Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [63]
[T]he House has developed atrocious habits, [including] the fact that members only spend two or three days a week in Washington, [a] breakdown in the deliberative process that guarantees that all legislation is carefully scrutinized, and all voices heard… the exclusion of the minority party, [and] failing to live up to its historic role of conducting oversight of the Executive Branch.58
He concludes, “[N]o one today could make a coherent argument that the Congress is the co-equal branch of government the Founders intended it to be.”
No doubt it’s too much to tie all of these failings to the rise of fund-raising. And no doubt, for some, anything that keeps Congress from regulating more must be a good thing. But at the very minimum, we can say with confidence that the fund-raising distracts Congress from its work, and not surprisingly so. Any of us would be distracted if we had to spend even just 30 percent of our time raising campaign funds. If you hired a lawyer to work for you, and you saw that 30 percent of the time he billed you each month was actually time spent recruiting other clients, you’d be rightfully upset. If you learned that teachers at a public elementary school that your kids attended were spending 30 percent of their time running bake sales to fund their salaries rather than teaching your kids how to read, you’d be rightfully upset, too. So it doesn’t seem crazy that we should be rightfully upset that the representatives we elect to represent us spend even just 30 percent of their time raising funds to get reelected rather than reading the bills they are passing, or attending committee meetings where those bills are discussed, or meeting with constituents with problems getting help from the Veterans’ Administration. At the very minimum, the Fund-raising Congress is flawed because the Fund-raising Congress is distracted.59
2. Distortion
Relative to the constitutional baseline, the work of the Fund-raising Congress is distorted.
At the end of a powerful and creative analysis of the effect of lobbying on policy outcomes, Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues present data that contrast the public’s view of “the most important problem facing the country today” with data “reflecting the concerns of the Washington lobbying community.”60 The image is quite striking (Figure 11).
FIGURE 11. Percent of lobbying cases compared to the average responses to the Gallup poll question “What is the most important problem facing the country today?”61
This is a picture of “disconnect,” as Baumgartner and his colleagues describe it. It is a “consequence of who is represented in Washington.” “It may be,” as the authors write, “that political systems built around majoritarianism work better for lower-income citizens. It’s certainly the case that in the United States… inequities… are sharply exacerbated by the organizational bias of interest-group politics.”62
The division between “majoritarianism” and “interest-group politics,” however, might be too simple here. For even among democracies driven by “interest-group politics” (as opposed to majoritarianism), “disconnects” may be different. How much of that disconnect comes from the way elections in Congress get funded? Would the disconnect be less if the elections were funded differently? Would the distortion be as clear?
The most effective way to gauge this distortion is with perhaps the finest theoretical work in political science about lobbying in Congress over the past decade, and a work that seems at first at least to exonerate Congress of the cynic’s charge.
In their