Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [159]
40. Ibid., 57.
41. Ibid., 57–58.
42. Kenneth G. Crawford, The Pressure Boys: The Inside Story of Lobbying in America (Julian Messner, Inc., 1939), 3.
43. Thompson, Ethics in Congress, 2.
44. Crawford, The Pressure Boys, 25–26.
45. Thompson, Ethics in Congress, 2.
46. Painter, Getting the Government America Deserves, 27.
47. Crawford, The Pressure Boys, 27. Crawford states this letter is from “Edwards,” but there was no “G. W. Edwards” who served in Congress. George Washington Edmonds served from 1913 to 1934. See Edmonds, George Washington, (1864–1939), in Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, available at link #92.
48. This idea is framed in Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (Feb. 2006): 69, and described later.
49. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 291.
50. Silverstein, Turkmeniscam, 55.
51. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 291.
52. Rob Porter and Sam Walsh, “Earmarks in the Federal Budget Process,” Harvard Law Sch. Fed. Budget Policy Seminar, Briefing Paper No. 16 (May 1), 18, available at link #93.
53. Thompson, Ethics in Congress, 3. See also Fiorina and Abrams, Disconnect, 90 (“politics today is much ‘cleaner’ ”).
54. Justin Fox and Lawrence Rothenberg, “Influence Without Bribes: A Non-Contracting Model of Campaign Giving and Policymaking,” Working Paper 10/4/10.
There are others who have developed models that might explain influence without assuming quid pro quo bribes. See, e.g., Brendan Daley and Erik Snowberg, “Even If It’s Not Bribery: The Case for Campaign Finance Reform,” unpublished working paper (Feb. 12, 2009), 1, available at link #94 (“We develop a dynamic multi-dimensional signaling model of campaign finance in which candidates can signal their ability by enacting policy and/or by raising and spending campaign funds, both of which are costly. Our model departs from the existing literature in that candidates do not exchange policy influence for campaign contributions, rather, they must decide how to allocate their efforts between policy-making and fund-raising. If high-ability candidates are better policymakers and better fund-raisers then they will raise and spend campaign funds even if voters care only about legislation. Voters’ inability to reward or punish politicians based on past policy allows fund-raising to be used to signal ability at the expense of voter welfare. Campaign finance reform alleviates this phenomenon and improves voter welfare at the expense of politicians. Thus, we expect successful politicians to oppose true campaign finance reform. We also show our model is consistent with findings in the empirical and theoretical campaign finance literature”); Filipe R. Campante, “Redistribution in a Model of Voting and Campaign Contributions,” unpublished working paper (Aug. 2010), available at link #95 (“even though each contribution has a negligible impact, the interaction between contributions and voting leads to an endogenous wealth bias in the political process, as the advantage of wealthier individuals in providing contributions encourages parties to move their platforms closer to those individuals’ preferred positions”).
55. I am not aware of any other work drawing upon Hyde, to model the lobbying behavior of Congress, but Phebe Lowell Bowditch does use it to understand the patronage system in Ancient Rome. See Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
56. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (1979), 3.
57. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 117–76.
58. Hyde, The Gift, 56.
59. Dan Clawson and his colleagues put the point similarly,
Campaign contributions are best understood as gifts, not bribes. They are given to establish a personal connection, open an avenue for access, and create a generalized sense of obligation. Only