Let’s take a look at a small sideshow act to this year’s Electoral College circus: Lawrence Lessig’s Amazing Disappearing Faithless Electors.
The Harvard professor, Creative Commons founder, and all around political gadfly boldly declared a few days before the election that “at least 20 Republican members of the Electoral College may not cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump.”
That’s just 18 more than the 2 that actually flipped. One wonders how Lessig arrived at his grossly inflated count, assuming it wasn’t plucked out of thin air or his nether regions.
Indeed, Lessig spent much of the 2016 election cycle making mystifying moves and puzzling pronouncements. In August 2015, he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination for President, raised $1 million to do so, pledged that if elected, he would pass a campaign finance “reform” (including a basket of liberal activist proposals, including limiting free speech by overturning Citizens United, eliminating Gerrymandering, introducing ranked voting, etc.) and then resign. Two months later he walked back the resignation promise, and shortly after that, after being excluded from the debates and unable to obtain any traction in the race, dropped out entirely.
So instead of Lessig, Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, the poster child for the campaign finance abuses and conflicts of interest Lessig railed against. Indeed, Lessig himself mentioned that the Clinton Foundation was why Clinton could never make campaign finance reform central to her campaign, and said that Clinton’s big money was deadly to the cause of reform. Indeed, his criticism of Clinton’s big money ties to lobbyists goes back at least to the 2008 Presidential race. (Note: That piece criticizing Clinton is from the Wayback Machine, as Lessig appears to have scrubbed the piece from his own website.) He also noted that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Hillary’s hand-picked head of the DNC, did everything she could to keep him out of polls and debates.
Believe it or not, Lessig was actually enthusiastic when Donald Trump entered the race, and even talked about running on a third-party Presidential ticket with him:
“Donald Trump is the biggest gift to the movement for reform since the Supreme Court gave us Citizens United,” Lessig told Politico.com, referring to Trump’s boasts that he’s given big sums to candidates in both parties and then called in favors as needed. “What he’s saying is absolutely correct, the absolute truth. He has pulled back the curtain.”
“I’ll make a promise,” Lessig said in Politico’s report, after stating he would not “rule out a third-party run with Trump” should that offer be made. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.”
In light of all that, it’s strange that Lessig would not only throw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of special interest money in politics, but lie about faithless electors in a last-ditch attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency.
Then again, if I were to pick a locale for the most intense cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Harvard University faculty lounge would probably rank near the top of the list…
Tags: 2016 Presidential Race, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrats, DNC, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral College, Harvard, Hillary Clinton, Lawrence Lessig, Trump Derangement Syndrome