Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [65]
Hall and Deardorff argue persuasively that if their theory of subsidy is correct, then all access is doing is enabling like minds to work together better—a “greater legislative effort on behalf of a shared objective, not a disingenuous vote.”71
This description may be too sanguine. If the model of reciprocity that I described in chapter 9 is correct, then there is a shared interest among lobbyists, special interests, and members for the lobbyists to become a practically exclusive channel through which legislative change gets made (or blocked). We are nowhere close to this exclusivity now, but we need to recognize why everyone involved would like us to be. For the more the lobbyist becomes central, the richer the lobbyist becomes. This benefits the lobbyist. And the more the lobbyist becomes central, the easier it is for candidates to secure funding. This benefits the candidates. And the more the lobbyist becomes central, the easier it is for (some) special interests to trigger legislative change. This benefits these (relatively dominant) interests. For this exclusivity benefits not every special interest, but, as Hall and Deardorff recognize, only the special interests that can
afford the high costs, not only of organizing and making campaign contributions, but of paying professional lobbyists and financing the organizations that support them. Such resources are not equally distributed across groups. Business interests exhibit “tremendous predominance” in federal lobbying…. Hence, the hypothesis set forth here, that public interest groups without electoral assets can influence legislative behavior, does not imply that they countervail the influence of private interest groups and thereby correct the distortions.72
Or, put more directly: “Lobbying distorts the representative’s allocation of effort in favor of groups sufficiently resource-rich that they can finance an expensive lobbying operation.”73
I saw this dynamic firsthand. For many years, the focus of my work was on issues relating to copyright and the Internet. Often I would have the opportunity to speak directly to members of Congress about these issues. The most striking feature of those exchanges was not that members disagreed with me. It was that members didn’t understand that there was another side to the issue. They had never even heard it. They were baffled when it was described to them. To them, the world was divided into those who believed in copyright and those who didn’t. To meet someone who believed in copyright but didn’t think the Motion Picture Association of America or the Recording Industry Association of America channeled the word of God (that’s me) was, to say the least, anathema.
This wasn’t because these members were stupid. They weren’t. It wasn’t because they were lazy. Most members of Congress work much harder than the majority of people, if you count all the junk they have to do, including fund-raising. Instead, this was simply because this different side was nowhere on the radar screen of these members. They hadn’t heard it, because it hadn’t had access.
Consider the lobbying that led to the recently enacted financial “reform” bill. In October 2009 there were 1,537 lobbyists representing financial institutions registered in D.C., and lobbying to affect this critical legislation—twenty-five times the number registered to support consumer groups, unions, and other proponents of strong reform.74 A system that makes lobbyists the ticket to influence is a system that wildly skews the issues that will get attention. This, in time, will distort results.
Finally, the third reason this “legislative subsidy” model doesn’t exonerate the current system is a dynamic that Hall and Deardorff don’t discuss but that is also consistent with their model. In describing the “lobbying as legislative subsidy,” Hall and Deardorff write: “The proximate objective of this strategy