Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [55]
The system thus feeds itself. It’s not campaign contributions that members care about, or not directly. It is a future. A job. A way to imagine paying for the life that other professionals feel entitled to. A nice house. Fancy cars. Private schools for the kids. This system gives both members and their staff a way to have it all, at least if they continue to support the system.
What exactly is the wrong in what they’re doing, given the system as it is? The wannabe lobbyists get to do their wonky policy work. They get to live among the most powerful people in the nation. Their life is interesting and well compensated. And they never need to lie, cheat, or steal. What could possibly be bad about that? Indeed, anyone who would resist this system would be a pariah on the Hill. You can just hear the dialogue from any number of Hollywood films: “We’ve got a good thing going here, Jimmy. Why would you want to go and mess things up?”
CHAPTER 10
What So Damn Much Money Does
Consider two statements by two prominent Republicans. The first, by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.; 2005–): “Thousands of instances exist where appropriations are leveraged for fundraising dollars or political capital.”1
The second, by former Federal Elections Commission chairman Bradley Smith: “The evidence is pretty overwhelming that the money does not play much of a role in what goes on in terms of legislative voting patterns and legislative behavior. The consensus about that among people who have studied it is roughly the same as the consensus among scientists that global warming is taking place.”2
To be clear, Smith is a corruption denier, not a global warming denier. What he is saying is that the evidence from political science suggests—contrary to Senator Coburn and to the whole thrust of this book—that the money doesn’t matter. Indeed, he says more than just that: He means to say that anyone who suggests that the money matters—to “legislative voting patterns and legislative behavior”—is as crazy as global warming deniers. That no honest scholar (let’s put aside politicians) could maintain that we have any good evidence to suggest that there’s a problem with the current system. That any honest scholar would therefore focus his work elsewhere.
I’ve found that people have two very different reactions to Chairman Smith’s statement. The vast majority react in stunned disbelief: “Is he nuts?” is the most common retort. It is also among the kindest. Almost all of us react almost viscerally to corruption deniers, just as most (liberals, at least) react to global warming deniers.
A tiny minority, however, react differently. If they’re careless in listening precisely to what Chairman Smith said (“money does not play much of a role in what goes on in terms of legislative voting patterns and legislative behavior”), they say something like this: “Yeah, it is surprising, but the data really don’t support the claim that money is corrupting Congress.” And if they’re more on the activist side of the spectrum, and less on the academic side, they’re likely to buttress this observation with something like “So you, Lessig, need to take this evidence seriously, and justify your campaign, since the facts don’t support it.”
I once confronted this latter demand in a bizarre Washington context. I had been invited to address a truly remarkable group called the Lib-Libertarians—a mix of liberal and libertarian D.C. souls who meet for dinner regularly to talk about common ideas. Most of them were lawyers. Some were journalists. And some were in various stages of the revolving and gilded door between government and the private sector.
I like liberals. (I am one.) I also like libertarians. (If we understand that philosophy