Getting Dark Money Out of Politics: Jeff Clements

JUNE 9, 2022

“It's an arms race that has no end unless we fix it.”

Jeff Clements serves as President of American Promise, an organization that is focused on repairing the constitutional foundation to renew freedom for all Americans, to support effective and honest government and an equal shot at the American dream. He is the author of Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations. We discuss ratifying a constitutional amendment that would rid American politics of dark money.

Once the Supreme Court decided that corporations have free speech rights to spend unlimited money in elections, our politics were effectively captured by the donor class. Wealthy people and corporations deploy their power by, for example, funding toxic, divisive ads that are so hateful that many Americans don’t want to vote. This is one strategy to win elections, but even the candidates are losing control. We need to pass laws to limit the powers of money and lift up the power of the human voice for a functioning democratic system. 

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Credits:

Host: Mila Atmos 
Guest: Jeff Clements
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham

• Transcript

  Jeff Clements Transcript

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] This episode is sponsored by the Jordan Harbinger Show, a podcast you should definitely check out. I enjoy the show and I think you will as well. Search for the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's Jordan H A R BINGE R in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now.

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.

  Justice John Paul Stevens: [00:00:39] While American democracy is still imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a shortage of corporate money in politics.

  Mila Atmos: [00:00:54] In his dissent to the Supreme Court's 2010 decision and Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the court's approach to the First Amendment would, quote, undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress and the states, to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process. And he went on: Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the court has advanced the cause of self- government today, end quote. Here we are, 12 years on from that decision, and faith in our government has cratered. Polling indicates that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe big money has an outsize influence on politicians and government, while the occasional candidate vows not to take political action committee money or pledges to support campaign finance reform. Since Citizens United, it's felt as though fighting corporate dollars in politics or even figuring out where money is coming from is nearly impossible. But today's guest is going to lift us out of this campaign finance defeatism with an ambitious plan to take back politics from the donor class. Jeff Clements serves as president of American Promise. He has practiced law for three decades in public service and private practice and is the author of Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations. Jeff, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.

  Jeff Clements: [00:02:31] Thank you, Mila. Good to be here with you.

  Mila Atmos: [00:02:34] So to get the lay of the land, how do we get here where the Supreme Court has declared that money equals free speech?

  Jeff Clements: [00:02:41] Well, it's a great question, one that brought me into this work, actually, because it wasn't the way it was when I went to law school, which I didn't think was that long ago. But I guess the time does fly. There was no such thing as a corporate free speech, right? To spend unlimited money in elections. There was no right of billionaires to spend money as much as they wanted to buy elections and influence foreign governments. Now, even spending money in American elections through super PACs and LLCs and even directly through the social media companies. So either our Constitution was amended sometime when nobody was looking or we've gone deeply wrong. And I think we've gone deeply wrong because the Constitution wasn't amended. The Supreme Court just decided and invented a new right that has nothing to do with the principles of American constitutional law or American government. The idea that if you have billions of dollars, you have a right to use it as a free speech right to buy influence in our elections is just counter to everything the constitution is supposed to be about and everything that a free and equal citizenry is supposed to be about.

  Jeff Clements: [00:03:52] But that's what happened, was the Supreme Court started going down this road some years ago, even before Citizens United created the idea that corporations have a right to speak. And that's why you now have all kinds of pharma influence. I saw it in my own career in the attorney general's office with the global tobacco companies claiming a free speech right to target children with marketing for nicotine, addictive cigarettes. And it was a slippery slope. And before you knew it, you had corporations and billionaires arguing, well, if money is free speech, we have a right to spend it to influence elections, too. And the court over Justice Stevens' dissent, it was good to hear his dissent from that great judge. Thank you. Made a disastrous mistake and struck down our campaign finance laws that tried to limit money. And now we're ten years, 12 years in to this experiment, and it's totally out of control. And I hate to think if we don't fix this, what it looks like in another ten years.

  Mila Atmos: [00:04:53] Why are corporations or these other types of entities not people? What's different about them and actual humans?

  Jeff Clements: [00:05:02] I'm glad you asked that, Mila, because I think we really have to understand the scope of the problem before we kind of accept the scale of solution that we need. We are in a heap of trouble if we don't fix this. We haven't just sort of slipped a little bit backwards. We have radically transformed the architecture of American government and the human being's role in it. You know, the Constitution opens "We, the people," the country was founded on a principle that we hold these truths is self-evident, that all people are created equal. It's an experiment out of the Enlightenment that human beings can actually govern together. So your question about corporations and what they are and why we shouldn't confuse them with people is right on point. Because this is not a theory. This is just a matter of fact. The corporations are legal tools. They're creations of law. Corporations exist because countries and states pass laws saying under certain conditions you can incorporate. So you can incorporate your small business. You can also incorporate a global multitrillion dollar business, and the Supreme Court by deciding that corporations have free speech rights to spend unlimited money in elections, made no attempt to differentiate between a human being, a small, one person corporation that you might set up for your bakery or something, and a corporation that is owned and run by a sovereign fund of a foreign nation. They are all of the same now, but they're very different. So if you imagine giving that much political power to non-human entities that don't ever die. Humans live and die. Corporations, as long as they're making money, will go on and on and on. And they can aggregate massive amounts of wealth. Some humans can, but not very many, and most can't aggregate the kind of wealth that global corporations can.

  Jeff Clements: [00:06:58] But fundamentally, most for profit corporations have that, just that as their focus, for profit, or they're going to be out of business. So every decision is going to go through that prism of for profit. Humans' decisions about who to vote for, who to support, what you do in life are filled with all kinds of reasons. Even if your job is a very important thing to feed your family, you're thinking about the future. You're thinking about your community. You're thinking about trade offs between all sorts of different issues that are moral, that are a balance of risk and safety, whether food or air or land or water. Humans are actually really good at taking a whole bunch of complex issues and deciding for ourselves what is the right path forward. And, you know, any one of us will probably get it wrong, but we try to approximate what is the right decision for us in our families or us and our friends or us and our community or us and our moral values. And we can change if we get it wrong. Corporations don't do that. There is no

  moral calculus. And so you ask, why are they different than people? What are those differences? Those are the real key differences. Corporations are tools. They're like gasoline. They're like shovels. They're things that humans use in order to conduct activity, whether business activity or non-profit activity or other things. They're good tools for that. But if we confuse that they're tools, they're not human entities, we run a real dangerous road. You know, you can think of it like artificial intelligence or, you know, machine learning. Eventually, if we don't control our tools, they control us. And that's the danger we're facing here.

  Mila Atmos: [00:08:41] So that's a great analogy I think that corporations are tools. Another tool, of course, is spending money. And there's a lot of shorthand language we use in this area. I'm thinking about the catchall dark money. What do you think about when you think about dark money and like what is the political life cycle of dark money?

  Jeff Clements: [00:09:03] Dark money is a phrase that has come to be used commonly for the notion of secret money as a way to think of it. Billions of dollars are now flowing into our elections. Most of the money is from a relatively very small, elite donor class of very, very wealthy people, big corporations, a handful of big unions, but mostly very powerful, wealthy interests. And sometimes those interests, quite often, if they can, don't want to be known that they are buying influence and buying elections. And so if they have a way to hide it, the source of the money, they will. And that's what dark money is. So because of the Supreme Court's reckless decision, we could have regulated about that. We could have required disclosure. We could have made sure that we could stay on top of the flows of money. But now, because of this notion that we can't regulate corporations or other sources of money in our political system because the court thinks it's free speech, it's very, very easy to set up a few different vehicles or tools to stick with our analogy, and you can hide the source of the money. So if I'm a billionaire with global interests and I want to buy a couple of Senate elections to make sure that my business model, which I don't really care about America, I care about my global business. I might not even be American. You could be anywhere and you've got a global business. But the US Senate is really important to make sure they don't mess with your business model by doing what the people might want.

  Jeff Clements: [00:10:43] Then you don't want to tell people you put in a few hundred million dollars in, so you set up a say an LLC or a corporation in Delaware. You move

  some money through a few subsidiaries and a few other things along the way. It ends up in American Company for America in Delaware. And American Company for America donates money to Americans for Apple Pie, a C4 Nonprofit Corporation, which then donates money to Americans for America. I'm making up these names, of course. But the point is, by the time it gets to the campaign and you're seeing those horrible, toxic, divisive ads that make you hate your fellow Americans or make you so disgusted that you don't vote, which are the two strategies for making sure that your candidate wins, nobody has any idea where the money came from. You're just seeing this hateful advertisement or social media spend that is getting you to do what they want you to do. And nobody knows where the money comes from. Somebody knows -- the guy who originally started this, maybe some operatives along the way, but that's dark money and both major parties are using it, some disconnected from the parties. But both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party now have embedded dark money operations that work very closely with the parties and the campaigns themselves.

  Mila Atmos: [00:12:07] Right. Well, if one party does it, the other party almost has to do it right? Like you can't have one do it and not the other one. And like you said, it's poisoning everything, you know.

  Jeff Clements: [00:12:16] Yeah, exactly. And we look at this at American Promise as a systems problem. We don't point fingers at one side or the other. We point fingers at the Supreme Court for making a bad mistake. We point fingers at the abuse of power. That is really what this is about, is wealthy people and corporations deploy their power to take what belongs to everybody, which is a democratic functioning system. But in terms of the parties, it is a system that they're stuck in and it's an arms race that has no end unless we fix it.

  Mila Atmos: [00:12:49] Yes, that's a good way to say it also, it's an arms race. Well, now that you've explained it as a systems problem. Right, it's like just cycled in and cycled out and it goes goes on and on without end. Is there a difference in your mind between dark money and just straight up corruption?

  Jeff Clements: [00:13:08] Where there are lots of forms of corruption, you know, there's straight out bribery. And there are still some hapless politicians getting convicted for bribery because they're so clumsy that they actually do it the old fashioned way and

  take a bag of cash in exchange for a public act for somebody. But there are so many forms of bribery that should be illegal but aren't. Dark money is certainly one of them, in the sense that it is corruption. It corrupts the system. It may not be bribery in the old fashioned, strict sense because the politicians may not even know who the people are immediately. They'll find out, believe me. But during the campaign itself, often the politicians are surprised. The candidates themselves are losing control, just like the constituents are, of what we should be debating and deciding and trying to solve problems or offering ideas. And the dark money comes in and suddenly the whole campaign is about, you know, Sharia law or don't say gay bills or something. That is not necessarily the most important issue to people's jobs and families or whatever they wanted to talk about or the candidates wanted to talk about.

  Jeff Clements: [00:14:20] It could be anything. I'm just picking those examples. So dark money is corrupting to the system. Sometimes it's corrupting because it's a scheme that is being operated with the politician's full knowledge. But even when it's disclosed, even when it's not dark money, even when it's like, Hey, I'm happy to tell you. And there are people like that Tom Steyer, George Soros, both sides, you know, the Kochs. They're happy to say we are spending a lot of money in this election because then they get listened to and they get their phone calls returned and they get their influence. And that's corruption, too. That's a different kind of corruption, but it's totally corrupt because they're basically saying the idea that the constituents matter, the idea that the voice of the citizen matters. They're saying, "no, it doesn't. Money matters and we have money. We're going to use it to drown everybody else out and we're going to be the ones talking to our elected officials, not the citizens, not the constituents." And that is systemically corrupting of the process. So, yeah, it's corrupt. Shorter answer to your question. Yes, corruption.

  Mila Atmos: [00:15:23] It's definitely corruption. We're taking a quick break to thank our sponsor. And when we come back, Jeff is going to help us scope out the true extent of the problem, the explosion of untraceable money that's threatening the fabric of our democracy. But first, thank you to the Jordan Harbinger Show for supporting Future Hindsight. The Jordan Harbinger Show combines in-depth interviews with some of the world's most fascinating minds, like Barbara Boxer and Anderson Cooper, and also features feedback Friday episodes to respond to listener questions about everything from conventional conundrums like asking for a raise at work to doozies, like helping a

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  Mila Atmos: [00:17:04] And now let's return to our conversation with Jeff Clements. So we're talking about how not only constituents, but even the politicians are caught off guard and are put in a difficult spot. So in a larger sense, in what way is unlimited money as free speech bad for democracy?

  Jeff Clements: [00:17:25] Well, some of the ways we already talked about, the way it systemically corrupts the system, but in so many ways, is it bad. And that's why, you know, we really have to appreciate the scale of this problem because you can roll your eyes and say, oh, yeah, it's always been corrupt. There's always been money in politics. It's never going to change. That's very dangerous. Or even worse, you know, there's nothing we can do about it that's dangerous because it is so systemically damaging to democracy and it's happening so quickly that it's hard to see. So we've just had a few election cycles since 2010. It has doubled every election cycle. So 2016 to 2020 doubled. We're now like $15 billion elections. Senate races that in 2010, the five most expensive Senate races, they were like $10 million. They're now over $200 million. And most of that money coming from the donor class. We had a $400 million Senate race in Georgia. It's a matter of time before we'll have $1 billion race and it won't be long. So what does that do for democracy besides, just be a lot of money, drowns everybody else out. Most of the money is coming from a handful of people who live in a few cities. You know, I could just give you some stats. Half of President Biden's $1 billion came from five cities, all of them on the coast. What does that do to where the elected officials

  and candidates are spending their time? They're spending time at fundraisers in New York City, in San Francisco, L.A., a couple of other cities.

  Jeff Clements: [00:18:52] That's it. And then President Trump had the same. You know, most half of his money came from five cities. They just weren't all on the coast. You add Las Vegas, but it's the same dynamic. So those funders are really calling a lot of the shots. When you, as I do, talk to members of Congress about this problem. They hate this system, although they're caught in it. And they say, you know, we're spending up to 70% of our time calling wealthy people, asking for money. They're not legislating. They're not working together. They don't even have time to talk to each other. They are going into little rooms with a phone. They call it call time, and they're dialing rich people and spending as much time as they can with them and asking them to give money. They're desperately trying to raise as much money as they can. So just the simple fact that it takes our elected officials who are supposed to work for us off the job, and when they're off the job, they're not coming home to talk to their constituents and to meet with people in their districts. They're going to fundraisers. But here's the thing that I think may be the most serious damage to democracy: There's been a complete collapse in trust in America and civic trust and faith in the system. And, you know, one of the things the Citizens United majority said that John Paul Stevens, that great dissenting Justice you mentioned at the top, said they got wrong was, the majority said this access that big donors will get this unlimited money will not cause Americans to lose faith in the democratic process and democracy.

  Jeff Clements: [00:20:32] And it turns out they're wrong, absolutely, categorically wrong. Americans have lost faith and Pew Research has tracked this question, same question for decades. Do you believe that American government is run by and for a few big interests looking out for themselves? Or do you believe American government is by and large run for the good of most Americans? And that's gone back and forth depending on the issues over the decades. But since 2010, it hasn't gone back and forth. The bottom has fallen out of trust. Far less than 10% of Americans think the government is operated for the benefit of Americans. Over 90% now believe that it's run by a few big interests for themselves. And even if it's not entirely true, every day, that perception that most Americans share is basically a collapse in the foundation of democracy, because democracy is kind of like money or the economy. It only works if you actually believe in it. If you don't believe that that dollar bill has actually got any

  value or that your Venmo is actually connected to anything, you're not going to believe that the system is actually working, that it has integrity and you don't believe it anymore. It doesn't work. It's one of those magical things that only works if you believe in it. So when you go and vote, when you act as a citizen, if you don't believe that your vote matters, that your vote counts, or that anything that we actually do that looks like democracy actually translates into what democracy is supposed to be, i.e. the majority of the people, by and large have a say in what the policy is. It just doesn't work. And then when that happens, then it's a systems problem. Again, it's not pretty. It doesn't just like edge away. It has huge, dramatic impact. And the two big things I think we're going to see more of if we don't fix this is total checkout, which a lot of people are doing. I'm not voting. I'm not cooperating with the system. It's totally corrupt. I'm not going to be manipulated and told that I'm supposed to believe in this when it's so patently not true. I'm out. And that's a damage. That's real damage. The other one is, I'm going to fight and you're going to get violence. You're going to get insurrection, you're going to get protests. It's the human story forever. And we are not exceptional in democracies as far as human history goes, are not the default. They usually have gone into oligarchy and failure in violent, messy ways. So this is a real serious problem. And your question about what's the impact on democracy? I think it's a, it's just about as big as it can be. And it's not the only source of what ails us, of course, but it's a big fuel for the real dangers we face as a democracy here.

  Mila Atmos: [00:23:24] I have a little bit of a side question here. You know, there are still some restrictions for people. They can only give $2,700 to a campaign. And I've been wondering, how does that work in conjunction with the ability to also write unlimited dollars to some superPAC? How how is it that we can regulate one and not the other? Like, how does that work?

  Jeff Clements: [00:23:47] You know, it's such a good question because only five Supreme Court justices who had never run for dogcatcher or done anything in politics could come up with this theory. But that the reason is, this is what the Supreme Court said: So the Supreme Court said, it could be corrupting to give money to a campaign because the candidate know that you gave money to the campaign and might be influenced by that and you could corrupt the candidate. So it's okay to have limits if you're giving it right to the campaign because there's a danger of corruption there. But they said if you're giving it to a super PAC with what they called an independent

  expenditure, i.e. spending money independently, not to the campaign, they said it can't corrupt it, can't possibly corrupt the campaign or the candidate. And then they said it won't cause Americans to lose faith in the system. And then they just started making stuff up like that. And so the theory of the Supreme Court was based on a whole bunch of things that were wrong. But the fundamental difference is the Supreme Court thought it isn't corrupting if you're doing it independently. So you want to run $100 million into Americans for apple pie to say candidate X is evil and tortures puppies. You can do that or whatever else you want to do to influence the election. Not corrupt. Why? Because the Supreme Court says so. Honestly, I filed a brief in the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. As you said at the top, I've been a lawyer for 30 years. I respect the Supreme Court. But they really got this one wrong. And part of it is because they're isolated from actually how politics work, that frankly, they were naive and now we're all living with that mistake.

  Mila Atmos: [00:25:34] Well, on that note, let's get to the good news. How does an amendment fix the problem?

  Jeff Clements: [00:25:41] Yeah, and there is good news. It's not easy because, you know, if it was easy, we wouldn't be in such dire straits. So I think the first step is we have to just accept that we've got some work to do if we care, if we want to try to turn this around, we've got some work to do. But the really good news is there's work that's been tested and proven in American life, and that's the Supreme Court does not get the last word. If we think this Constitution does not mean what they say it is. If we think that the Justice Stevens dissent, when he said that we need to stop the power of money in our political system to make democracy work, and that's what the Constitution is entitled to. And when we think free speech is for human beings to actually debate and and be heard, not for rich people to dominate and corporations to shut down, then we actually can fix it because the Constitution actually comes from the people. And that sounds highfalutin and abstract. It's not at all. It's literal. The Constitution is based on the rights of the people. And eight times in American history, eight, eight of our 27 constitutional amendments reversed and corrected Supreme Court decisions that were disastrous for Americans and our rights. This would be the ninth time. So we've been through this before. The Supreme Court said African Americans, people of color have no rights. I'm quoting that the white man is bound to respect. That's in the Supreme Court reports. They ruled that forever as far as they were concerned, people of color would have zero

  rights. We had to fight a civil war, but we did three constitutional amendments to fix that. Supreme Court ruled that women have no right to vote. Supreme Court said 18, 19, 20 year olds no right to vote. Supreme Court said poll tax is just fine. Supreme Court said there's no power, no right of the people to have an income tax and tax the wealth of the super rich, that the progressive income tax was unconstitutional. All of those and more were reversed with constitutional amendments by the people doing exactly what we're doing and making it happen. So the only question for us is if we're going to try this or not, because I think once we try it, we will succeed because almost everybody agrees on this. And so we just have to execute the playbook that Americans our grandparents did, our great grandparents did, and now it's our turn. This is how it works. So that is the really good news. And maybe even better news is there's no way to do it alone. We actually have to unite to do it. And that heals a lot of the damage, even in the process, to fixing the problem once and for all.

  Mila Atmos: [00:28:23] I like the way you put that, that we have to work together to get this done. So tell us about the amendment. What does it say and how will it bolster our democracy?

  Jeff Clements: [00:28:35] So a constitutional language is always simple, you know, due process, free speech, equal protection. They're usually not big, long, complicated words. They're famously words that, like the Declaration of Independence, anyone could pull out of their back pocket and read and understand and agree and have your own views as to what the words mean. And this is no different. So the constitutional amendment that you can find on American Promised Net, actually, it says that "we the people have the right to pass limits on the power of money to influence elections." It gives Congress the power to pass effective regulations in the federal elections states, the power in state elections to have reasonable limits so that the people are heard. And the people in ballot initiatives where those ballot initiatives exist are able to pass laws to limit the power of money and lift up the power of the human voice and the human voter. And the amendment itself doesn't say all the many ways that we can do that. The vision is, and once we have this amendment, what we'll be able to do is empower small dollar donors, empower and incentivize candidates to go to their constituents, to people who live in their states, to human beings, and not to rich people in global corporations. It would end super PACs, end to those dark money vehicles over. It would really transform how not only the voter's perspective is, but the candidates, and then how we

  govern after the elections, because it would end the money chase, but we would have to enact laws. And the reason we can't just do it all in the Constitution is each law for different states or for Congress, those get pretty complicated, and they should. And we'll need to make sure those are good. And we will. But we also need it to work 50 years from now, 100 years from now. We're fixing the Constitution for all time. And so it has to be effective when already we're seeing global money, digital money, AI is coming. You think corporations are not people? Wait til you see AI, artificial intelligence and the different ways that that can influence behaviors and elections. So we need to give Americans the tools to protect ourselves and our human rights and our voice in our elections. That's what the constitutional amendment does.

  Mila Atmos: [00:30:56] So let me ask you this question. So make sure I understood you correctly. What you are saying is that we need a constitutional amendment, but at the same time, we also need legislation at the federal and the state level in order to limit money in politics so that the campaign finance rules, state by state or on the federal level, will then be protected by the constitutional amendment. Did I get that right?

  Jeff Clements: [00:31:20] Yeah, that's right. And the way, and that's always the case. So the way to think about it is the Constitution is about rights and about checks and balances and about power. Right now, what the Constitution means, according to the Supreme Court, is that you have no right to stop the influence of global corporations and billionaires, even if you don't have any voice and you don't have any vote. No right to be heard over their noise of billions of dollars. The states have no right to protect state interests. As you know, 24 states had anti-corruption laws for 100 years before the Supreme Court struck them all down. And some of our conservative friends are really outraged by that. That's a blow at federalism. It's checks and balances. We now have concentrated power and nationalized elections right down to the school board. So if you don't fix the constitution first, you can't do anything because the constitutional rule right now is you don't have a right to do anything about it and you just have to live with this and it gets worse and worse. So step one, claim our rights and the way to do that. It's a constitutional amendment. We do have a right to do something about this. We have to check and balance against concentrated power. That's the constitutional amendment. But we always will have issues that we have to address as they come up and laws will have to pass once we have the right to do so.

  Jeff Clements: [00:32:35] So, you know, the progressive income tax, I use that example, the constitutional amendment that allowed that gave us the right to pass a tax law, but we had to actually do it. And we did the constitutional amendment so women could vote. That didn't indicate anything other than that. Right. But then women had to start voting and the laws had to protect the right to vote. This is the way it goes. But the beauty of it is when you do the amendment, you're actually transforming not just the constitutional language, you're transforming culture and society. Even when amendments don't work, like the Equal Rights Amendment for women, equal rights and the Constitution never got ratified. But by fighting for it, it helped change the world and advance the equal rights of women. And that fight still goes on. But the beauty of the constitutional amendment is it creates a new kind of politics and a new kind of political power among the people so that we can renew our government and actually start passing some really effective regulations. So don't be discouraged by the fact that we'll have more work to do. That's always the case. Welcome to life and welcome to democracy. You don't get to just put your feet up and relax. I think we did that maybe too much the last 20 years. And now we got to learn again that, you know, you don't pay attention. The bad guys can really mess it up.

  Mila Atmos: [00:33:55] Let's talk a little bit about the work that you're doing to get this amendment passed. I've heard you say that there is broad support across the spectrum. How are you building a cross partisan coalition?

  Jeff Clements: [00:34:06] Yeah. So American Promise is cross partisan where Republicans, Democrats, Independents at every level are volunteers, our staff, our board. So we're basically Americans who are coming together and we're not pretending that we all have the same view on a lot of issues. There are a lot of different points of view, but we share this one big goal. We know what's right for the country, so we focus on that. That is cross partisan and you have to be. The reason is an amendment, I said it's not easy, it's not quick, it's hard. You need two thirds vote in Congress to propose the amendment. It then has to be ratified in 38 state legislatures. That's two, three quarters of the states. And so that sounds really daunting. It is if you play the game of, well, only the Democrats will do it. We'll just win one more election, or only the Republicans will do it, we'll just win more, one more election. The challenge and the beauty of a constitutional amendment, as I said it, it can only happen if you are disciplined and strategic about working together. But that's why it happens, because

  there are times when you just have massive consensus this has to happen and you do it, and that's what we're seeing now. So survey after survey, poll after poll vote after vote, we see 75%, 80% support for this constitutional amendment, doesn't matter, Republican, Democrat or Independent.

  Jeff Clements: [00:35:26] That's what we see. We're realistic about Congress. We're not pretending that two thirds of Congress is going to wake up from their nightmare that we're all watching and how they behave and decide to do this. We know our way around Congress. But the real work is in the states and in our communities. We, the people have to make the first move. And so we help Americans do this where we live. So 22 states now have formally called on Congress to act by passing resolutions in the state legislatures, six of them were by ballot initiative. That's where the citizens get to vote on it. We've never lost. Six ballot initiatives. Six wins. Very little money in those ballot initiatives. And the people vote for this. We want this to happen. That builds up the pressure. It connects us together. We learn we're not as divided as as all of this big money wants us to be and push us against each other. If we actually work together on this, we see that most of us actually want to do this. So 22 states, 800 cities and towns have passed local resolutions. This is all volunteers who are deciding, hey, let's work together, let's pass a resolution. And you might think, oh, if I pass a resolution in my city council or my town meeting, what difference does that make? You have to trust that millions of other Americans are doing that, too. And that's our job at American Promise to make sure that's true. But you have to trust that because otherwise it is a, it's like a little drop in an ocean and you just feel hopeless. But when, you know, 800 plus cities and towns have done it, 22 states have done it. Millions and millions of Americans live in states and towns that have done this and have voted for these things. We have a national business network. We work with Rotaries. This is not political. It's not divisive. It's sort of right down the middle where we have a health care network, we have a sportsman's network or whatever walk of life you're in. You can decide, Hey, I want to talk about this constitutional amendment where we can unite and get big money out of politics. Who's with me? And you can do that anywhere you live and anywhere in your walk of life. So that's what American Promise does. And we connect that all together. And that's what builds the kind of power that candidates and elected officials will have to listen to us.

  Jeff Clements: [00:37:41] So we have a candidate pledge program. We had 250 candidates who had pledged to support the amendment when they got elected. We now have 200 plus votes in the House. We need to 90. We have 50 Senate votes. We need 67. So we're making a lot of progress. And, you know, the media that makes billions of dollars and this current system of divisive big money and doesn't really want to tell the story of united Americans actually doing something civic and constructive. You don't hear about it much, but it's really happening. And I think we look to a vote in Congress late in 2024 or 2025. So that's two or three years away. Might seem like a long time. But, you know, the sooner we start, the closer that will come. And that's kind of where we stand right now and and how this gets done. It's up to us. It's at the state and local level. It's not some magic lobbyist who's just going to persuade Congress to do this. But the fortunate thing is, is really good people, when you get involved in this, it's nice in this sort of tough times and dark times to be working with people who believe in the future of this country and humanity and are willing to work together on this big cause.

  Mila Atmos: [00:38:51] That's exciting. I have a technical question about the states. You talked about 22 states. Does that mean that 22 states have amended their own constitutions or does it mean that they have agreed to sign on to ratify this amendment?

  Jeff Clements: [00:39:09] Yeah, that's a great question. It is the closer to the second one, it is that they have taken an action to pass a resolution to say, we want this amendment in this state. We are ready to ratify this amendment. Congress, do your job, pass the amendment and get it back to us for ratification. So it's a resolution. It doesn't bind. And even if it was an amendment to their constitution, it couldn't bind because the US Constitution is supreme over that and the Supreme Court has messed that up so the states aren't able to actually fix it even in their own constitution. So these are resolutions. They're not technically part of the process. But as I said, we're not inventing this. This has always been the way that amendments have succeeded from women voting to ending the poll tax, the tax on voting that kept people from voting, electing senators in senators used to be appointed. It was constitutional amendment that made them face the voters. So the Congress never wants to do this stuff. They do it because they're forced to by the work of the people in the states and state resolutions just like this.

  Mila Atmos: [00:40:16] You know, what I've learned on this podcast over and over is how much power actually American citizens have over their democracy. And I think we are not always 100% cognizant that we can do these things and that, in fact, we demand for our democracy to work for us. So as an everyday citizen, what are two things I could be doing to advance a constitutional amendment to take money out of politics?

  Jeff Clements: [00:40:42] Two things. I guess there's so many things and so many different people. We try not to do one size fits all. But there's two things that I think are common to everyone that I'd say: First, you have to believe and sort of accept two things. One, that the depth of the problem, but also that we can do something about it. It may be an act of faith, it may be an act of determination, but it has to be an act. We have to just decide and trust. Well, I'm going to try. And so I kind of put that as... Sign up an Americanpromise.Net. It's not a bogus petition. We're not going to deluge you with emails. It is where we connect with each other. If we don't connect with each other, we won't be able to do this. But we are connecting with each other. So sign up at Americanpromise.net, then you'll be able to follow the different things that we offer. Because we think of ourselves as serving the American capacity to do this. And that means we are not just going to say, do this, do that, we're going to find out about each other. And if you're a business person, you might go into our business network and pitch in there. If you're a local activist or want to be, you might work on a local resolution. If you're a highly skilled social media maven, you can decide you want to help on social media. If you just want to stay in touch and follow it for a while and learn something, sign up at Americanpromise.net. That's the way. The other is talk. Tell your friends. Exercise our right of free speech. You know, it doesn't just have to be in elections and and so it can be on social media. You know, the conventional way would be to, oh, share, share or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook, and you should do all those things, look for American Promise, but actually talk to your neighbors and friends and say, "hey, you know, there's actually a constitutional amendment. I know it sounds hard, but let's try it. Let's do it" and give your friend and family a little bit of a lift and something positive they could do too. So that's what I'd say. Sign up at Americanpromise.net and share the news and tell your friends.

  Mila Atmos: [00:42:47] Excellent advice. Well, here's my last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?

  Jeff Clements: [00:42:53] What makes me hopeful about the future? I think what makes me hopeful is all the things I said. You know, I wouldn't be trying to do this and leading American Promise and working for a constitutional amendment if I didn't have abiding hope and Americans and human beings to catch up to the things that have kind of run away from us, get on top of them and make it better. It's not a naive hope that we're going to go through hard times like we always do as human beings. We're not as fast as AI and social media and global internet moves so fast. Humans are kind of slow and trying to figure things out, but it's like the turtle and the rabbit, the tortoise and the hare, where we are the turtle in some ways, but we're catching up. And I do think that humans eventually, we have such capacity to do it right. And so I see it in the new generation and I see it in history. What gives me hope is like we have been through really, really hard times before too, and people come through. People have amazing spirit to move through it. And I don't think we're different in both our scope of problems and our excellent ability to really mess things up. And we're not really different in our ability to unite and accomplish really big things that can help fix it. So I see a lot of reasons for hope. I am a apocaloptimist. I think we're, we're facing some apocalyptic level challenges and struggles from climate to war to everything else. But I see that the optimist part is there, too, that that is the way. That's the human condition. And we're going to get through this and see much better ahead.

  Mila Atmos: [00:44:46] I'm hopeful alongside you, apocaloptimist. I think I'm going to have to use that in the future.

  Jeff Clements: [00:44:52] I'm sure I stole it. So it's all yours, too.

  Mila Atmos: [00:44:55] Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us on Future

  Hindsight.

  Jeff Clements: [00:44:59] Thank you. It's been so good to talk with you.

  Mila Atmos: [00:45:02] Jeff Clements serves as president of American Promise. Next time on Future Hindsight. Sung Yeon Choimorrow of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum joins me to talk about our shared experiences as Asian- American women and how we can gather to build political power.

  Sung Yeon Choimorrow: [00:45:24] You know, I had two incidences where people threw rocks at me and chased me and said, go home and put on a mask. You're spreading coronavirus. Go back to China. All these things. I know so many of us have had that experience and it shouldn't limit us to fighting for protection of our own immediate family community. It should really propel us to think about all the people that live in this country who fear for their lives when they go out in public. That's really for me, ultimately, where we need to land, that we're able to take our particular experience and then to rise up with other people who have had similar experiences to fight together.

  Mila Atmos: [00:46:01] That's next time on Future Hindsight. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.

  The Democracy Group: [00:46:18] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.