Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Why the System’s Rigged—and How to Unrig It - Jeff Clements

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

Jeff Clements is the co-founder and CEO of American Promise. He served twice as Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts, most notably as Chief of the Public Protection and Advocacy Bureau, where he led more than 100 attorneys and staff in critical law enforcement areas, including consumer protection, antitrust, and unfair trade practices. A frequent national speaker and author of a 2014 book called the "definitive guide to overturning Citizens United," Jeff's commentary has appeared in major outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, and Newsweek. Get his 2014 book Corporations Are Not People here: https://amzn.to/48WFKJV Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He is the host of the podcast Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island. 📚 Get a copy of my books: Solana Rising: Investing in the Fast Lane of Crypto ⁠https://amzn.to/43F5Nld⁠From Wall Street to the White House and Back ⁠https://amzn.to/47fJDbv⁠The Little Book of Bitcoin ⁠https://amzn.to/47pWRmh⁠The Little Book of Hedge Funds ⁠https://amzn.to/43LbM83⁠Hopping over the Rabbit Hole ⁠https://amzn.to/3LaykJb⁠Goodbye Gordon Gekko ⁠https://amzn.to/47xrLYs⁠ 🎥 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗮 𝗖𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗻𝘆! ⁠https://www.cameo.com/themooch⁠ 🎙️ Check out my other podcasts: The Rest is Politics US - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@RestPoliticsUS⁠ Lost Boys - ⁠https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYFf6KS9ro1p18Z0ajmXz5qNPGy9qmE8j&feature=shared⁠ SALT - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/SALTTube/featured⁠ 📱 Follow Anthony on Social Media Instagram - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/scaramucci/⁠ X - ⁠https://x.com/Scaramucci⁠ LinkedIn - ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/anscaramucci/⁠ TikTok - ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@ascaramucci?lang=en⁠ YouTube - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@therealanthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For most Americans, not at all. And people know it. We want to fix it. It's going to take a heavy lift. We've got to amend the Constitution. It's basically a battle of power. Can the American people win this fight? And I think we can.

Congress has a 14% approval rating when they poll. This is slightly above Kim Jong, the North Korean dictator, which is slightly above. But people hate the Congress. Yet, if you're an incumbent in the Congress, you have a incumbent in the Congress, you have a little Congress, you have a 95% incumbency success rate. So square that circle for me. It's about the money, basically. So go ahead. Square the circle for me. Even good people going into the system who want to do good things in Congress are stymied because we have a structural, systemic problem of the power of money to prevent the delivery of what the American people are looking for from our Congress.

So you have exactly that problem. You wonder what the 14% are thinking, because most Americans are not getting what we would expect out of our representative government in Congress. And yet, because it's a battle of money and the parties, both parties, are using super PACs and dark money channels, even getting foreign money now coming in to elections, there is a great power to be reelected. And the further up you go, the more control over the money you get in terms of seniority and committee assignments and things like that. The money just completely has corrupted this process. And that's the big divide. What Americans see in the in terms of how the Congress is performing, and yet what happens on Election Day.

Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me now is Jeff Clement. He's the CEO of American Promise. He is also a huge proponent in repealing something that's near and dear to my heart. He's an author of a book about it and several articles about Citizens United, which we're going to get into in a second, Jeff. But it's great to have you here. Let's start with your journey. You've been a lawyer or an advocate and now you lead American promise, why is campaign finance reform the fight that you've decided to get yourself into? Well, Anthony, I think, and thanks for having me on. It's good to see you.

And, you know, I, like a lot of Americans, have watched what's happened to our country and how the money is poured into our political system in these last 15 years. I had something of a front row seat as a lawyer. when I practiced law in Boston a long time, I did a brief in the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case, which struck down the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act back in 2010. I did not think that was going to end well. I were still practicing law, though. So I went out to Montana, Steve Bullock's, the Attorney General at the time.

He's trying to defend laws that the states have had on the books for a long time to prevent unlimited spending in their elections, all the money coming out. what we now see is the dark money super PAC problem. We went in Montana. The Supreme Court strikes that down. So it seemed to me that we as citizens, as Americans, had to get a handle on the money and politics problem if we're going to be able to solve any other problem. And I think that's what we're seeing now. And the issue, though, is constitutional. The Supreme Court says we're not allowed to solve it. Most Americans actually know we have to. But to do that, we need a constitutional amendment. So that's the journey that brought me to campaign finance. I was not a campaign finance won. It's a lawyer representing big companies in Boston or serving in the Attorney General's office. But like a lot of Americans, I saw the problem of money in politics, how it was tearing us apart as a country, how it was preventing us from solving some big problems,

and how it was increasingly leading to a systemic corruption of our system. And I felt like I could do something to help. There's a lot of people that listen into this podcast, many from outside the United States that don't understand the nuances of everything that we're talking about. So I want to set the course for this. I want to talk a little bit about campaign finance. And so basically in January of 2010, Justice Scalia said in the Citizens United case, and I'm paraphrasing, if you have money, it's your First Amendment right to use it as you see fit. You have limitations and direct campaign donations, but you have no limitations if you want to set up a political action committee to support a candidate or to present an idea or to support or fund a policy. Do I have that right, Jeff,

or do I have something wrong about what I'm saying? No, you have it exactly right, Anthony. And I think it's interesting to look at like, why did we get that system? We just had a $20 billion election in 2024, $20 billion. We have had a $100 million Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. super PACs and local council races now. So we have this system exactly because of what you said, which is the Supreme Court essentially made up a rule about the First Amendment, that there's a free speech right to spend money unlimited, as long as you're not doing it directly to the campaigns and you're doing it in the so-called independent, what we now call super PACs ways. No American ever voted to that system. This was not a choice of the American people about how we should fund.

our elections, for 200 years, the First Amendment had nothing to do with money in politics. And we had any corruption laws. The states had them. Federal government had them. The mid-1970s, the court, Supreme Court, case called Buckley v. Vallejo, essentially made up this theory that you described pretty well, which is First Amendment free speech, unlimited money in elections if you've got the money. So we've been on the sort of several decade pathway to where we are now because of a doctrine that was invented. by the lawyers and the Supreme Court that is just failing. It's not protecting free speech of Americans for the most part.

It's corrupting the system. And the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum want to fix it. Okay, but tell us why they want to fix it. Because when I look at the data since January of 2010, the legislative agenda has been wildly skewed towards big business, big food, big pharma. tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare. Hello, Mr. Politician. Let me light you up with PAC money and lobbying and donor money.

That was the book, The Wolfs of Cade Street, that I was referencing. And then what happens is they do exactly what those people want. And the little guy, in the big, beautiful spending bill, the little guy got torched. And the big guy benefited. So am I right about that or am I wrong about that, sir? And if I'm right about that, what can we do about it? Well, you're absolutely right about it. And it's not just, you know, you or me saying this.

You can talk to virtually any American to ask them. This hits home. This is not like the old 1990s, McCain-Feingold, campaign finances, a big bore. This is hitting people where they live. And, you know, reducing money in politics is now the number one priority, according to Pew Research. You know, the Americans ranked it ahead of the economy and terror. after the 2024 election. And the reason is not because, you know,

everybody's sort of walking out on policy. It's because of exactly what you're saying, which is Americans understand most people are not represented in the system. If you have money, if you've got power and can deploy a lot of capital, you can get what you need out of politics. For most Americans, not at all. And people know it.

You know, that's why we're seeing the support we're seeing for how we can fix it. And, you know, the beauty of it, Anthony, you've talked about constitutional amendments before. That is a power that the American people have. We want to fix it. It's going to take a heavy lift. We've got to amend the Constitution. And we got it. It's basically a battle of power of can the American people win this fight? And I think we can. All right. So take us through the process, though, of amending the Constitution. I, like you, I'm an entrepreneur, and I believe we can do things like this, but cynics would say it's pretty hard to amend the Constitution.

And don't give Donald Trump any ideas about amending the Constitution so he can run for a third term. But go ahead, do your best to split that baby. Go ahead. Yeah. So, you know, we set out when we launched American Promise in 2016 to prove the cynics wrong because I and many others had seen all over the country, Americans actually weren't that cynical about this, very cynical about the political process for good reason.

But in terms of our own power to actually do something about it, I think Americans have been looking for this kind of opportunity to do something big because we know the small solutions aren't going to work. So how do you amend the Constitution? We've done it 27 times, 27 times, starting with the Bill of Rights over and over again, we've done this. You need a two-thirds vote in Congress. You need ratification in 38 state legislatures. Now people will ask, you know, the government can't even fund itself today. How is Congress if we're going to vote? two-thirds. Well, it turns out the secret is always the same, since the Bill of Rights all the way to women voting, to the amendments we did in this 1971 to lower the voting age, it's always happened the same way, which is you go to the people in the states. The states start passing formal measures to get behind the amendment. That builds the pressure on Congress. It builds the

political reality that if you want to get elected to Congress, you better support this kind of a constitutional change. That's what we've been doing. And so we now have 23 states that have formally passed measures saying we want a constitutional amendment to put power back in the hands of Americans to limit the power of money in the political system and get our representation and voice back. And now the support is building in Congress. We've got hundreds of members of Congress now on board. We had just brought in a whole bunch of supporters, including state legislatures from the Republican side to Congress to talk to their Republican colleagues about getting behind this and leading this. And so we are proving every day and we invite all Americans. We don't care who you vote for.

We don't care what your party is. You want to join this fight. We're going to get it done. You talk about it. I mean, he wrote a great piece in the Boston Globe where you're drawing a parallel between the American Revolution 250 years ago. in today's finance crisis, you're saying basically this is a second revolution moment. What do you mean by that? Well, you know, it'll be 250 years next July 4th since our revolution began. And it's a continuous theme in American life. In fact, in human life, democracies are rare. Self-government

and freedom is rare. It always tends to collapse into concentrated economic power. And the founders, the framers of our Constitution knew that. That was the struggle against, you know, a monarchy, aristocracy. And we had a chance and we made a very good run of it to prove that human beings can actually be free people governing ourselves and get closer and closer to that promise. That's why we're called American promise of freedom and equality for everybody. But the stakes are high now. And we should just be really clear about that.

We could lose this thing if we're not a deadly serious about what's going on. And the biggest thing is that concentrated economic power. It's getting more and more concentrated. You have hundreds of millions of dollars from individual donors now. And if we don't work to get our government back to the government of the people, we will lose it. So that's what I mean is that it's big stakes. It's a big opportunity, though. The framers gave us this tool of constitutional amendment. It's how we've always used it. And it's,

it's never been easy. It wasn't easy for women to get the right to vote. It wasn't easy when the American people demanded to elect senators. And so, you know, the Bill of Rights wasn't something that was handed to us. The American people demanded it and amended the Constitution. So it's how we've done it. And I think it's time to do it again. The Congress has a 14% approval rating when they pulled. This is a slight. slightly above Kim El-Jung, the North Korean dictator, which is slightly above the people hate the Congress. Yet, if you're an incumbent in the Congress, you have a 95% incumbency success rate. So square that circle for me.

It's about the money, basically. So go ahead. Square the circle for you. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's statistically true. Now, there's always exceptions. People will say, oh, money doesn't always win. But statistically, money almost always does win. And incumbents have a big advantage in raising money because they can give the rewards.

And so that's always a big advantage. The entrenched incumbents is a real problem. And then even good people going into the system who want to do good things in Congress are stymied because we have a structural, systemic problem of the power of money to prevent the delivery of what the American people are looking for from our Congress. So you have exactly that problem. 14% is you wonder what the 14% are thinking because most Americans are not getting what we would expect out of our representative government in Congress. And yet, because it's a battle of money and the parties, both parties are using super PACs and dark money channels, you even getting foreign money now coming in to elections. there is a great power to be reelected. And the further up you go, the more control over the money you get in terms of seniority and committee assignments and things like that.

The money just completely has corrupted this process. And that's the big divide of what Americans see in terms of how the Congress is performing. And yet what happens on election day? You know, the people, I mean, it's just astonishing, staggering to me that there are other countries, democratic systems that won't allow the money in. So you write about corruption being normalized. So let's just go over some of the things. Donors getting government jobs, tax breaks for billionaires, laws drafted by lobbyists, just turn the whole law over to lobbyists and then they try to put it in the congressional register. Do you think Americans don't get it? They don't understand or they're underestimating how money is shaping the laws that govern them? Or do you think they're starting to get it? Or do you think you're still relatively uninformed?

I think Americans get it. I've been blessed Anthony to be all over this country this past 10 years since we launched American Promise. I've been in probably every state. I've talked to Americans across the political spectrum. They come out and they vote for this. We have volunteers standing in the snow. getting signatures on clipboards that come for lobby days. Americans really get that our political system is not going to be able to deliver unless we change how it is funded. And I think the biggest enemy that we have is cynicism and our sense that we're powerless, that an amendment, if it's going to take a constitutional amendment, that's too hard. Or we're too divided. And I got to tell you, I was talking to a Republican in Texas who looked at our map of the 23 states on board. And he sees our, you know, states like New York or California. He says,

wow, you're getting the Democrats. I can't believe they're going to support this. And then we talk to the Democrats and they see, you know, Utah and the Wyoming Senate and strength in Texas and West Virginia on board. And they're saying, wow, you're getting Republicans. So we have to get over the idea that we're too divided to do big things. Our political system can't always deliver that. But when we work together, like on this constitutional amendment we're doing, we over and over again show that we can deliver states red or blue doesn't matter, and we can get the votes in Congress. So I think we need to trust ourselves that we actually have more power than we think, because I think that is what we're most cynical about,

is the question of whether we have the power or whether we're too hopelessly divided that we just can't get this done. So I hope people will get in this. They'll see what we can do and we'll really be able to pull this off. What would be in the amendment? Like what would be the steel trap that would prevent the money influence? What would be the idea? Well, there's no steel trap that will, you know, this isn't like, you know, waving a magic wand and everything's fixed. But the constitutional language is really solid. It fits on a napkin. I'm holding it and show you right here. It's really tight, like all good constitutional language, and it's about power and who has it. That's what the Constitution does. It is not a campaign policy law of, you know, a thousand

pages. It's very simple. It moves the power to the American people, to our state legislators, through our Congress, through our local legislatures, to pass effective rules if they choose about how money is used in the political system. That's the simple version. It's three short sections. And what that does is give us the power to do it. The reason it's not a magic wand is because we'll have to do it. But the judicial overreach, the courts striking down are anti-corruption laws over and over again, that will be over. We will have anti-corruption laws. We will stop foreign money. Up in Maine, that 86% of the voters passed a law saying foreign governments cannot spend money. in Maine's elections. It seems like a no-brainer. The judicial, the courts, federal courts,

struck that down under Citizens United. That law would stand after this amendment. So, you know, people might think, like, oh, we won't be able to pass laws, but that's not true. We keep passing them. We have always done it before, and we've always had limits and any corruption laws until this judicial overreach, and we'll do it again. So that's what the amendment does. It gives us the ability to do it, but we're going to have to do it as a democracy, not only now, but 50 years from now, 100 years from now. That's what this constitutional change is so important for. It gives us a chance. Well, you're an incredible patriot to have this sort of a vision. So let me ask you a visionary

question. If the amendment were to pass, and let's pray that it does, what would politics look like in the United States 10 years from now, in your opinion? Well, it would look very different in the sense. It's, it would, it would, it would, be representative again. We'd have competitive elections. We'd have a lot of debates. I'm from Boston. I know you're from New York. It's, you know, politics ain't being bag in either place. It's not, it's not like we turn into angels. Given the Yankee defeat last night, I almost canceled the podcast on you, but I decided, you know, what am I going to do, you know? Yeah. I'll just say, nice to see the Red Sox winning. But it's not over yet, as you know. So.

These are two tough teams, by the way, but what a great pitching contest last night. Yeah, really, really good to see. Give me some hope. Give me some hope for my fellow citizens, because to me, and I think you've heard me say this is how we got together. I want to end Citizens United, pass a constitutional amendment like this. I also think we need to end the gerrymandering, actually. I think that's another big disaster for the country.

Give me some hope. What's the vision? Well, and this is the hope. Look, when we do constitutional amendments in this country, we do them in bunches. So, you know, we did four amendments between 1960 and 1971. We did four amendments between 1910 and 1920. Those were periods a lot like our own. The wheels were coming off in this country, both times.

The American people rallied. We didn't just do amendments. We passed a whole bunch of laws, too. And so usually it is more than one thing. And we definitely have more than one thing. We got a fix in this country, including gerrymandery. So we get the for our freedom amendment across the finish line, and I think we will in the next few years.

we'll then start passing any corruption laws. We'll take on gerrymandered. We will, the politics will be realligned. It'll be more responsive to the people. And we will see again. And again, it's not, the vision doesn't come from me. It comes from what I see in the American people. And you look historically,

we always go about every 50 years into these periods where it just seems like the country is going to fall apart. And Americans rally and we pull it together. and we come out of the other side, but we never have done it without constitutional change and new constitutional rules and new political alignments. And I think that's what we're going to see in the next decade. And that's the hope that we can actually turn into reality. Well, I want to help you raise your profile on this. I sort of want to help you make this a reality. And this is types of things that we have to do in America. You know, we have 27 amendments

to a 236-year-old document. So as you're pointing out, that would mean an amendment once every eight or so years, yet we've had no amendments since 1993. And that was a procedural one. We both know the real big amendment happened 59 years ago, which is the civil rights amendment. So we are all overdue for these amendments. But this is the sclerosis now in this sort of very tight duopoly

for these ancient leaders just want to sit at the top of this political structure and do very little for the American people and do a lot for themselves in terms of their self-service. It's almost like we had public servants. Now we have public self-servants, you know? It's a little bit of a bummer. But, okay, so we're down to the five words. I went through your writings with my staff.

I'm going to give you a word. I want you to give me a one or two section sentence reaction to the word. Ready? So I say the word freedom. You say what? America. Okay. I say the word trust. Rebuild. Okay.

We know. We got to re-engineer, recreate, right? Yeah. What about the word corruption? You hear the word corruption? Yeah, I'd have to say our American political system right now, and it's systemic. Yeah, it needs to be changed, right? I think everyone looks at it. Something's really wrong. Systems rotten, even if the politicians don't want to face it, the American people have, right? Yeah, that's pervasive. Lincoln once said something. They were arguing over whether or not the Americans were smart. And Lincoln once said, yeah, you guys may not think they're smart, but they've got a good nose. They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement. It was one of his lines. And boy, there's something really rotting right now. I say the word revolution. You say what? I would like to say peaceful. You know, I think the amendment process is how we do. peaceful revolution. But if you don't respond to the constitutional obstruction to freedom,

you know, revolution is Thomas Jefferson said. That's the ultimate right of the people. And I think the, I would like very much to respond peaceful revolution. Right. Well, that's the whole discourse. That's the whole reason for this sort of discourse. That was the whole thought behind the constitutional convention and the federalist papers that you you know, politics. You know, Dick Gephard used to say to me, you know why we have politics, we don't have a war. We're beating each other's brains out, you know. You have the ugliness of politics and the verbal abuse we give each other to save ourselves from physical violence. So I'm with you on that. Okay, I'm going to say the last word, but I'm going to give you the last word.

I say the word future. What do you think about? Well, I think about a lot of things. I think uncertain. We can't predict the future. I think there's reason to be concerned about some of the threats of various kinds. But in the end, I think it is in our hands in a lot of ways to make a contribution to it, to do what we can, where we are. And I think of my kids and my granddaughter, and I know neither you nor I will be here in the future at some point. And what I like- Speak for yourself, Clemens. I'm planning on living for 200, okay? Well, that's good.

I'm like Chuck Grassley. Chuck Grassley's been in the Congress for the last 600 years, okay? Speak for yourself, Clemens. I wish you luck, but I think we have an obligation not only to the past and what Americans did before that we benefit from, but we got to lay some stuff down for you and all those other people who will be here in 200 years. I'm very grateful to the work that you're doing and the dedication. And I'd like to figure out a way to do more with you and perhaps get you over to our conference business and see if we can raise awareness. But this, ladies and gentlemen, you're hearing from Jeff Clement.

He's the CEO, founder of American Promise. And hopefully we'll have you back on the show when we get this amendment passed. We can talk about the positive ramifications of that. But thank you so much for joining our podcast's open book today. Anthony, thank you so much. Love what to do and appreciate the opportunity to be here with you.