Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [52]
Finally, lobbyists get an ever-growing and increasingly profitable business. The lobbying industry has exploded over the past twenty years. Its growth and wealth match almost any in our economy. In 1971, Hacker and Pierson report, there were just 175 firms with registered lobbyists in D.C. Ten years later, there were almost 2,500.88 In 2009 there were 13,700 registered lobbyists. They spent more than $3.5 billion—twice the amount spent in 2002,89 representing about $6.5 million per elected representative in Congress.
And as the lobbying industry grows, D.C. gets rich, too. Nine of Washington’s suburban counties are now listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per capita income.90 As former labor secretary Robert Reich describes,
When I first went to Washington in 1975, many of the restaurants along Pennsylvania Avenue featured linoleum floors and an abundance of cockroaches. But since then the city has become an increasingly dazzling place. Today, almost everywhere you look in downtown Washington you find polished facades, fancy restaurants, and trendy bistros. There are office complexes of glass, chrome and polished wood; well appointed condos with doormen who know the names and needs of each inhabitant; hotels with marble-floored lobbies, thick rugs, soft music, granite counters; restaurants with linen napkins, leather-bound menus, heavy silverware.91
There are many in the lobbying profession, of course, who deplore the state of the industry. They obviously don’t want to return to the old days. They instead want the industry to evolve into the profession they dream it could be. As one lobbyist put it, “Money does make a difference—and it has changed the character of this town…. The truth is that money has replaced brains and hard work as the way for a lobbyist to get something done for his client.”92 And many, including the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Federal Lobbying Laws, have recommended “so far as practicable, those who advocate to elected officials do not raise funds for them, and those who raise funds for them do not advocate to them.”93 As the ABA report states:
[T]he multiplier effect of a lobbyist’s participation in fundraising for a member’s campaign (or the member’s leadership PAC) can be quite substantial, and the Task Force believes that this activity should be substantially curtailed …. [A] self-reinforcing cycle of mutual financial dependency has become a deeply troubling source of corruption in our government.94
That follows the strong recommendation of President Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, Professor Richard Painter:
The best way to change the profession’s reputation for abusing the system of campaign finance is to end lobbyists’ involvement in campaign finance. When lobbyists bundle their own and clients’ money to buy government officials’ attention they undermine public confidence not only in government but also in the quality of lobbyists’ advocacy and the merits of their cause. The bagman image erodes credibility even if credit is due for a lobbyist’s intellectual ability, experience, and integrity.95
Until these reformers succeed in their reform, however, much of the value from the service of lobbyists will continue to derive not so much from the “bagman image” but from the fund-raising reality.
In this model of influence, campaign cash plays a complicated role. My claim is not that campaign cash buys any result directly. As Dan Clawson, Mark Weller, and Alan Neustadtl put it, “Many critics of big money campaign finance seem to assume that a corporate donor summons a senator and says, ‘Senator, I