Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [67]
Shape-shifting is thus one reason the effect of money on legislative voting would be invisible. It is distinct from another dynamic that would also be invisible to the regressions. The rankings of members by groups such as the Chamber of Commerce is based upon roll call votes. But roll call votes are the very end of a very, very long legislative process. A bill gets introduced. It gets referred to a committee. Very few of the bills referred to a committee get a hearing. Even fewer get referred to the floor for a vote. On the floor, there are any number of ways in which the proposal can be stopped. Or folded into something else. Or allowed to die. There is only one way to pass a bill in Congress, and a million ways to kill it.
But influence can be exercised—and hence a campaign contribution rewarded—in any of the stages of the potential life of a bill. If it is, it is invisible to the regressions. If a senator puts an anonymous hold on a bill, that doesn’t enter any one ranking. If a chairman decides not to assign a hearing to the bill, he doesn’t get tagged as a result. In a whole host of ways, legislative power can be exercised without a trace. And where it is exercised without a trace, the regressions cannot map cause and effect. As the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities describes, “Complex government inevitably means government with bottlenecks at which pressure can be quietly and effectively applied…. The prevention of governmental action, and this is the aim of many lobbies, is relatively easy under these circumstances.”86 “Most issues,” Baumgartner and his colleagues find, “do not reach those final stages and most are not highly publicized, even within the Beltway.”87 That means, again, the opportunity for invisible influence is great. Senator Larry Pressler (R-S.D.; 1979–1997) describes a particular example, drawn from the recent battle over health care:
There should have been an up or down vote on [single-payer health insurance], or a vote at least on cloture. There was neither. For some reason, it just went away. Barack Obama abandoned it completely, although he had said he was for it. Some Republicans are for it—I was for it way back and Nixon was for it… on a much more significant basis. Bob Packwood had a plan for it. But the point is, when they really started doing the health care bill, everybody disappeared who was for a single payer system. I would suspect that is because of the insurance companies’ contributions, especially to the Democrats.88
Pressler’s example could be multiplied a million times over. Indeed, it is almost too obvious to remark.
“You say,” the skeptic insists, “that this competing dependency upon money draws the members away from what they otherwise would have done. But is there any evidence for this? Do we have a way to calibrate the extent of this distortion, or even any measure to demonstrate that there is distortion?”
There are two ways we might measure distortion. One maps the gap between what “the People” believe about an issue and what Congress does about that issue. Call this substantive distortion. The other way maps the gap between what Congress actually works on and what is important or, alternatively, what the people want them to work on. Call this agenda distortion.
The evidence for substantive distortion is compelling, at the level not of roll call votes—that’s the fight we’ve just rehearsed—but of actual policy decisions. This is the story of “regulatory capture.”89 Consistent with the argument of this book, regulatory capture does not “imply that regulators are corrupt or lack integrity.”90 And even without proof of a contribution-based distortion, we know