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By Root 895 0

2006 paper, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff provide a model to explain just what lobbying in Congress does.63 Lobbying, they argue, is best understood as a “legislative subsidy.” Lobbyists don’t try to flip their opponents. They work instead to solidify and help their base. Most of the work of lobbyists, they say, is directed toward getting people who already agree (at least in principle) to better support what they agree with. So lobbyists for unions, for example—and there are some: 1.26 percent of the lobbying dollars spent in 2009 were from labor spending64—don’t waste their time trying to convert Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.; 1985–) to the important role that unions have in our economy. They instead spend their time with Representative James Langevin (D-R.I.; 2001–), or Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.; 1997–), helping them to better advance their views that labor needs support. Lobbyists, in other words, try to subsidize the work of the members of Congress whom they like, by helping them do better the sort of stuff they already want to do.

This picture makes the process seem almost benign. If lobbyists are just supporting members, how could they be corrupting them? What’s the harm? How could a free gift of aid consistent with what a member already wants to do hurt anything or anyone?

The answer is, in at least three ways—two of which (and the most important of which) Hall and Deardorff explicitly recognize, and the third of which follows directly from their model.

First, and as Hall and Deardorff acknowledge, “representation [can be] compromised without individual representatives being compromised.”65 It may well be that lobbyists do nothing more than help a member do what the member already wants to do. But not every issue the member wants to support has the same “subsidy” behind it.

If, for example, a member went to Washington after campaigning on two issues, the need to stop Internet “piracy” and the need to help working mothers on welfare, on day one she’d find a line of lobbyists around the block eager to help with the first issue, but none there to help her with the second. That difference would be for all the obvious reasons. And the consequence would be that her work would get skewed relative to her desires going in. At the end of two years, that member could well reflect that she supported only the issues she said she would support. But if she were only slightly more reflective, she’d recognize that the proportion of support she gave her issues was driven not by her own judgment about the relative importance of each, but instead by the weight of the subsidy, including, indirectly, of campaign funds.

Second, and related, the benign account underplays the way such a system of “subsidy” may in the end block effective access to representatives in government.

If there’s one effect that money has that even supporters of the current system concede, it is on access to government.66 As Larry Makinson puts it, “virtually everyone… accept[s] that money buys access to members.”67 The reason is clear enough. As former senator Paul Simon (D-Ill.; 1985–1997) describes it:

If I got to a Chicago hotel at midnight, when I was in the Senate, and there were 20 phone calls waiting for me, 19 of them names I didn’t recognize and the 20th someone I recognized as a $1,000 donor to my campaign, that is the one person I would call. You feel a sense of gratitude for their support. This is even more true with the prevalence of much larger donations, even if those donations go to party committees. Because few people can afford to give over $20,000 or $25,000 to a party committee, those people who can will receive substantially better access to elected federal leaders than people who can only afford smaller contributions or can not afford to make any contributions.68

Indeed, as Clawson and his colleagues argue, “the principal aim of most corporate campaign contributions is to help corporate executives gain ‘access’ to key members of Congress.”69 And that’s certainly its effect. As Representative