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?
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?".
?
This is already illegal. It's generally termed "corruption".
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.
Doing it for money - yes, that should be illegal.
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.
It was a system designed to consolidate power among white landowners and to be extremely difficult to change. It's not a surprise it's got issues.
It was designed to be difficult to change because democracies always fail when the majority decides the rule of law is no longer important.
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.
0. Lobbying is a right, but one that can only be exercised by individual citizens, not corporations.
1. Anyone who wishes to "lobby" congressional candidates or congresspersons must register their financial interests
2. Make it illegal to directly accept money for lobbying services (akin to prostitution)
Sure, it wouldn't make lobbying impossible - but it would make it much harder.
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.
It's not nearly as simple as you're portraying.
This embeds the idea that someone making more money has a right to a larger voice than someone that doesn't. - 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.
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.
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.
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.
You might be surprised; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing for the way it's usually done.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike with our our elected representatives. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...)
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.
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.
This trope is both untrue and tired, as most cookie-cutter generalities are.
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...
This is much less of a problem if you can hold down scope-creep on the role and responsibilities of government.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Foster_(politician) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Casten
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
For example, H.R. 5323, Derivatives Fairness Act drafted on behalf of CitiGroup.
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.
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.
1: "How Have Term Limits Affected the California Legislature?" https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/rb/RB_1104BCRB.pdf
And lobbyists aren't experts either, they're simply paid to bribe people to get a result.
This implies that the EFF does not have expertise in privacy and free speech. Would you agree with that?
EFF is probably the antithesis of most lobbyists, certainly the ones being discussed here.
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.
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).
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)
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.
With your example, Hillary Clinton would be a billionaire for doing that inane dance on Ellen.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mike-pence-used-camp...
Imagine, for example, that all the fast-food workers unionized and wanted to get the minimum wage raised.
How would they do that when most live outside DC and have to work 1-2 shifts per day to keep their jobs?
They hire professionals -- lobbyists.
Unfortunately any unregulated system benefits the powerful, and we have the heavily abused lobbying system of today.
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.
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.
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 ...
Term limits might be nice too.
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.
Doubtful. Then they are incentivized to secure a lucrative position after their term. Guess who can provide lucrative jobs for some consideration?
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.