okay?

27:02Speak for yourself, Clemens. I wish you luck, but I think we have an obligation not only to the past and what Americans did before that we benefited from, but we got to lay some stuff down for you and all those other people who will be here in 200 years. I'm very grateful to the work that you're doing and the dedication. And I'd like to figure out a way to do more with you and perhaps get you over to our conference business and see if we can raise awareness. But this, ladies and gentlemen, you're hearing from Jeff Clement. He's the CEO, founder of American Promise. And hopefully we'll have you back on the show when we get this amendment passed.