‘Government is Ours’: Actress Jennifer Lawrence Bolsters Plan to ‘Save America’

A newly formed political campaign seeks to fix the US political system by adopting anti-corruption laws in many states, which will then take them to a federal level, circumventing opposition by Congress.

Hollywood actress-turned political activist Jennifer Lawrence, known for her role in Hunger Games movies, released a video on 27 February, promoting a new plan to "save" the US from political corruption, which includes gerrymandering and lobbying.

Speaking in a video made on behalf of a political campaign called RepresentUs, Lawrence says the entire political system in the US is broken.

"We are witnessing a total political system failure in America," she says.

She underscores that the issue is not limited to Democrats or Republicans, and that both parties are equally susceptible to it.

She further proceeds to cite a 2014 study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, which determined that, no matter how strong or weak public support for the issues is — be it a 0 percent or 100 percent approval rating — Congress has the same 30 percent chance of passing a corresponding law. This, Lawrence says, makes public opinion on anything in America "statistically irrelevant."

The reason behind this effect lies in politicians' constant race to raise funds for winning re-elections.

"In order to win a seat in a Senate in some races, you have to raise $45,000 every single day," she says.

In the meantime, only "0.05 percent of Americans give more than $10,000 to politics," making politicians dependent on a small clique of "billionaires and groups of interest."

Other problems with US political system, according to Lawrence, include lobbyists who effectively write laws themselves and then pay the congressmen to pass them; the Democrat-Republican duopoly which makes third parties' participation mostly impossible; and gerrymandering, which allows politicians to "draw their own voting districts" so that the voting outcomes benefit them.

The system can be fixed, because this idea is supported by the overwhelming majority of people on both sides of political spectrum. Congress, however, is naturally unwilling to fix it, because it benefits from the status quo.

To solve these issues, the campaign calls for a series of measures that can be passed on a state level, citing the acceptance of several policy ideas — including women's votes, interracial marriage and same-sex marriage — that made quantum leaps to the federal level once enough states adopted them. According to the US Constitution, US states have the freedom to decide how elections happen, which also extends to federal elections, the group says.

Therefore, adopting a set of measures that will supposedly eliminate corruption in a large amount of states will allow them to circumvent Congress and fix the political system on a national level, the video says.