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...would have loved it if there had been more of a reaction and more pressure put on Sudan. But I also think there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive in Darfur who wouldn't be if it hadn't been for that public movement. It raised the costs to Sudan so that the Sudanese military or the Janjaweed couldn't attack some of the refugee camps. And it led the UN to feed some of these people and avert starvation. It didn't work nearly as well as it could have, but it was vastly better than...
...more important consequence of the decision has been a remarkably vibrant discussion of how best to get money out of politics. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has called for a constitutional amendment reversing the decision combined with public financing of elections. Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Senator Chuck Schumer have proposed requiring corporations to subject all political spending to a shareholder vote, which would presumably cause such spending to grind to a halt. Yale professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest denying federal contracts to corporations that engage in political spending, and Ackerman and Congressman David Wu have formulated...
These proposals’ prospects vary widely. Both of Lessig’s are subject to supermajority requirements in the Senate–67 votes for an amendment, and 60 to break a filibuster on public financing–where minority leader Mitch McConnell has been a staunch opponent of all campaign finance reform efforts, and so chances are dim. Same for Ackerman and Wu’s bill, the cost of which should alienate swing Republicans. Van Hollen and Schumer’s and Ackerman and Ayres’ more modest suggestions could attract more support, though it?...
...question is whether they’re enough. Experts have for years tried and failed to prove a relationship between the strength of campaign finance laws and levels of corruption and public trust in government. Some of this is no doubt due to the subtleties of how money infiltrates the political process. Outright corruption, though real, is less common than implicit quid pro quos or even looser expectations of reciprocity. However, if the bills have failed to reduce corruption, which is easier to study and identify, how likely is it that they have significantly clamped down on means of influence...
Held from Feb. 13-15, the tournament consisted of five sub-tournaments: the policy debate competition, the public forum competition, speech competitions, the Lincoln-Douglas competition, and the Harvard National Student Congress...