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Jeff Clements

Jeff Clements is a founder and president of American Promise, which is uniting Americans to combat systemic corruption and protect our voice, votes, communities and future with a For Our Freedom Amendment to the US Constitution. The amendment authorizes limits and regulation of the deployment of money to influence local, state and federal elections. Jeff has been as a partner at a large law firm based in Boston and in his own firm. He also has served as Assistant Attorney General and Chief of the Public Protection in the Attorney General’s Office in Massachusetts. Among other major litigation, Clements filed briefs in the Supreme Court and other courts in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and other cases defending anti-corruption laws. He is the author of Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money & Global Corporations and his work has appeared in various media. Clements also is a founder of Whaleback Partners LLC, which provides sustainable financing to businesses in the local agriculture economy.
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    Civic Ed

    Imperfection and perseverance

    Jeff Clements
    May 20, 2022
    Statue of William Henry Seward

    A bronze statue honors William Seward, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state and a governor of New York, in Manhattan.

    Epics/Getty Images

    Clements is the president of American Promise, a nonprofit advocate for amending the Constitution to allow more federal and state regulation of money in politics.

    A couple of years ago, I went to Anchorage to give the William Henry Seward Lecture at the University of Alaska. I thought of this visit recently, and of Seward, when I heard that for his alleged views and actions about “manifest destiny” and American expansion, Seward deserves condemnation and that statues honoring him should be dismantled.

    Seward is high on any list of great secretaries of state. Side by side with President Abraham Lincoln, he helped win the Civil War by keeping the European powers from recognizing the Confederacy and prevented their intervention in the conflict. He navigated the 13th Amendment across the finish line in Congress to end slavery. The traitorous conspiracy that killed Lincoln also gravely injured Seward that same evening of April 15, 1865.

    Recovered, Seward returned to office in 1867 to negotiate the purchase of Alaska from Russia. It was the largest addition of territory to the United States since President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Today, and even at the time, one might be uneasy (to say the least) about a massive land transaction between two continental powers where neither considered the wishes of the people who had lived in the land for many generations.

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    It is good to know true history. We can learn to do better. But to the extent that America has moved ever closer to the full promise of equal rights and constitutional democracy (and we have), we owe a huge debt to William Henry Seward. His legacy may be mixed but it is the legacy of all Americans, across all the frontiers, not just the last frontier of Alaska, and across time to today.

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    The battle of Ukraine involves the American homefront

    Jeff Clements
    March 25, 2022
    The battle of Ukraine involves the American homefront

    An activiist demonstrates solidarity with Ukraine at New York's Grand Central Station on March 23.

    Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

    Clements is the president of American Promise, a nonprofit advocate for amending the Constitution to allow more federal and state regulation of money in politics.

    Events of these challenging years have forced Americans to face uncomfortable truths about ourselves, our government and our place in the world. We are reminded that constitutional democracy is not the default human condition; it is fragile and rare in the world and in human history. The aspiration for freedom is universal, but government of tyrants or oligarchs is far more common than government of the people. Free people and democratic societies that won’t defend themselves from external or internal dangers don’t survive.

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