Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [45]
Today’s lobbyist is not so rogue. It is an absurd simplification and an insult to the profession to suggest that the norms of the industry circa 1890 have anything to do with the norms of the profession today. The lobbyist today is ethical, and well educated. He or she works extremely hard to live within the letter of the law. More than ever before, most lobbyists are just well-paid policy wonks, expert in a field and able to advise and guide Congress well. Regulation is complex; regulators understand very little; the lobbyist is the essential link between what the regulator wants to do and how it can get done. Indeed, as we’ll see more later, much of the lobbyist’s work is simply a type of legislative subsidy.48 Most of it is decent, aboveboard, the sort of stuff we would hope happens inside the Beltway. The ordinary lobbyist today is a Boy Scout compared with the criminal of the nineteenth century. He has as much in common with his nineteenth-century brother as Mormons have with their nineteenth-century founders.
Yet as lobbying has become more respectable—and this is the key—it has also become more dangerous. The rent seeking that was hidden and careful before is now open and notorious. No one is embarrassed by what the profession does, because everything the profession does is out in the open for all to see. Indeed, almost literally: since 1995 no profession has been required to disclose its activities more extensively and completely than lobbyists.
But as this practice has become more professional, its effect on our democracy has become more systemic. And the question we need to track is what that systemic effect is. The lobbyist today may be best understood as providing a mere “subsidy” to the legislature—advice, research, support, guidance for issues the legislators already believe in. But one of those subsidies has the potential to corrupt the whole process. As Robert Kaiser describes best, in at least the last thirty years, the demand for campaign cash has turned the lobbyist into a supplier.49 Not so much from the money that lobbyists give directly—though lobbyists (and their spouses and their kids) of course give an endless amount of money directly. But instead from the funding they secure indirectly—from the very interests that hire them to produce the policy results that benefit those interests.
In a way that is hard to see (because so pervasive), and certainly hard to model (because so complex), lobbyists have become the center of an economy of influence that has changed the way Washington works. They feed a frantic dependency that has grown among members of Congress—the dependency on campaign cash—but they can feed that dependency only if they can provide something of value to their clients in return. The lobbyists are funding arbitrageurs. They stand at the center of an economy. We can draw that economy like Figure 7:
FIGURE 7
On the one side of this economy are the members, frantically searching for campaign cash. On the other side are interests that increasingly find themselves needing or wanting special favors from the government. As government grows, as it has, “its tentacles in every aspect of American life and commerce,” then “no serious industry or interest can function without monitoring, and at least trying to manipulate, Washington’s decision makers.”50 These manipulators make themselves essential to the extent that they provide a suite of essential services—including, for many, the channeling of campaign cash.
As Kaiser describes, “The more important money became to the politicians, the more important its donors became to them. This was a boon to [the lobbyists]. ‘The lobbyists are in the driver’s seat,’ observed Leon Panetta. ‘They basically know that the members have nowhere else to turn’ for money…. Lobbyists had become indispensable to politicians.”51
At the center of this funding