History
Change Congress was officially launched on March 20, 2008 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. when Lessig held a press conference sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation.
Lessig had considered a run for Congress in 2008 under the Draft Lessig movement, but decided against it. An exploratory committee and a private pollster determined that there was "no possible way" for Lessig to defeat Jackie Speier, and that Lessig would lose in a "big way". Lessig conveyed that while he did not fear losing, he did fear that losing would be harmful to effectively displaying the importance of the Change Congress movement.
Change Congress's main aim is what he sees as "institutional corruption" in Congress, as opposed to cases of personal financial corruption and bribery, whereby the influence of money has an uneven, distracting, and detrimental pull on the United States Congress.
Change Congress operates in three phases: get candidates to embrace the reform platform; build a wiki-based map of reform candidates; and financially support the reformers. The first phase is similar to Lessig's alternative copyright strategy campaign, Creative Commons. As of January 9, 2009 this three stage strategy has disappeared from the Change Congress website as the site is now dedicated to the Donor Strike campaign. There is no indication whether or not this strategy will be reimplemented or not.
On November 16, 2011, the Change Congress, Fix Congress First, and Rootstrikers projects became part of the United Republic organization.
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