Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash | Hacker News Reader

Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash

wired.com

124 pointsMoral_43 comments

Why stuff like this isn't considered bribing in US boggles my mind. They're receiving money for voting a certain way.

Because the people being bribed are the ones who vote on the laws that define illegal bribery.

It is absolutely bribery. And as an American, I'm glad there are people in other places who see it for exactly what it is.

And sometimes it gets pretty damned blatant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boehner#Connections_to_lo...

"In June 1995, Boehner distributed campaign contributions from tobacco industry lobbyists on the House floor as House members were weighing how to vote on tobacco subsidies"

Isn't voting a certain way the only real reason why anyone makes campaign contributions to legislative candidates?

This sort of stuff doesn't require the politicians in question to change their minds. Think of it as a two-fold selection effect. First, the candidate who already holds views of which the defense industry approves, receives campaign contributions therefrom and is therefore more likely to win. Second, I would think that defense companies are hardly likely to donate to a politician of the Ron Paul stripe when they are in a race against someone more ... conventional. As rayiner pointed out elswhere in the thread, correlation does not imply causation.

This mechanism may have deleterious effects on our political discourse and decision-making, but it's hard to call something that doesn't involve a politician changing his mind as a result of money "bribery". This mechanism is a systems problem, it seems to me, not a problem with individuals.

Now I'm sure this is far from the only thing that's going on. (In particular, I think I remember Lawrence Lessig talking about how money may or may not buy a change of views, but it surely buys access. You pick up the phone for the guy that contributed $LEGAL_LIMIT to your campaign.) Moreover, I haven't ruled out that the money changed their minds---just provided an alternate hypothesis. Nonetheless, this toy model provides a not-totally-implausible explanation for things we observed, without invoking bribery.

Edited for style.

Unless you're willing to move entirely to public financing, which has it's own problems, making aspects of politicking illegal presents a massive separation of powers issue. Imagine if the DOJ could put a Congressman under investigation because some Lockheed-Martin engineer donated some money to his campaign. You should want your legislators more insulated from executive-branch influence, not less.

This is, incidentally, also the argument for why insider trading isn't illegal for Congress. It would give the executive branch a huge stick to beat the legislative branch with.

I think I want my legislators insulated from money overall. They should not have their chances of election boosted by their cash flow.

Of course, this doesn't help the problem of poorer candidates trying to run against candidates who are already wealthy to begin with. But I think it could be a start.

There has to be some way to equalize the playing field so that everyone running for office has a voice. Otherwise the democratic process is distorted.

Here's a radical idea: what if we outlaw electioneering? No advertising, no campaigns, just structured dissemination of information via debates and perhaps online charts comparing differences in candidate views.

At some point, it becomes impossible to differentiate "electioneering" from political speech, which is a pretty important thing to protect.

This is a very good point and needs to be addressed.

Two thoughts:

1) What about differentiating between speech in support of an idea vs. in support of a person running for election? This may be useless though, as it still privileges viewpoints held by wealthier individuals.

2) What about restricting political speech to mediums where reach is (mostly) independent of financial input, such as internet forums and public/private meetings? For example, I can post something on Hacker News about a candidate, but I can't pay to get that posting to #1. This is a more egalitarian platform for the dissemination of ideas.

What about differentiating between speech in support of an idea vs. in support of a person running for election?

Then you get into the wide gray area of "public interest organizations" that aren't supporting a candidate, just supporting the idea that Obama's birth certificate is fake.

I've come around to the far opposite position on this. The only regulation on any political donations should be transparency. Give as much as you want to whomever you want, as long as it's completely out in the open.

So the solution to elections is to suppress political speech and disenfranchise the average voter by moving the political discourse to media they don't watch or listen to.

Also: you wouldn't hire someone based on just a resume and a canned promotion video, and YC wouldn't fund a startup based just on an initial business plan, so why would you vote for someone based on the same? Politics is about persuading large groups of people to go along with you. You can't evaluate that from a chart.

Right, but the problem is when money becomes correlated to your ability to persuade people. There needs to be some way to weaken that connection.

I don't think candidates should be prohibited from trying to persuade voters, hence the need for debates. In fact, I would argue that political commercials are more akin to "canned promotion videos" than live televised debates.

Also, I think it's inaccurate to characterize my suggestions as disenfranchising voters. They still have the power to seek out information on the candidates running for office. The only difference here is that biased viewpoints won't be forced upon them in isolation.

How is preventing voters from exposure to one-sided campaign commercials disenfranchisement? If the important thing is informing the electorate, then let's do so in a balanced way.

There is a conflict of interest issue when companies funded almost entirely by government contracts uses money in this manner. The government could easily specify as a term in their contracts that are not allowed to do this. Considering the amount of funds involved, I think this is more than reasonable.

On the topic of conflict of interests, why should the government educate the youth about the proper roles of government? I wonder how the Patriot Act and the loss of our liberties will be portrayed in text books. I would guess in a very sympathetic light towards the cause of safety and security. Maybe the next generation will see privacy advocates as terrorists attempting to defraud them of their beloved police state.

Not under current court precedent, which treats corporate money as free speech. As long as corporations are treated as people, restrictions on political spending by corporations would abridge free speech.

In my personal view, if corporations were people, they'd be classified as sociopaths, which is yet another reason not to let them give money to politicians.

I'm not a lawyer, but this is just a condition on a voluntary contract, which nobody is forcing the companies to sign.

Individuals routinely sign things like NDA's which are abridge free speech.

Conservative, pro-security candidates get more donations from the defense industry: news at 11.

In other news: befuddled HN poster can't believe that Wired ran an entire articled based on confusing correlation with causation.

I think this is showing that the awareness of the military-industrial-complex is really starting to hit the zeitgeist of the actual mass public.

While these types of issues are completely bvious and known by a very large fraction of the populous, it was still a fraction - now it is simply inescapable by anyone just how much control the defense/intelligence industry/military has over the USG.

Merely "conservative"? Are you sure? http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/25/democrat...

There are lots of conservative democrats, especially in rust-belt states. E.g. only 2 of Illinois's 12 democratic Congressmen voted for the Amash bill.

Where did they say that this was causation?

Correlation is enough to make this an interesting article.

Does it matter that much if: a) lawmakers who are funded by the defense industry vote in favor of the defense industry or

b) lawmakers who vote for the defense industry are kept in office through funds from the defense industry

Cause or effect seem to be pretty unpleasant.

This vote did not break on conservative/liberal lines. There were a number of conservatives who opposed it (as distinct from "establishment" Republicans) and a number of Dems who supported it.

We get the government we vote for. The defense industry can contribute money, but they can't vote (other than as individuals comprising the same). If you're opposed to what your representatives vote for, get involved. Support candidates who share your views. With Twitter, Facebook, and other social media the old, expensive part of a campaign (traditional media advertising) is less and less important, particularly among the under-30 age group.

Sort of. You don't get to vote for anyone (other than a feel-good write-in) unless money has put them in front of you.

You're the one declaring that causation runs in only one direction. Meanwhile, the article only stated the correlation.

The article quotes, "How can we trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected? Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors". This strongly implies that the article's point of view that the link is causal.

As the famous xkcd comic aptly points out, "correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'".

> pro-security candidates get more donations from the defense industry

My intuition tells me that these kinds of contributions are a bad thing, a potential vector for money to influence who gets elected and how they vote. Do you disagree with that?

from the article, Daniel Newman sums it up nicely: “How can we trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected? Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors”

People and organizations like Lawrence Lessig and Democracy Matters have been on this issue forever. It's the root issue. The revolving door too. Pass Fair Elections in NY state this year, and then every other state. That's a start.

The only problem with that narrative is that it doesn't agree with the evidence. The article begs the question that defunding the NSA is what voters want. But the polls, while they're pretty much all over the map, don't support that conclusion. E.g. the latest Pew poll of whether people "approve" of the NSA program basically matches the margin by which the Amash bill lost: http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi....

How can you conjure up this narrative of politicians choosing between their donors and their voters, when the evidence suggests that the politicians are voting the way their voters want? Especially considering that because of gerrymandering, conservative rural voters have a substantially greater representation in the House than they do in public polling.

This is brilliantly put and has actually made me feel better, for a second. Then I realised that private defence firms and the NSA are, clearly, one and the same organisation at this point. This idea chilled me to my core.

Correlation does not imply causation. An alternative hypothesis is that legislators have fixed ideologies that are not influenced by who their donors are, but receive money from donors who have similar ideologies. After all, donors don't want to waste their money--they'll contribute to those legislators who already think like they do. Birds of a feather flock together, etc. Unfortunately it's impossible to conduct a controlled experiment, and donor influence probably varies by legislator and by donor.

Not so. A larger percentage of donations have little to do with the individual views and predilections of representatives, and a tremendous amount to do with the committees on which they sit. Not only is there a a precisely defined hierarchy of assignments (ranked according to much money they're expected to bring in), but the allocation of these seats is handled to ensure the overall viability of the party. So for instance, a junior representative from a swing district will be assigned to a high-dollar committee, on the assumption that this will give him access to a higher volume of donor funds, and make his seat more defensible. What he thinks, personally, is irrelevant. What he oversees is what matters. And if he squanders the opportunity given to him by his party's bosses, he'll be kicked out of that seat, and see it handed to a representative who has the motivation and mercenary disposition required to exploit it fully.

Some committees have negative value. That is to say, sitting one one signals a lack of influence, making assignment to these Congressional Siberias a real damper in the dialing-for-dollars game that these folks play, if not all day, then at least every day. Interestingly the Science & Technology Committee is one of these. Any actually valuable science and tech (e.g. telecommunications) is handled elsewhere. The grim consolation in seeing total anti-science idiots getting assigned to these committees is that it indicates that even Congress doesn't take them seriously. The optics are terrible, of course, but that's another matter.

Your post is fascinating. Is it the case that the committee member must vote the party line on committee matters, or appease the donors? What happens when those are in conflict? Does the member get a pass to vote the donor line and rely on the full chamber to vote the party line?

Party line votes tend to happen in relation to ideologically symbolic issues which tend not to be the issues that donors care much about.

What's more likely to happen is the representatives will be permitted to vote against their party if the party is assured of a win. So for instance, there's no need to antagonize the conservative-leaning supporters of a Democrat from a swing state by forcing the the rep to vote against his constituents interests. Likewise, if a vote is in the bag, a fair amount of purely symbolic dissent is allowed, which reps can use to placate their most valuable donors and most vocal supporters (even when Congress as a whole is going against them).

The real danger for a rep comes from situations where he sits in a "safe" seat, and refuses to take money or show support for a special-interest with business in front of his committee. As long as the seat has been securely gerrymandered (the definition of a safe seat) then there's no danger that a primary challenge will end up replacing the uncooperative rep with a zealot who will go on to lose the seat to the opposing party in the general election, since the general election has, in effect, already been rigged to ensure that the party that drew the electoral maps always wins.

For what it's worth few donors are aligned with one party or the other. There are exceptions of course (Unions, for instance, tend to fund Democrats exclusively, and the NRA focuses heavily on Republicans). But generally speaking, donors don't give a fig about the rep's personal points of view. The whole idea that they donate to people with whom they already agree is exactly the kind of malarky that reps would like you to believe. In reality, most donors give judiciously on both sides of the aisle, so that no matter who sits on the committees that govern their business, they're assured of access.

What's the story with Rep Moran, the only top-10 defense $ recipient who voted for the amendment?

The cynic in me says, he's from Northern Virginia and he's getting his money anyway because the contractors need to be near DC. The non-cynic says he's just a good guy.

Maybe he voted last and wanted to show off to his constituents.

One often-overlooked side of these votes is that there is an element of horse-trading with party leadership.

Let's say the party asks you to eat your hat 5 times and vote for crappy stuff; in exchange, you'll ask the party to be left free to vote against the grain a couple of times or so, when you really need to show off with the electorate or your conscience won't let you sleep.

It's perfectly plausible that Moran voted for the amendment because he had built up credits on other votes, had info that the amendment was unlikely to pass anyway, and so he obtained permission to showboat for his own electorate. He might have done that exactly because he knew he'd be attacked for being in the pockets of BigDefCo -- he's a Dem, after all. This is a very likely scenario.

Or maybe he could be a good guy and I'm too cynic to expect good from people. Good guys in politics are very rare, to say the least.

I've always wondered on the psychology of these voting decisions. Investigative journalists outside looking in can can easily see the forest for the trees, but I am curious as to whether or not the politicians themselves are acutely aware of these conflicts of interest or if it is subconscious.

what in American politics is surprising for me is that such a meager sum (vs. the scale of decisions these lawmakers take and even the scale of their personal wealth, etc..) as 20K is supposedly able to affect/sway their decision. To compare, 20K is something that sometimes may sway a junior engineer in the Valley take this job instead of this - compare that with decisions affecting distribution of some billions of dollars and lives of millions of people. I'm really puzzled by that.

> 20K is supposedly able to affect/sway their decision.

It happens to be the market rate unfortunately. And that goes to tell you much invested or interested these people are in upholding any ideals.

They could vote either way, personally they've been around the block and in bed with so many lobbyists they just care about furthering the political career. For them in this case it is getting $0 or getting 20K for a vote they probably don't/can't fully understand and are not personally invested in. They see 20K and in their head that might = nice weekend in Vegas or new car for my son.

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