Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [61]
We’ll return to this hypothesis later in this chapter. For now, just recognize that all that they are claiming is that the data don’t show the link between PAC contributions and roll call votes, at least as reflected in the Chamber of Commerce rankings. That may be because there is no such link. Or it may be because the method they are using to find that link cannot detect one. In either case, what they are not saying is what the anti-reform think tank Center for Competitive Politics reports them as saying—viz., “a substantial majority of academic research on the subject has shown that there is little connection between contributions and legislative votes or actions.”36 “We don’t see it” is not the same as “there is nothing to see.”
Ansolabehere and his colleagues’ conclusions, moreover, are not uncontested. Some political scientists do believe that there is a link between money and results that can be demonstrated by the numbers alone.37 Thomas Stratmann, for example, conducted a meta-analysis of the same forty studies that Ansolabehere and his colleagues reviewed. That analysis rejected the conclusion that money does not affect results.38 Sanford Gordon and his colleagues find that an executive’s likelihood of contributing to political candidates is tied to how sensitive his or her salary is to firm profitability: the higher the sensitivity, the higher the likelihood of contributions, reinforcing the suggestion that the contribution is an investment rather than consumption.39 Consistent with this result, in a study of PAC contributions related to the 1984 Deficit Reduction Act, Sanjay Gupta and Charles Swenson found that firms whose managers’ compensation included earnings-based bonuses made larger PAC contributions, and that contributions generally were “positively associated with firm tax benefits.”40 Likewise, Atif Mian and his colleagues found that the voting patterns on the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act were strongly predicted by the amount of campaign contributions from the financial services industry.41 Not exclusively, but partially, and certainly enough for us to wonder whether the money is queering results more generally. This work provides strong pushback against the theory that campaign contributions are mere consumption (and therefore don’t affect results), and it explains how such investments could, consistent with the data, provide a return.42
But let’s assume for the moment that Ansolabehere and his colleagues are right. Let’s assume the data won’t show a clear link between contributions and results. If that is true, does that fact exonerate Congress? Are the critics unfair, if Ansolabehere and his colleagues are correct?
The critics are not unfair. For, even if the political science skeptics are right, there are three undeniable effects of this economy of influence, each of them a reason for concern, and all three together a demonstration of the urgency there should be in solving it.
1. Distraction
First, and most obviously: the Fund-raising Congress is distracted.
If members spend up to 30 to 70 percent of their time raising money,43 that means they have less time to do the sort of things members of Congress traditionally did. For example, deliberate. If you compared our Congress in 1792 to the British House of Commons in 1792, we’d fare pretty well. Today, Congress compared to today’s Commons is an embarrassment. The British actually take time to deliberate as a body (as our Framers intended us to do). Our Congress does not. Or to read the bills: As Washington lobbyist Wright Andrews responded when asked about whether members read “most of the bills,” “Most of the bills? [They read a]lmost none of them! Any member that was honest will tell you that.”44 (In a private session, Bill Gates reported that when he was a congressional page, he read “every bill.” That may have been possible in the 1960s, even for mere mortals [which Gates