> The answer is to outlaw lobbyists, it would fix a lot of problems. That, and enact term limits for Congress. That will fix even more.
When you think there are simple answers to big problems it's generally because you don't actually understand the problem.
How would you outlaw lobbyists? Setting aside the fact that it would be unconstitutional, do you think it should be illegal for you to air your grievances to elected officials? That seems to fly directly in the face of democracy. Or should it only be that businesses aren't allowed to lobby? What about a small business that is being unfairly impacted by regulations, or being run out of business by a large company abusing a loophole in the law? Seems like them not having a voice in government would be a path to oligopoly or monopoly. If that's ok, where's the line in which business is allowed to lobby, and how do you keep a large business from simply hiring a small business to lobby on their behalf?
> 1. Anyone who wishes to "lobby" congressional candidates or congresspersons must register their financial interests
Under the terms of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, anyone who spends 20% or more of their work time lobbying the Federal government already has to register themselves, and disclose both the clients they lobby on behalf of and any expenses they incur as part of their lobbying activities. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_Disclosure_Act_of_199... for more information.)
Many states also have similar laws in place regarding lobbying of state officials, though obviously the details will vary depending on what state you're in.
> 0. Lobbying is a right, but one that can only be exercised by individual citizens, not corporations.
So charities and environmental groups can't lobby? Lobbying for them means designating a representative. How is that any different from what corporations are doing? They just happen to have deeper pockets.
Furthermore, the fact that they have deep pockets is actually important. It means they reflect an important aspect of the economy, so ignoring their interests could also have detrimental economic effects.
> Furthermore, the fact that they have deep pockets is actually important. It means they reflect an important aspect of the economy, so ignoring their interests could also have detrimental economic effects.
This embeds the idea that someone making more money has a right to a larger voice than someone that doesn't.
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In my "if the world were simple" dreams I'd say something like "every voter can spend $200 - any lobbying group or corp can spend that $200 IN THEIR NAME, but then no one else, including that voter, can. Corps/groups can still raise money and represent their members (who don't have to each spend that money) but it doesn't make a small group of wealthy voters look like a big group of voters. The groups/corps would have to make sure they represented the views of their members, or those members would start revoking their permissions."
Of course, the world isn't that simple, but that sums up my views on money in politics.
> This embeds the idea that someone making more money has a right to a larger voice than someone that doesn't
I don't see how. I just said their opinion shouldn't be ignored, which is what the OP was suggesting by banning corporations which represent large groups of shareholders and employees.
>This embeds the idea that someone making more money has a right to a larger voice than someone that doesn't.
No, it's a signal that you might be proposing an economically destructive policy. You're not required to listen to lobbyists or take their suggestions.
>So charities and environmental groups can't lobby?
They could create form letters for their members to email their representatives.
Some charities I belong to operate this way.
Obviously Comcast could do this too but I don't think they'd be successful getting real people to lobby on their behalf.
>Furthermore, the fact that they have deep pockets is actually important. It means they reflect an important aspect of the economy, so ignoring their interests could also have detrimental economic effects.
The fact that they have deep pockets means that they can broadcast their message more easily so they have an inbuilt advantage. There's no reason not to compensate for that.
>So charities and environmental groups can't lobby?
Incase you didn’t know, all tax-exempt charitable organisations are already severely limited in how they’re allowed to engage in politics. They’re never allowed to endorse candidates, or directly or indirectly campaign for them.
No, but the union could ask their members to lobby on behalf of themselves toward a common goal. As long as that lobbying isn't a requirement for membership or influence in the org, I see no problem with that.
> 0. Lobbying is a right, but one that can only be exercised by individual citizens, not corporations.
A "corporation" isn't a thing that exists in the world. They don't have mouths, and can't speak, so it makes no sense to outlaw their ability to use the mouth that they don't have.
There are people in the world. As well as groups of people.
A corporation is merely the pural of person. Each person in that corporation, whether employee, or owner, should have the same speech rights as any other individual.
This argument is facile. There's an obvious and clear difference between a person representing their own interests and a person paid by a corporation specifically to advance its interests.
It's not a difference which is easy to legislate without unintended consequences (people's own interests frequently overlap with those of their employer, and most people with informed opinions on the implications of a policy are in employed in areas not unlinked to that policy).
What is facile is to argue that a law which simply bans corporations from hiring people describing themselves as lobbyists or government relations professionals will have any real world effect, or to pretend that there are no possible downsides from legislation which might prevent organisations like the EFF from existing or ensure that healthcare professionals are unable to make representations about healthcare to politicians.
It would be entirely possible to write campaign finance laws so that organizations like the EFF can only be funded by private donations and not by corporations, if they want to make campaign contributions or run "issue" advertising. I don't really see what unintended consequences you're referring to. The problem with getting corporate money out of politics is that the people getting it wouldn't like that, not that the law would be difficult to craft in a fair way.
Just outlaw legislation written by lobbyists. If Congressmen have to do the actual work of writing, it would end up being simpler than the specially crafted 500pg bills nobody reads. It isn't too much to ask elected officials to do the work they signed up for.
Something that stuck with me from law school was that frequently when students raised the point that a law could be written far more simply, the professor would walk through the language they suggested and basically always the simplest formulation was absolutely shot through with loopholes, and as you close the obvious loopholes one by one, you end up with language that looks just like the statute as written, or you end up with a law that doesn’t accomplish the same thing.
What you are saying is quite interesting: basically if lawmakers need to have the skill of writing laws, then it means that they must be very educated in law matters. Lawyers, basically, which makes a lot of sense. But on the other hand if you restrict congressmanship (is that a word?) to such a small and biased sample of the population, how are they supposed to understand the actual problems of the population at large?
It is the very problem of representative democracy: elected officials need to form an elite of superior intelligence and ability to comprehend the world, yet at the same time be firmly grounded in the reality of everyday people to understand their problems and represent them...
Would it really be unconstitutional? The right of petition cannot abrogated, but surely one can outlaw the exchange of political favors for money or other forms of compensations.
Yes, actually showing that political favors were exchanged for money is tricky, but still, it's better than nothing and it changes the whole discussion from "it's the system" to "who's doing something bad and hiding it?".
I guess you could say lobbying legalizes a portion of what is understood as corruption. (Not everything, obviously.) Under the guise of "defending special interests", or something similar.
You shouldn't be allowed to finance people whose decision you stand to profit from.
I guess the only "simple" way to solve this is to outlaw the private financing of politicians and their campaign. It should all be public money. Not that easy to operationalize (almost nothing of interest is), but feasible, desirable and fair I reckon.
I'm saying that "airing grievances" "for money" has prior art. I'm a busy person, and the opinion stated says that it should be illegal for me to hire a person to represent my views before, say, a congressperson. Or it should be illegal to hire a person more eloquent than myself to state my case; a professional, as it were. We hire lawyers because navigating the law is difficult. Should we not also be allowed to hire professionals as we take part in the making of those same laws?
In small claims court you can't be represented by a lawyer for example. Both - being represented and representing - aren't constitutional rights. So it is up to society whether to allow or prohibit it in various cases.
I still fail to see your point. A lobbyist still has a fundamentally different job than a lawyer, and they both use fundamentally different tactics to reach fundamentally different goals.
> Or it's pretty obvious and some people are intentionally dense.
It doesn't seem at all obvious to me how you would outlaw lobbying - in general or by specific types of companies. Do you think I'm being intentionally dense?
Maybe most large problems aren't actually trivial, and the reason they don't get solved by message board suggestions is because those suggestions wouldn't work. Just a thought.
If you disagree, why don't you walk me through your proposal in a less handwavey manner. The devil is in the details - surely you can agree that there are a variety of challenges at each step of the way?
> If you disagree, why don't you walk me through your proposal in a less handwavey manner
You could say companies aren't allowed to spend money to intentionally target or influence elected representatives.
Sure it's hardly defined at all, and maybe I spent 30 seconds on it. But if a jury of my peers unanimously think an exec was trying to influence a representative, then why not levy a huge fine? As far as the legality, is there anything interstate commerce doesn't encompass?
> When you think there are simple answers to big problems it's generally because you don't actually understand the problem.
Funny. Most complex problems have simple solutions. It takes lot more effort to do it, but the simple solutions tend to stick around the longest. This is based on 10 years of work exp in top tech companies :-)
The only place when simple solutions don't work is when people have other vested interests.
God forbid we think outside the realm of what the Founding Fathers wrote down.
> fly directly in the face of democracy
Except the U.S. has long been classified as a flawed democracy.
The problems you list can "simply" be solved with a comission akin to the FTC. A small business can complain to said comission which would solve the matter.
A representative republic is the system we have in the US, which is by definition not a democracy. They're two very different concepts, and they are mutually exclusive.
This is basic civics. It's taught, or I hope it's still taught, in grade school. It's not controversial, it's not surprising, it's fact.
Not siding one way or the other, that will definitely limit the amount of expertise that comes with a Congressman/Congresswoman.
Think about it, it takes at least six months for us to learn our jobs, they have to learn about hundreds of things ongoing in the government before they can make informed decisions. You then even rely more on lobbyists (or "experts") who at least generally know what they are talking about.
Point being, I think this issue is a hell of a lot more complex than it seems.
Lobbyist being experts is something I've never heard before. They are salesmen, do you want to get your nutrient information from a McDonald's commercial? It may save you time but isn't really helpful.
Though there is a distinction between corporate lobbying and e.g. the EFF: corporations lobby for their own interests, the EFF does it for everyone. Besides that, if company lobbying did not exist, the EFF wouldnt exist because there would be no one to work against. The EFF was specificly founded to defend the peoples interests against corporations.
You need to be more pedantic. The EFF is a 501(c)(3) organization, and that's a type of corporation.
If you want to outlaw lobbying by for-profit corporations, then they'll just create subsidiary lobbying organizations. The NRA is a 501(c)(4), which is also a tax exempt non-profit designation, and realistically it serves primarily as a lobbying group for gun manufacturers.
That's a fair point. Though while they may not be exclusively a lobbying front for gun manufacturers, I think it's still fair to say they serve that purpose.
If you ignore the highly politicized lobbyists, you'll find that expertise is one of the main things lobbyists provide to politicians.
"We know you don't have time to dig deep. Here is a summary of the research, and our recommendations based on it."
Edit: I also once had a fairly cynical view of lobbyists. But then some people I know went to work for lobby groups after they graduated. When I looked into the types of lobby groups they went to, they were fairly impressive. Things like advocating for homeless, advocating for people without health care, etc.
> Lobbyist being experts is something I've never heard before.
Lobbyists often are, and, whether or not they themselves are, are almost invariably supported by, domain experts.
> They are salesmen
Yeah, but they are salesmen who do the public policy equivalent of technical sales, and it's a field where selectivity is high because you are selling to a very small number of very high value customers.
Lobbyists will bring in the "expert" with necessary credentials who can "advice" on the finer points of legislation, give talking points etc. They might not directly project expertise
I am not sure they have the required expertise anyway, most of the elected politicians have zero understanding of tech for example, many of them never even used email, the woeful questioning of zukerberg showed how clueless they are.
Career bureaucrats are the ones who run many of hundred things that run the government. Politicians need to provide direction and reflect the will of the people. Hardly need to career politicians for that. Younger representation is critical to make sure the voice of youth is being heard.
Do you think any politician understands the needs of the millennial generation ? Any long term policy like say education enacted now is going to impact the future generations more than anyone else.
It's not like we're blindly considering something that has never been tried. California enacted term limits, and there were studies[1] as to the effect it had. Information as to some aspects of it is but a click or search away. Here's some highlights of the summary I linked to:
In both houses, committees now screen out fewer bills assigned to them and are more likely to see their work rewritten at later stages. The practice of“hijacking” Assembly bills—gutting their contents and amending them thoroughly in the Senate—has increased sharply. As a body, the Legislature is less likely to alter theGovernor’s Budget, and its own budget process neither encourages fiscal discipline nor links legislators’ requests to overall spending goals. In addition, legislative oversight of the executive branch has declined significantly.
...legislators are learning more quickly than their precursors, but that frequent changes in the membership and leadership of legislative committees, especially in the Assembly, diminish their expertise in many important policy areas. Many committees lack the experience to weed out bad bills and to ensure that agencies are acting efficiently and in accordance with legislative intent.
That said, overall the summary finds that the effects of term limits were neither as good as proponents hoped or as bad as detractors feared.
I think it is, like most problems. I tend to favor the idea of term limits but while discussing this with a friend who used to work in politics, he made a good point I thought. His experience is that the staff change is the real problem in a political change. The ramp up time for a new staff is very long, the politician would not be able to get much done until the staff figures everything out, then it would be time to change again depending on the limit.
I've often thought each section of legislation should have a byline that lists every person who had a hand in drafting it since most legislation is now written by lobbyists and not the actual legislators.
For example, H.R. 5323, Derivatives Fairness Act drafted on behalf of CitiGroup.
2 terms in the Senate is 12 years. 4 terms in the House is 8 years. There will be plenty of knowledge transfer between junior and senior members in that time.
I would argue the amount of expertise will go up with term limits: people who still have fresh memories of living outside the government bubble can actually make a lot of difference.
Moreover, it works the other way round as well. If, say, a teacher returns back to school after a term in state senate, the school will get access to invaluable wealth of knowledge of government internals.
I would argue that congresspeople are not experts in general in most (all in some cases?) domains, and make generally totally uninformed decisions that are designed to pander to a political base.
And lobbyists aren't experts either, they're simply paid to bribe people to get a result.
> that will definitely limit the amount of expertise that comes with a Congressman/Congresswoman.
The expertise they have is in glad-handing, personally enriching themselves, and playing political games. They're certainly not subject matter experts in anything outside that realm. Term limits don't have to mean that we're losing out on this valuable "expertise", it could be something as simple as "retire at 65", you know, like everyone else in every other industry aspires to do.
==They're certainly not subject matter experts in anything outside that realm.==
Except many of them clearly are. Bill Foster worked as a particle physicist at Fermilab for 22 years [1]. Sean Casten started and sold an energy recycling company called Recycled Energy Development [2]. Those are two examples just from suburban Chicago. Try not to let political cynicism cloud reality.
How many? And I think it's particularly telling that the folks you managed to find are newbies to the political arena and not career politicians, a class of individuals that can only exist thanks to the absence of term limits. Also telling is that in Foster's case, his expertise is completely useless in a political context. Let me know when he gets around to drafting a major particle physics bill.
I'm not sure, I provided two examples to prove your assertion wrong. Surely, you can find more if you look.
== And I think it's particularly telling that the folks you managed to find are newbies to the political arena and not career politicians==
Can you name a career field where experience is considered a bad thing? Does your career have term limits, would people be more effective at it if they did? The free market seems to pay specialists more than generalists, due to higher perceived value.
Politics is the only place I have ever heard this argument. Foster was first elected in 2008, so he's hardly a "newbie".
==Also telling is that in Foster's case, his expertise is completely useless in a political context. Let me know when he gets around to drafting a major particle physics bill.==
Huh? The House holds the purse strings and decides funding on things like the Energy Department, which funds Fermilab, or NASA. I think he might have something to add in that arena.
You made a claim that lobbyists are not subject matter experts. Another commenter refuted that claim with counterexamples. Now you are moving the goalposts and demanding quantifiable data about how many lobbyists have expertise in some domain.
I think it's time for you to counter by defending your thesis, that lobbyists generally don't have domain expertise, instead of demanding increasingly more evidence.
The world is a crazy complex place. Like them or not, lobbyists are useful for helping lawmakers understand the implications of laws, and eliminating lobbyists (setting aside the impracticality of such a task) and imposing term limits (thus reducing the level of institutional knowledge in Congress) would mean that lawmakers would often be flying completely blind.
There is of course a middle ground between no terms limits and super short term limits. The longest serving member of congress made it over 59 years - I think most everyone would agree that's excessive.
So let them get bought off instead? I refuse to believe that the only two options are widespread graft or poor ignorant lawmakers who have no other way of obtaining information.
We could also elect people with integrity, as unlikely as that seems in our current environment.
My point is that hard problems rarely have simple solutions, as much as populist politicians might like to pretend otherwise. “Ban lobbyists” is a great soundbite but would introduce all sorts of negative consequences (like driving them underground and introducing more potential for corruption).
> That, and enact term limits for Congress. That will fix even more.
Do you have a citation for this? Because term limits would mean that elected officials need to plan for what to do after they hit their limit. That could make them even more beholden to corporate lobbyists, who have the resources to offer termed-out lawmakers jobs or other benefits after they leave office.
One unintended consequence in my district is that we have two guys who trade seats back and forth between state senate and state house. They're totally interchangeable and neither one ever talks to their constituents (well, the ones who don't write big checks anyhow)
Lobbying would be toothless without campaign contributions. Money on the table is the only reason why lobbyists get meetings and average citizens get a full voicemail inbox and templated auto-response.
I don't know how pedantic you're intending to be here; what do you consider a "campaign contribution". If you use the traditional definition of a "campaign contribution", that is, money given to the candidate to be spent on election campaigns, then this is completely false; lobbyists cannot give any more money to campaigns than regular people can.
The power of large lobbies is more closely related to the fact that they represent a large number of constituents who donate and vote (approximately) as a block.
I don't follow. Lobbying is paid for by corporations and organizations. The financial conflicts of interests that this poses on legislators is separate from campaign contributions. For instance, a legislator cannot use the latter for anything but campaign expenses [0]. But a legislator, after leaving office, can go to work for a friendly corporation (though there are laws requiring a "cooling off" period before they can directly lobby Congress).
No, for the same reason that astroturfing online about sending the troops into south side Chicago isn't a campaign contribution; it's not exchanging money for influence.
With your example, Hillary Clinton would be a billionaire for doing that inane dance on Ellen.
Or we could elect people who can't be bought by lobbyists because they have principles. I was taught in poli-sci classes that the single biggest issue wasn't so much the principles of law makers as it was their capabilities and their staff. Most law-makers are incapable of doing the (sometimes overwhelming amount of) work, and rely on hiring professionals to work as a team to review law and then tell the law-makers how to vote. If none of them are savvy about lobbyists, they can easily be fooled by groups that come to them to push an agenda. We need smart congresspeople who can do the work and also can hire a competent and principled staff.
> Or we could elect people who can't be bought by lobbyists because they have principles.
Yeah except they all say they can't be bought and paid for. And they probably believe it for a while. Decades in an environment where graft runs rampant will change a person though.
> Or we could elect people who can't be bought by lobbyists because they have principles
Don't see how idealism and fantasies of heroes is going to make our government better. How about we stop expecting mythical people to exist and come save us from the bad guys.
The intent here is good, but I don't think you can do that? Can you define "lobbying" in a way that encompasses all (or at least most) of the bad activity but doesn't encompass acceptable activity?
What even is lobbying? A broad definition would include most any communication with a policymaker, a narrow one would exclude lots of activity that is obviously meant to influence policy.
If you want to reduce the influence that moneyed interests have over politics there's only one answer: take their money away.
I think there are good people that want to serve, but they have to play the money game to survive (costs millions/billions to get elected?? What?!). Which eventually corrupts them ...
In theory lobbyists perform a public good: they create legislation that someone wants. The problem is that we only have them for groups that have the money to pay lobbyists, so the only lobbyist-originated bills that cross legislators' desks are the ones representing a narrow set of interests.
So rather than outlaw lobbyists, one alternative would be to balance this out by hiring public lobbyists. They would craft the legislation on behalf of the state.
The analogy I'm thinking of is that this would work in much the same way that we hire public prosecutors to represent the public interests in the courts by prosecuting criminal cases on behalf of the state. Otherwise the only criminal cases would be if someone hired a private prosecutor, as it was until the 18th century.
Currently the bill-writing is the responsibility of legislators and parties. This would make it a non-political, non-partisan role in the bureaucracy.
Don't outlaw lobbyists, outlaw accepting handouts of any form during, after or shortly before being in the senate or congress. They are already compensated for this by getting a generous retirement package.
> The answer is to outlaw lobbyists, it would fix a lot of problems. T
So, no one is allowed to write their senators anymore? People can't request to meet with their elected representatives? Subject matter experts aren't allowed to express their opinions within earshot of a member of congress?
Lobbying is just people with a shared interest expressing their views to elected representatives.
Now, the concept has gotten a bit overly... complex, but outlawing lobbying all together would be a huge infringement on freedom of speech.
I’ve heard of an interesting argument against term limits and that it would strengthen political parties as they try to keep the pipeline of successors full. I do not know if there is any research to back it but the intuition makes sense at least and may be testable. We saw regulatory capture as a concept with almost no evidence until they looked at hockey referees and the calls they make over their careers, so something comparable would be worth looking at for term limits.
This happened in California, and now every state senator sees the State Senate as a rotating door and a launchpad for the next career. Get in, introduce some populist bill with your name attached to it, disregard any long-term consequences, get positive press headlines, use the momentum to get hired for the next job.
Around half of Americans reliably vote for candidates that support lower taxes for businesses. Add in term limits, and they'll just vote for a different candidate that supports lower taxes for businesses.
