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By Root 6768 0

lobbyist is Jack Abramoff, who was jailed in 2006 after pleading guilty to three criminal felony counts relating to the corruption of public officials and the defrauding of American Indian tribes whose legalized gambling interests he lobbied for in Washington. The exploits of “Casino Jack” got enough attention to serve as the basis for not one but two feature-length movies. But lobbying actually isn’t notably more corrupt today than it was in the past. In the post–Civil War period, bribery of public officials by railroad interests was standard operating procedure. In the 1920s, the Harding administration presided over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which the secretary of the interior received loans from businesses in exchange for the granting of leases on government-owned oil fields. The best novel about lobbying (and about Washington politics in general), Democracy, by Henry Adams, in which a woman declines to marry a senator after she learns that he has accepted a bribe, was first published in 1880.

Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, told us a story in which someone asked then senator Bob Dole whether Congress had gotten more corrupt. “And he said, ‘Oh, not even close!’ When he got started in Congress back in the early 1960s, people literally had bags of cash that would be distributed and so forth,” Bayh said. “That doesn’t happen today.” (Now the money comes via campaign contributions, airplane rides, golf outings—and more campaign contributions.)

What is new is the sheer number and power of lobbyists and the interests they represent. In 2010 there were 1,900 firms, employing more than 11,000 lobbyists (more than twenty for every member of Congress), registered to operate in Washington. The lobbyists were paid about $3.5 billion, which was twice as much as they had collectively earned only a decade earlier. Why the growth in their numbers, their salaries, and, most important, their power? The answer is contained in the title of Robert G. Kaiser’s valuable 2009 book about lobbyists, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, which we draw on here.

The rising influence of lobbyists on our political life is the consequence of a broad, long-term trend: the steady growth in the size of the American government. Over the decades, the American people, through their elected representatives, have decided that they want their government to do more and more things and to spend more and more money doing them. The federal budget for fiscal year 2010 involved the expenditure of $3.55 trillion, so it is not surprising that special interests hire lobbyists to get it spent on their behalf and not somebody else’s.

Lobbying has its constructive side. Lobbyists can represent small but worthy interests whose voices would otherwise not be heard (such as the group that wants to save the old covered bridge in your hometown), or broad public interests such as environmental protection that have no natural, moneyed, private-sector champions. Lobbyists can also help government officials understand complicated issues involving the companies and interests they work for—and can walk them through the thickets of corresponding legislation. In 2006, the federal tax code was 44,000 pages long, with 5.5 million words. The stimulus bill that Congress passed in early 2009 covered 407 pages. The health-care legislation it enacted the next year was 906 pages long. The financial-reform act of that year took up 2,319 pages. Even the sharpest elected officials cannot hope to understand such bills by themselves. That is where—for good and for ill—lobbyists come in. The diverse and complex nature of so much legislation today opens the way for lobbyists to shape and even write portions of bills, ostensibly for the national interest, certainly for the benefit of the special interests they are paid to represent.

Former senator Simpson has referred to lobbyists as “practitioners of the dark arts” who would, he predicted, resist any serious effort to implement the budget cuts he favored. Behind closed doors, lobbyists