Fourteen days to go, team! We’re counting down to the first Democratic presidential primary debate, and since today is the deadline to close out contributions books for the FEC, I thought we could take a gander at Sanders’s take on campaign finance reform, and generally, how he’s doing in the money race.

It’s been about five years since the Supreme Court freed us all from shackles of ethics in government. In that time, the price of elections has gotten so high that even the slightly-poorer-than-Croesus are complaining that they don’t get to call the shots quite as much as they used to. According to one political fundraiser, it could cost as much as $5 billion to elect our next president. With that amount of money, you could pay the combined payroll of all 30 Major League Baseball teams and have enough left over to launch two NASA space shuttles.

That’s absurd. And it’s a problem.

There are a lot of reasons why Congress is somewhere between telemarketers and Nickelback in the list of things America hates. But it might have something to do with the fact that most Americans think money in politics is a problem.

I have to confess my own bias in this conversation. I consider myself a civil libertarian and a free speech absolutist. Among my heroes I count Nadine Strossen, the former president of the ACLU and a devout apologist of the Citizens United decision. I, like her, think that political speech must be as free as possible from restrictions. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that we get to advocate our political preferences.

But (to put it as Bernie might) there is something fundamentally wrong about a system that allows billionaires to buy our government.

From my perspective, the problem needs to be tackled in three ways. First, we need legal solutions; second, we need to use technology more effectively; and third, we need a cultural revolution.

The good news is that Bernie embodies all three.

On the legal front, Bernie has introduced a constitutional amendment that would clarify that human rights are human rights and that filing Form LLC-1 (Articles of Organization, California Limited Liability Companies) with the appropriate state agency does not confer upon the duly appointed corporate stakeholders the right to buy politicians. He has also co-sponsored a bill that would  require organizations to disclose where they’re getting their money from. And he has said he will only nominate justices to the Supreme Court if they will overturn Citizens United. (Quick side note: I especially appreciated this headline on CNN: “Bernie Sanders has a Supreme Court litmus test.” Come on, CNN – I depend on your breathless sensationalism to keep me going.)

I could bore you to tears with my analysis of Citizens United (for one, it’s not actually the problem – Speechnow.org v. FEC was actually the catalyst for super pacs; John Stuart Mill proved that censorship harms both individual and communal development, etc.). But the frank reality is that we have an interest – a real, immediate interest – in ensuring that our leaders are responsive to us. Under the regime established by the Citizens United decision, we have no way of meeting that interest, because the Supreme Court has decided that we don’t have that interest at all. That is wrong both as a matter of constitutional law and as a matter of normativity.

But beyond the legal front, I suspect we’re getting to the point where technology is increasingly making money irrelevant. I see headlines like this all the time: “The next political battleground: your phone.” I personally know of a research team here in Berkeley that is working on building online tools that would essentially eliminate the need of pollsters (who are absurdly expensive). And more than that, we increasingly rely less on the kinds of advertising that cost the most amount of money in campaigns. Here’s from an article about conning millenials into buying things:

Millennials communicate with each other far more than any advertising campaign can. When trying to figure out whether something is worth buying, millennials will go to their friends and social networks to see what people think. They use this collective filter to sort out research and other word-of-mouth style information when making decisions.

And here at Bay Area for Bernie, we use Slack (an instant messaging tool with the hideously sarcastic tagline “be less busy”), email, Facebook, Twitter, this blog, the Daily Kos – all things that can be used for no money or, when we do pay, very little.

Which brings me to my third point: People are saying enough is enough. We don’t want politicians who are already bought and paid for. We want, by a wide margin, super pacs out of our elections – 69 to 25 percent. We think, by a wide margin, that money influences politics too much – 84 to 15 percent. That holds true for Republicans and Democrats (80 percent versus 90 percent). We’re done with it.

And Bernie has shown us how it can be done. Don’t take money from corporations. Don’t let super pacs campaign for you. Ask for help from ordinary people. Show that you have a back bone. Disarm unilaterally if that’s what you have to do.

It’s working, and it will continue to work so long as we keep the pressure on our leaders to, well, lead.

You can read more about Bernie’s positions on money in politics here.