Jennifer Lawrence Is Going to Fix Democracy

Jennifer Lawrence Is Going to Fix Democracy

Fans of democracy, rest easy, Jennifer Lawrence is here to save it! We can all go home and relax, J-Law has this. The actress told Entertainment Tonight she was going to take a year off of acting in order to fix democracy, so I guess she’s got this, we can go home, democracy is saved.

“I’m going to take the next year off,” the 27-year-old actress revealed. “I’m going to be working with this organization as a part of Represent.Us … trying to get young people engaged politically on a local level.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with partisan [politics],” Lawrence said of her involvement with the non-profit organization. “It’s just anti-corruption and stuff trying to pass state by state laws that can help prevent corruption, fix our democracy.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure our democracy is broken. We definitely have a gerrymandering problem and in concert with first-past-the-post voting it’s resulted in a system where the party that got 49% of votes for the House of Representatives has 55% of seats and the party that got 48% has 45% of the seats or states where one party wins every state-wide election but their state legislature and House of Representatives delegation is controlled by the other party. I was pretty sure Lawrence was going to ignore this and focus on some empty platitudes about “coming together”.

But when I looked at the Represent.us homepage to see what the group Lawrence is affiliated with wants to do, it does specifically address those issues, calling for ending gerrymandering, voting on preferences like Australia and taking big money out of politics. These are things that everyone but those with a vested interest in maintaining the current status quo can agree on. Which is to say it’ll never happen because both Republicans and Democrats in government are primarily concerned with protecting their own careers and put doing the right thing for the country is a distant second. Like very distant. If this was the Oscars, personal enrichment would be Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and the health of the nation would be The Emoji Movie.

Lawrence got her campaign to save democracy off to a great start by pissing all of the U.K. off at the BAFTAs today by appearing to insult Joanna Lumley, who is basically second only to The Queen on the list of people the British will defend to the death. Lawrence told HuffPo that the incident, where she told Lumley her introduction was “a bit much” was a joke between the two of them. She then presumably flew back to work with a think tank on making policy. Because she’s taking the year off to fix democracy. She’s like Shia LeBeouf, she’s not famous anymore, she’s a geopolitical strategist.

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