• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 884 0

Grim and Carter claim, sets its agenda, at least in part, so as to induce funders to fund their campaigns. Who has time to deal with jobs, or poverty, or unemployment, or a simpler tax code? Where is the money in that? As Grim and Carter write, “Political action committees organized by members of the Electronic Payments Coalition, a cadre of banking trade groups, dumped more than $500,000 into campaign coffers during January and February [2011] alone.”130

This dynamic is perfectly consistent with Hall and Deardorff. There is plenty of persuading action on an issue not centrally salient to the public. It also follows directly from the excellent and extended analysis of Baumgartner and his colleagues of lobbying: “The bad news is that the wealthy seem to set the agenda,” and “there’s little overall correspondence between the congressional agenda and the public’s agenda,” and because of this “many issues never get raised in the first place.”131

It is perfectly inconsistent, however, with Chairman Smith’s claim that the money doesn’t affect “legislative behavior.” Setting Congress’s agenda is quintessentially “legislative behavior,” and if it isn’t money that explains this particular mix, then it is pure insanity.

I chose the more charitable reading: It is money that is affecting the agenda here. Money, in other words, that affects “legislative behavior.”

3. Trust

But let’s say you still don’t buy it. Let’s say you still believe (and I’m not going to hide it) astonishingly that the raising of the money within this lobbyist industrial complex, has no systematically distorting effect. That perhaps it distracts members of Congress, but so what? The less Congress does, you think, the better. The political scientists haven’t proven that “money buys results,” in your view. And my gift economy argument just doesn’t persuade you, either.

Even if you assume that everything I’ve described is completely benign—that the policy decisions that Congress enacted when subject to the dependency upon funders as well as the dependency upon the votes is precisely the same as the decisions it would make if dependent upon the voters alone—there is still an undeniable whopper of a fact that makes it impossible simply to ignore this competing dependency upon the funders: trust.132 The vast majority of Americans believe that it is money that is buying results. Whether or not that’s true, that is what we believe.

This belief has an effect. Or better, it has a series of effects.

Its first effect is to undermine trust in the system. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, “just 22% [of American voters] say they can trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time, among the lowest measures in half a century.”133 Thirty years before, that number was 70 percent.134 According to the American National Election Studies project at the University of Michigan, the public’s perception of elected officials is near historic lows.135 Whereas in 1964, 64 percent of respondents believed that government was run for the benefit of all and 29 percent believed that government was run for the benefit of a few big interests, in 2008, only 29 percent believed government was run for the benefit of all, and 69 percent believed it was run for the benefit of a few big interests. Similarly, whereas in 1958 only 24 percent of respondents believed that “quite a few” government officials were “crooked,” in 2008 that percentage had increased to 51 percent.136 A poll commissioned by Common Cause, Change Congress, and Public Campaign following the Citizens United decision found that 74 percent of respondents agreed that special interests have too much influence, and 79 percent agreed that members of Congress are “controlled” by the groups and people who finance their campaigns.137 Only 18 percent believed that lawmakers listened to voters more than to their donors. Similarly, in 2008, 80 percent of Americans surveyed told the Program on International Policy Attitudes that they believed government was controlled by “a few big interests looking