That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [140]
To make matters worse, not only do the core agendas of the Democratic and Republican Parties not address the country’s major challenges in ways that promise viable solutions to them, the parties’ almost religious adherence to those agendas is making one of those challenges—the deficit—even more difficult to fix than it otherwise would be. When Democrats advocate increasing government spending while raising taxes only on the wealthy and Republicans call for lowering taxes without reducing spending sufficiently, it becomes impossible for us to address the country’s deficit problem at the scale required. Our fiscal diet of all dessert and no vegetables, the result of uncompromising partisan allegiance to core Democratic and core Republican agendas, has given the country what the columnist Christopher Caldwell has aptly described as “a social-democratic government on an anarchist budget.”
Meet Me in the Lobby
“Lobbyists” are so named, legend has it, because in the 1870s men who wanted things from the government would wait for President Ulysses S. Grant in the lobby of the Willard Hotel next to the White House, hoping to press their cases on him when he stopped by for a nightcap.
It was their right. The first amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
That, strictly speaking, is what lobbyists do: “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” In our day, more than ever, the act of petitioning the government is dominated by special interests and their lobbyists. The term “special interests” connotes a selfish disregard for the interests of all Americans. Politicians like to boast of serving the national interest or the public interest, but they serve special interests as well, sometimes above all. As government has grown, so have the special interests and their lobbies in Washington—to the point where they often stand in the way of the policies the country needs. No less than hyper-partisan politics, super-funded and super-empowered special interests are crippling our capacity to define and act in the national interest—which involves meeting our big challenges and reviving our formula for prosperity. The attention paid to special interests also diverts our politicians—and our citizenry—from seeing our big problems, and it keeps us from tackling them with the speed, scope, and scale we need.
While it is no longer possible to buttonhole the president of the United States in a hotel bar, ever since Grant’s time lobbyists have plied their trade by influencing politicians and shaping legislation. To do this, they need access to those politicians and the hope of getting a sympathetic hearing for their concerns. They get this access, in no small part, by doing favors for those politicians, including making campaign contributions—which often come close to crossing the line that separates legal from illegal acts. As Russell Long, a former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, once put it: “The distinction between a campaign contribution and a bribe is almost a hairline’s difference. You can hardly tell one from the other.”
Lobbyists not only donate to campaigns. They also organize fund-raising events for candidates at which others donate. They help to create and operate political action committees that donate to candidates, and sometimes they even serve as finance chairs and treasurers of campaigns. These services naturally earn them the gratitude and goodwill of the politicians they help. As the longtime Senate Republican leader Bob Dole said of political action committees, when they give money “they expect something in return other than good government.”
In our day, the most notorious