When it comes to making government work, Lawrence Lessig sees a straightforward solution. The country, he says, needs to overhaul the way elections are funded. The challenge, of course, is making that happen.
Lessig will discuss this challenge at a February 2 lunch from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. with NationSwell Council members in New York City. We hope you will join the conversation by tweeting your questions before then by using the #NSCouncil hashtag or joining the live conversation on Twitter.
Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, launched the Mayday PAC as a “counterintuitive experiment” to tackle the problem of money in politics. In phase two of this experiment, which was first tested in the 2014 midterm elections, Mayday PAC is looking to its supporters to recruit members of Congress who will support reform. As The New Yorker put it in a recent profile, “Lawrence Lessig wants to reform campaign finance. All he needs is fifty billionaires.”
In his TED talk, Lessig says that only by spreading funder influence beyond the “tiniest slice of America” can we restore the idea of a government dependent on the people alone. 
“We have lost that republic,” he says. “All of us have to act to get it back.”