it's truly an honor to be here tonight i've been working on money and politics issues for twenty years now but for five years before that on environmental issues including a lot of ballot measure campaign so i think i've probably worked on twenty or twenty five different ballot measure campaigns over the years and i'm pretty sure i've never seen a volunteer signature gathering effort anywhere near this substantial i think i've been a few that maybe got one hundred thousand volunteer signatures but nothing like this in my lifetime i have not gathered twenty thousand signatures so to to do that is truly phenomenal  know i think that is a testament not only to the incredibly disciplined hard work that i know you out there because i know what it takes to do this kind of thing but i do think it is a testament to the depth of the seriousness of this problem and in some ways the character and resolve of the american people to to rise to this to just see signature efforts like this come out of the dirt on any issue so i truly think we're living in  a special moment and i now so i'm honored to be here with you i think you for coming i know you have many other things that you could be doing tonight and so the fact that you're taking time on top of all the time you already spent gather tonight to learn more about this issue and talk more about that issue you know means a lot to me so i'm saying that not only to be polite but also the fact that you have limited time is a central point i make in this book and i know it seems obvious right you know we all know we have a limited time but if you think about it from a political point of view you know between juggling our jobs where we've got you know more things to do than we have in a work day you know you've got sick kids you've got to take care of her or sick parents or siblings you got chores to do at home we like to eat and sleep in all those you know if we're lucky i know you are spending two hours on this particular night taking in some political information but i  best the most active citizen on average has about an hour a day to think about our public policy problems and issues and politics and what not and that is a pretty scarce resources it's limited right  because our time is limited we limit political speech all the time and don't even think about it you know walk into pretty much any city council meeting in america and they'll be a public  can stand up and say anything that you want for two minutes sometimes it's one in los angeles it's one i've been there sacramento we're trying to get it up to three but everyone agrees there needs to be a limit as otherwise of one person you know blabs on for an hour nobody else gets to talk i've seen some city council meetings like that where the members do that but now in congress you may find out you can do that they limit your speech quite severely watch c span and they spend half their time argue about all the gentleman from virginia has sixty seconds left will you yield cut out of it a very strict time limits on political speech in the u s congress the united states supreme court limits political speech they will tell each lawyer from each side here's exactly how long your brief can be do not exceed fifteen pages there's a funny story in the book about what happened to b p oil when they tried to use a smaller font type to squeeze they got in trouble and likewise you know when the oral arguments come it's thirty minutes for each side they are limiting speech and they're doing that too fur rather the first amendment because freedom of speech for the people means we limit the duration in the volume of speech of any single person so that all sides can be heard so that judges can make decisions that are more wise and more fair so that legislators can balance all the viewpoints in the country and come to a better decision than they could themselves and again i say this as if it's obvious but it is not human nature this is something that we  learn and i discovered that when i was volunteering a few years ago in my daughter's first grade classroom and i tell you you walk into a first grade class room they all talk at once all of the time and the teacher spends the bulk of the time  why can't you and you know you look you noticed you've all been trained in this right because you're all sitting down not talking listening to me and sometimes i think that five of the nine members of the united states supreme court must not have gone to kindergarten because this seems to be a totally foreign concept to them and they're saying you know what i'm talking about is actual speech right like you physically speaking with your mouth talking about a political issue money is obviously not speech and q magine what would happen if you're in a city council meeting and somebody waltzes up to the microphone and you know digs into their pockets as i got ten thousand dollars here i'd like to buy an hour's worth of time you will get two minutes i know about an hour place thank you and if you know the parliamentarian said well of course the first amendment demands that you would fire that parliamentarian in about five seconds and yet that's what the supreme court is saying is no no you cannot you have to allow that person to by that time and the the a lot of people  heard of the citizens united ruling right how many people here do that six years ago but really that logic came forty years ago in a ruling called buckley versus vallejo that was passed in the wake of the watergate reforms big it's resigned big problem congress reacted to that very big problem and so it's important to remember that we can force congress to act when our problems are big enough and the supreme court gutted two thirds of that  law and what they said in their logic in doing that is the concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voices others of others is wholly foreign to the first amendment they don't go to kindergarten and they're obviously never been to a city council meeting or even a supreme court argument where we do that but in seriousness that the argument that they would make is that well of course of course of course we limit speech in a forum right if there is a roof on your head we all have you know we're judges we have limited time we have to consider all these cases legislators they have limited time they've got thousands of bills are you limited to time that so you can have a debate but when there's no roof when there's no forum there should be no limits forgetting that you have limited time right as voters but really even outside the building we don't hold to this unlimited theory when it comes to real people trying to speak talk to my friend go but you know folks of ninety nine arise who get arrested for speaking too much i got arrested with them in sacramento for speaking too much on the state capitol talk to the folks of the occupy movement to spoke too long in  or the folks of the i don't know what you call him in bundy's movement but you know who are speaking too long according to some people on the public property in the state of oregon right now and we limit all of their speech to not even to enhance the voice of others but so that the public can use public property to do things like bird watching or enjoying zuccotti park or enjoying the steps of the california state capital i was saying at our friend's house in portland oregon last night and was amazed he showed me a picture of the sign he used to have up on his own house on his own property that said end corporate rule and then he showed me the citation he got of fifty dollars a day from the city of portland if he did not take that down for violating their sign ordinance so there is a bonus chapter in the book so it's not actually in the book you can get today but if you go to the website when money talks dot com there are three additional chapters that my publisher limited my speech and said derek i don't put in the book i got to get rid of them i said i'm not getting rid of them i will give them away for free on the web site so but the last one is about the very real threats to free speech that regular people face all the time anyone here get kicked off of some place when you were trying to circulate a petition saying no you cannot speak your u s postal service property will not have  so when it comes to real people trying to speak we get restrictions all over the place but when it comes to billionaires trying to spend money on paid speech the court says oh no can't limit that and this  comes from a fundamental just this understanding of reality and this is something that has changed since the founders time you know in thomas jefferson's day james madison's day the amount of information that a citizen could consume in their lifetime and warm will average citizen not jefferson who had his own private library that became the library of congress but just regular   now that's about how much information is in a new york times edition today that's great right we're very well informed from our various media outlets but we are really inundated with information unlike any society ever in the history of the plant and you know thing about your e mail box you have two hundred e mails on open write your voicemail boxes overflowing you've got two hundred channels on cable t v it i s overwhelming and the way we deal with that is we set up filters to figure out what's the most important information for me to read right so you've got a spam filter on your e mail you've got a mute button on your think he's right and this leads me to sort of the second key point of the book the first one is you know we have limited time the second one is advertising or paid speech what i call paid speech is designed to cause filter factor and there's a fundamental difference between you as a reader seeking out speech when you buy the new york times or tune into fox news or whatever your source of news that you choose and what you're doing no seriously what you're doing is you're choosing an information filter that you trust right and some people trust fox news because they say i share their values and i want to hear information that's important to them and that's an absolutely legitimate choice for people to make that's entirely different when somebody pays to put information in front of you actually interrupting the program that you were tuning into that you did not solicit it would be like if ted cruz suddenly walked on the door up here and kicked me off the stage and said please excuse me i have a thirty second information session that i'd like to give you'd say get off the stage ted go get your own room we didn't come here to hear you that's what advertisements are and they are screwing up all your information filters and forcing speech upon you that you didn't seek out and so if we draw a line between free speech that you are paying for and really the words of the first amendment say freedom of speech which is really freedom of conscience to believe what you want and speak with your own mouth without being sent to jail and then it's freedom of the press and what the founders thought of the press is much like the it's you know newspapers that you buy not advertisements that somebody else pays for you to read so if we draw that line that can cut through a lot of the confusion that we hear from opponents of campaign finance reform senator ted cruz took to the floor of the u s senate about a year and a half ago when actually a constitutional memo was being debated and he said well if we get money out of politics it will mean that the government can jail the producers of said in a lot but saturday night live is not an advertisement that's a program that people tune in to watch so i completely agree we do not want the government jailing producers of not live or fox news or the new york times or a citizens united organization making a movie that people pay to watch but we also don't want advertisers deciding the information that we get here alternately the choice of what information you're going to filter out and what information you're going to consume given that you can't consume but five percent of the information you're bombarded with should be up to you and anything that infringes upon your choice of information is really an infringement on your liberty so if we're worried about government infringement on liberty let's first look at this distinction between free speech and paid speech  so that's my assessment of what the court has gone wrong it's a different frame to think about money in politics than the way we normally talk about it which has been corruption right where they the presumption is sort of being well yes we're willing to accept some limits on freedom of speech in order to prevent corruption i do think money in politics causes corruption but i don't accept that actually putting these limits on money in politics in any way harms freedom of speech i think it enhances much in the way that a two minute limits in a public city council meeting so the problem is that as eloquent as that argument might be we have five members of the supreme court who disagree and probably would disagree even if i could talk to them personally for five hours across the dinner table come on really just hear me out on this so the challenge then for the citizen is what do we do when we are confronted by five men wearing graduation gowns who refuse to let eighty percent of the country govern ourselves as we want to which is not only a money and politics problem it's a fundamental problem questioning whether we still actually live in a democratic republic i think so one approach is we could wait for a new supreme court you know there be a new president that new president will probably be able to appoint several new justices of the supreme court there are four of them that are getting on up there in age but maybe not these are some on re people who can stick around for an awful long time if they choose to they're pretty healthy so i have some concerns about whether or not that would actually work if it did i would happily take it but i would still say that we shouldn't rest there because ten years later the composition of the court could change again and we could see the foundational meaning of the first amendment ping pong back and forth every ten or fifteen or twenty years based on the whims of who has a heart attack or feels like retiring on whose watch and i don't think that's a way to take self government seriously or to take our constitution seriously you know it's and it still leaves this lingering question in my mind of late will who's really in charge here you know we could've waited for king george to die too and maybe the next king would have been better but that's not what we chose to do you know we sacrificed a lot and risk everything so that we could govern ourselves and i think we need to push back on the judicial branch right now and there are two ways to highlight of doing that one you're familiar with we could pass a constitutional amendment and there are two routes to doing that that you may be familiar with one is for two thirds of congress to draft the amendment which is how we've passed twenty seven amendments so far the other possibility would be for a convention of states to draft an amendment and then either way three quarters of states those thirty eight state legislatures need to ratify the amendment that's one good reason for organizing in state legislatures right now is to pave the way for that  and i think this is a more permanent solution than just waiting for the court to change the composition and it's also something that citizens can directly engage in fulfills the promise of our democracy george washington said in his farewell address as he was leaving the presidency now the basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and alter their constitutions of government and if we're saying it's now become too hard to amend our constitution even when eighty percent of us want to i worry we've lost the promise of the framers and i'm not willing to let go of that so that's why even if we do get a new court i will keep pushing for a constitutional amendment there is a third way to go about this that most of us don't think of very often but that is also to return to a fundamental principle of the framers that the supreme court is not the sole institution in our country responsible for interpret ing and enforcing the constitution the framers expected all three branches of government to check and balance each other not only in passing laws like the congress does and enforcing them like the executive branch but actually in interpret the laws you know the right of judicial review was not in the original constitution it's a practice that the court started doing and that we the people have accepted and i think that fine but i don't think that they're the sole entity that should be playing that role and that's certainly not the intention of the framers and there's a great quote by thomas jefferson in the forward of the book to that effect but where we really saw this play out in fairly recent history was the great depression where you had franklin delano roosevelt elected president ited states he was terrified for the future of the country where it really looked like you know the economy was so bad the republic could fall apart moved very aggressively to implement the new deal and for the first four years he was in office the supreme court struck down almost everything he got thr congress and this is a pretty grave situation so he ran for reelection basically on a campaign against the united states supreme court saying they're wrong i'm right vote for me and they did and elected him overwhelmingly and gave him overwhelming majorities in congress and he then found a way to pick a fight with the judicial branch they didn't wait for anybody because most historians look at this is one of his big failures right he proposed packing the supreme court because there's no guarantee or the number nine is not in the constitution about the number of justices we're going to have he said well let's have eleven or thirteen a a couple more nothing illegal about that in fact we've had different numbers about that before but there were some qualms about that even from his own party but by raising that issue and challenging the institutional authority of a supreme court that i think really had gone off the rails at that time and was damaging the future of the country oh in roberts who was a justice at the time no relation to john roberts today i don't think he flipped his vote and he started up holding the new deal by a five four vote and stuck with that and other justices have stuck with that since that time in the new deal you know  concept that government can regulate the economy through things like minimum wage laws the maximum workweek laws and all these other things is now considered not constitutionally controversial and this is known as the switch in time he switched just in time before they were going to pack the court to save nine right so the switch in time that saves nine was a result of executive leadership challenging you know the checks and balances between the three branches of government the court the  blinked and save the country arguably so i think that's an approach we need to look at now i'm not suggesting that our next president should try packing the court because that's sort of been tried and didn't work but i think we should be creatively looking for other opportunities to do that and we do have other examples in our history that are not so rosy where people executive branch officials have defied the united states supreme court and some are pretty ugly like in one nine hundred fifty eight when the governor of little rock said i'm not going to go along with the supreme court's order to desegregate schools and i'm going to call out the state national guard the block african american students from going to high school in little rock well the federal executive branch but eisenhower said no you're not i'm going to enforce the united states supreme court opinion on this and i'm going to send in federal troops and those kids are going to that school the mayor of little rock happened to agree with them as well and that was a case where the executive of that state was out of step not only with the united states supreme court but the you in the federal executive branch and the federal legislative branch and so that failed and i think that that's appropriate and that's the check and balance on sort of runaway executive power is i claim you know it's only justified for the executive to push back and challenge the court's authority in cases where they can honestly claim to be acting on behalf of the people and i think franklin delano roosevelt could definitely claim that in one nine hundred thirty six and thirty seven after running a campaign explicitly on this issue explicitly challenging the court and the people weighed in and said you're right and they're wrong and i think that that's what owen roberts was recognizing i think he was not only just saving his own institution from being weakened i think it was in fact a recognition that the people have spoken on this and our constitution permits government regulation like the new deal so that's a thing that i think states could be looking for creative opportunities to challenge the federal court montana almost did it when they continued to uphold their hundred year old ban on corporate contributions after the citizens united ruling ultimately defied the u s supreme court and the montana state supreme court thumbed their nose at the u s supreme court and by a seven two vote said oh yeah we uphold that law we know the u s supreme court doesn't but we do well that's an interesting moment but then the supreme court struck it down and the montanans folded their tents but i kind of wonder what would have happened if they didn't you know what would brock of bomb i have sent in federal troops to montana to say you must allow corporations to spend money in your elections maybe but maybe not right and that's again a way for both branches of government to sort of throw it open to the people and you know if they if the people in montana thought the governor was being reckless they cannot elect him they can recall him that there's an electoral accountability there as well now none of these things are easy to make happen right politicians don't just risk their careers forcing a constitutional crisis with the courts or passing a constitutional amendment against really their own incumbent self interest since they do a pretty good job raising money themselves so i spent a lot of time looking the issue of what how do we get congress and executive branch officials to do something that they may not want to do and when i was researching this you know in the late one nine hundred ninety s i ran across this practice of voter instructions and i want to talk about a little bit tonight because that is exactly what seven thirty five is and there is an amazingly long and proud history of this in this country that you all should be aware of as you go out and explain this ballot measure to your fellow citizens in washington so let me just read one quick search from the book that will do a better job explaining it than i could if i just read it but it says sometimes voters don't want to rely only on their elected representatives to speak on their behalf three resolutions they want to speak directly not just as individuals but as the entire electorate the people it has been generations since americans really thought about what it means for voters to collectively tell our elected representatives precisely how we want them to represent us but it played a central role in passing the seventeenth amendment and there's more on that later in the book but constituent instructions began in england and were used by nearly all of the early american colonies prior to independence colonists gathered in town meetings to not only elect representatives to legislative assemblies but to specifically instruct those representatives on certain positions to take on their behalf quite different than the direct democracy practiced used today in twenty four states through the initiative practice whereby citizens can enact laws themselves and completely bypass legislators the instructions process embraces republican form of government instructions given elected officials clear directives on how we want them to represent us but leave the details up for our representatives to debate and finalize and here's the part i really want to read this preamble to instructions from boston residents to their representatives in seven hundred sixty four this is pretty declaration of independence explains the idea we the freeholders of the town have delegated you the power of acting in our public concerns in general as your prudent shall direct you reserving to ourselves the constitutional rights of expressing our minds and giving you such instructions upon important subjects as it anytime we may judge proper so this is you know they would send someone to go represent they sent delegates to the continental congress some of them gave them explicit marching orders and said we want you to declare independence from england and those delegates did that and that's what led to the declaration of independence then the states sent delegates to philadelphia to draft our current constitution some of those delegates were under explicit instructions as to what that constitution had to look like and could not look like and they followed those instructions and then after the convention when they were going around selling the idea to the states many of those framers as part of the deal said hey we know it's not perfect but you'll be able to amend it and in fact you'll be able to use an instruction process to do that so you can hold your elected officials accountable and one framer from delaware a guy named john dickinson said when he was pitching the constitution to his constituents saying you know it may be perhaps advisable for every state as it sees occasion to form with the utmost deliberation draps of alterations respectively required by them and to enjoin that was the word for instruct its bind their representatives to employ every proper method to obtain a ratification now the interesting question that's been debated ever since that time is well how do you enjoy no elected official to follow their instructions and this ultimately i think will be the crux of whether your effort is successful here in washington or not when they were debating the first amendment in the congress they actually thought about putting a right to instruct in their not right to petition freedom to assemble right to instruct and they decided not to because they didn't know how that could be enforced sue your member of congress to they automatically like lose their seat if they don't follow the instructions how we're going to force this well we'll just let people do the instructing and then leave the enforcement up to the people through the political process so it was considered a morally binding practice and two u s senators who later went on to become president actually resigned their seats in the u s senate rather than disregarding the instructions from their voters that's how strongly they felt about it and as late as the lady thousand nine hundred seven california was drafting its constitution and actually did include the right to instruct in our state constitution one of the delegates there explained the thinking of the time about how strong these were supposed to be he said the people have a right to instruct their representatives in the representative has a right to refuse to obey those instructions both have rights but if the representative cannot conscientiously obey those instructions he should resign right that's after all the job you're a flop applying for i would like to represent you people in the congress or in the state house and so how can the nice a well but i don't want to represent what you just told me to do so this was once taken very very seriously and i think when you put together your campaign for initiative seven thirty five you should be laying the groundwork for this expectation you know we are not just here to spout our mout we are here to call you to take a very specific action and we expect that you'll do it and if you don't and i understand if you can't in good days you know good conscious fulfill your public duties resign your office right kim davis didn't think she could perform marriages in the state of kentucky ok get a different job where you don't have to do that if you're a conscientious objector don't join the army if you don't want to follow the will of the people don't take a job as their elected representative cuz that's what those people do but so that's the way historically americans have thought about this and i think that's the way we need to start thinking about it and talking about it again so it's not enough for us to win an initiative seven thirty five on the ballot we need to win it with such a grassroots presence in every single congressional district in washington that every single member of congress of every single political party feels like they have no choice but to listen to what their constituents have done or they'll be so that's the challenge before us it's incredibly exciting how far you have come already let me wrap up my comments and throw it over to questions was just a couple of closing thoughts about what you can do first thank you for devoting a couple of hours your time tonight and i'm going to beg you and plead with you to devote five or six more hours and actually read the book and i i get that that's a big ask because your time is scarce and i don't have a billion dollar ad campaign to put the book in front of you and thirty second bites on t v ads to do that next night at the end of every chapter there's a little tip on one thing you can do and it ranges everything from like stamping messages on your dollar bills with the stamp stampede to running voter instruction  read the book share it with other folks literally lend them a copy or tweet about it or facebook posts it's helpful if regular readers can write reviews of these things on amazon dot com or good reads things like that can help get the message  out i mentioned there the bonus chapters that you can share with friends for free and mail about the website when money talks dot com also while i'm spouting out web sites let me remind you i know that we have a couple folks filming tonight and so if you're one of those people not in the audience but watching this on t v and you want to get involved with this effort right now in washington state go to the website for one man which is it is it women dot org well man w a n e a n d org opened up another window on your browser right now click it join them while you're listening to me rap really important it's something you can do and then caveat i am not proposing these ideas about differentiating paid speech or this one tactic of voter instructions as the only thing we need to do and i feel like sometimes even in the kind of pro democracy movement we get a little focused on this is the one reform and everybody needs to be doing this and only this because it's so important and i say no we need to do this it needs to be part of the mix we also need to end gerrymandering we need to end the constitutional doctrine that corporations are people with cost to shell rights which is another part of the citizens united ruling that i didn't talk about tonight but there are other great books on that corporations on people by jeff clements tom hartman has a book on equal protection that's another whole battle the battle for voting rights on and on and on and rather than saying we all have to focus our efforts on one strategy or tactic i'm more think about it is like you know what if we do the last time our republic was totally threatened in world war two and we weren't sure we were going to make it we did everything we could think of as hard as humanly possible right we didn't go well let's just put everything in the normandy invasion and hope that works it's like no do that the manhattan project let's do espionage was bombed dresden let's every you know and we didn't know what would work and i don't think we know right now what's going to be the thing that will work but i do know that something will because i wonder percent confident that the status quo is not tenable it is intellectually bankrupt and it is politically bankrupt and unsustainable and you know i get all the time how dare you know this is impossible you never know richard citizens united or anyone else heard that right but just in my lifetime you know i'm in college i studied the soviet union about four weeks before my graduation there was no soviet union and you know none of the political scientists that i were reading saw that coming because that looked like an immutable object and we saw the apartheid regime in south africa fall in less than a year and the way these things happen i think it's like an earthquake right where you  don't see the plate tectonics moving because they're not moving but pressure is building up until a point when it can no longer hold and then when things move they can move very fast and very quickly and we saw that one hundred years ago in this country when women got the right to vote we banned corporate contributions from federal elections we created the citizens initiative process we got the right to vote for u s senators on about ten years so incredibly big changes happen very quickly and i think that will happen again and i think it may be less further off than a lot of folks think when we reach that earthquake or political fault so don't let anyone tell you it can't be done keep doing what you're doing and i will not limit my speech so that we can get some questions for you but thank you we have we have we have two microphones you can just line up on either side to task question whole chapter on this and i kind of and again this is an amendment only to fix the money is speech part not the corporate personhood part you can combine this language into one amendment and deal with that or you could pass them too separately or a judge could write these words and again i don't believe that these particular words are magical i think they're a little bit better than several versions that have come before and i'm confident that they'll continue to get better as we evolve and work on this and you know process wise i actually think we'll come up with a much better wording through a collaborative crowdsourcing process of having the whole country think about it and debate it through committee hearings in the u s senate than having one in a couple of clerks spend a couple hours on it and reading the court opinion so i think an amendment will get a superior language to a court ruling but again as i said i will still take a court ruling that overturned citizens united tomorrow if any justice is interested in doing that but let me see if i can actually because it's a short a memory that i would present i could just read it to you here we go to advance democratic self government and political equality ensure a fair and balanced debate and protect the integrity of government and the electoral process nothing in this constitution shall prohibit limits on the amount of money spent in or given to election campaigns or political advertisements and i like that language a little bit better than a lot of the existing drafts that are out there that talk about regulating or limiting money expenditures to promote political viewpoints and that the trouble with that tom i think is well some people think that does sound like the new york times but you do have to expend money to print the new york times and the higher reporters and all those things but nobody thinks of the new york times as a political campaign or a political advertisement so those are some of the distinctions that you know that's a draft with i'm throwing out there i think it's worth thinking about and i think we'll continue to improve on it  next question well an attorney and once told me when i was trying to gather signatures from him and his fife that our i seventy five didn't go far enough because it just urged legislators rather than having stronger terminology that you just mentioned so really what will our amendment achieve it i prefer the word instruct or charge as opposed to the word urge but there's no legal difference there's no legal way to enforce any of those things so it comes down to that moment when somebody has ignored them and you're saying well it's time for you to resign and they go well i didn't because you only urged me not instruct me i don't think that's going to wash so yeah there's always ways we could tweak the wordings of these things but i think the intense pretty clear and i think any member of congress the intense pretty clear and they had better listen up but ultimately the enforcement will come in whether or not voters choose to remove somebody from office who doesn't follow this they're urging either way yes in observing the two thousand and sixteen presidential elections unfold so far it seems to me that the contest between hillary clinton supporters and bernie sanders supporters is a contest between those who believe that the status quo is basically ok and looking for basically a third obama term versus those who believe that no the status quo is not ok and we need really really big changes and a fundamentally flawed system if you would agree that the status quo is not ok and that we need big changes what do you think is the best way to convince hillary supporters or the country at large that we really do that the status quo is not ok and that we really do need big changes well i don't actually think hardly anyone thinks the status quo is ok i think the difference of opinion is about whether or not we can do anything about it which kind of gets back to this fundamental question of you know do we still run our country or not because if we can't do anything about the status quo what happened to george washington's promise but i do think there is something extraordinary going on in this election and this is been building up in past elections but there are three things happening one is small donors are actually playing a bigger and bigger role and that's in part a technological thing it started with jerry brown in one thousand nine hundred two throwing out a one eight hundred number i mean that right and then howard dean and barack obama started you know successfully using online and these were tools that allowed us to raise large amounts of small contributions in ways that were so much more cost effective than direct mail that small donors could really start having a big impact and when you look at bernie sanders fundraising numbers you know it's historic it's epic and part of it's that technology but there's way more to it than technology right the other thing that is happening and i talk in the book about we need to change the political calculus of incumbents because right now and mitch mcconnell spells out this calculus very clearly in one thousand nine hundred ninety four letter to his colleagues in the house that got leaked to the washington post where he says what are you doing supporting campaign finance reform we would be foolish to throw away our ability to compete we killed this last year and we all got reelected so shut up in so many words and the calculus was at the time that the advantage of big money is more than the disadvantage of being crosswise with your constituents on this issue because people don't really care about this issue well the advantage of big money is less right now for the third reason we now have our own media sources right social media twitter on lying we've got people filming here who don't work for one of the three networks i think you know bernie sanders hasn't run a single ad in california and that all my neighbors seem to have heard of i'm right that's because they have facebook so i'm not saying big money doesn't matter but i'm saying we have some new tools and i think people are way more mad about this than they have been in the past and those three things i think are changing the political calculus who remains to be seen if they change it in this election or not but i do think a lot of the appeal of both bernie sanders and donald trump is saying i'm not taking money from super pacs i'm not doing that and you know in the past that would be called unilateral disarmament and complete suicide in stupidity but i think they're getting more support for doing that than they've lost in funds so when other politicians start seeing that oh maybe actually the way to get reelected is i need to be for this that's the calculus that changes and i'm not one of those who say we need to wait until control of congress changes from one party or the other of this and that you know i think what needs to happen is for maybe two or three members of congress to lose their seats because of this issue and that could happen in a democratic primary or a republican primary or a general election but you know look at the power of the n r a right they run the show no matter what party is in congress and they don't annoy lect a lot of people but they sometimes do take out two or three people for crossing them and everyone else runs scared two or three people get taken out over this issue they will run scared and i think they are already pretty scared about what's going on with bernie sanders and donald trump and you know it may or may not alternately prevail i think it might but either way they're taking notice and the political calculus is changing and that'll you know once that changes all of these reforms that look impossible suddenly become possible you know public financing of campaigns disclosure constitutional amendment gerrymandering because the plate tectonics will shift and so we that's again why i'm saying we don't focus on just one we need to have the whole pipeline of stuff ready to go through i do think this super pac and money and politics thing is the thing that people in maybe the most aware of the name read about so it's a great organizing tool but there's a long answer to your short quest i like it it's scary you know i'm from california and most liberals and progressives in california hate the initiative process because one time in the one nine hundred seventy s the people did something that we thought was really and it was really you know it hurt our state a lot right we passed prop thirteen you've got a guy to my man up here who's doing it you know in so we tend to want to get rid of the process because sometimes voters disagree with us and i think the better solution in the long run is to educate the voters and persuade them to agree with us but this is one of the yeah i think it's in the last chapter in the book i kind of start inching there and i if washington prevails which i think you will and if california prevails which i think we will we're working on getting a very similar question prop forty nine back on the ballot in california i think the next step is a national voter instruction measure introduced in congress where we let the whole country vote on i one thirty five now again that wouldn't pass a constitutional amendment in and of itself it wouldn't be legally binding but it would be unprecedented this idea has been introduced before it's legally possible there have been bills to do it in opposition to world war two for example one of them actually received a floor vote on the house of representatives so think of that as your next act when you're bored the day after the election you're going around asking your members of congress to obey the instructions and i went thirty five and someone says oh yeah i already had to do that what's your next  know i think it's intriguing and i think it's one of the best things we could do to reinvigorate participatory democracy and let people feel like they really do have a way to make their voice heard now that's a good transition because i wanted to ask you about voter instructions also i think it's incredibly interesting concept but i'm having a little trouble figuring out how we could move into that i see like on the national level that like if we if we need if we want to get a question answered by our senators at least the last time i tried to you have to fill out an application to do that and that the congressman both representatives and the senators go there go to congress and if they're not millionaires to begin with they're almost all millionaires when they come out and brock obama has talked about well the people are more interested in their jobs  our jobs and even at the state level i've had to stand up and speak sort of against my three legislators at the time which was really quite difficult to do because they worked as a team and i didn't know as much as they did but so i don't quite see how i made the other people could move into that with people with such  narcissus in our culture in politics well it's easy to just write a thousand dollar check to that member of congress and then they want even need the webform they'll invite you into their office new can have a nice chat this is the way it works she got to buy access right now  that is the way it works right and again what's happening is paid lobbyists who are hired by corporations and billionaires are taking up all of your representatives scarce time because they need to meet with them or they won't get a campaign contribution so even if they don't always vote with that lobbyist they're still taking up time that they should be meeting with you right so what do we do about this you don't just show up by yourself you show up with ten other people or twenty other people or you join an organization you know we are fighting this battle with one arm behind our back but that doesn't mean that we can afford to give  up so we have to find a way and you know previous generations have found a way you think it was easy for women to get the right to vote you think they got a meeting with their member of congress excuse me i'd like to sit down talk about my right to vote no way protest you know that's part of what ended apartheid that's part of what ended apartheid in this country and got us the civil rights act we cannot satisfy ourselves with filling out a web form and going well i hope they listen to me we need to do that but we need to do everything else and force them to listen to us and we can't and we have done it before we've won huge battles in this country you know where used to be only propertied white men can vote so everything is hard fought and this is hard fought and we just have to keep at it i hope that's a satisfactory answer but you know there's no alternative but dogged determination you know the kind of determination that lead someone to go get twenty thousand petition all right final question i think i love all of those ideas and i would say not after not next but now all of the above right now and in fact all of this is happening right now there is a corporation in maryland that is true ing to get the right to vote i forget the name of it but they are doing that a friend of mine in california jonathan freeman i don't think i put him in the book but i should have you know he likes to ride around in the h o the lame carpool lane with a briefcase in his passenger seat and his incorporation pretty good on he got pulled over by the highway patrol as i have two people in the car with me right here what do you mean they gave him a ticket he went to court he got his fifteen minutes of fame hearing all over it got a ton of news but people are finding incredibly creative ways to point out the absurdity of the situation that we're in and then yet can't vote can't contribute rule imagine if you're in a new england town meeting your own city council meeting and so on they're like you know four hundred people from new york city goldman sachs employees show up and they'd like their two minutes you know like no this is our city council meeting you know you can maybe hand out a flyer outside but in terms of speaking in the meeting that's for people who live in the town same thing if you want to write a check and speak about that election you should be a constituent in that election the voters of oregon thought that in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine hundred ninety four and they passed a ballot measure requiring seventy five percent of the funds that any politician raises has to come from the state of oregon is supreme court said no money is speech and you cannot discriminate against the speaker and an out state bribe is no more corrupting than an in state bribe the state of alaska also passed a similar measure on the supreme court of alaska held and i think it may still be on the books and james bopp is getting ready to challenge it so i shouldn't say this too loudly but there is a precedent for that and i think states should keep passing these now and if the supreme court keeps striking them down we don't care we pass another one you know and same thing on all of these things it's a way to create new test cases a new pressure on the court and that's a commonsense idea that everyone can agree to so again not next not after i know you're busy i know you have limited time i know you have an incredibly important ballot measure campaign to pass here there are other great efforts in washington state to you know that seattle just an act of this great public financing voucher system and they'll be an effort to take that s wide not next not after all of that now i know it's tiring but you know how important it is and i know we're all going to win together so thank you for