How Do You Feel About Lobbying?
I was just thinking about lobbying and considering whether the lobbying system is a broken thing, whether it is necessary, and whether it is something that ought to or can be fixed. From the lay person's perspective, myself, I get the following impressions about our system of lobbying. For those of you who study this stuff, feel free to correct or elaborate as needed:
Layperson Impressions of Lobbying:
1. A lobbyist can have a great deal of influence on a congressman; the kind of influence that can only be balanced by intra-party pressures, congressional peer pressure, executive branch pressures, mass protest, or the influences of other lobbyists. This means the influence exerted by the individual, via writing or calling your congressman, or participating at a town hall meeting, is extremely dilute by comparison.
2. Loosely, the more money a lobbyist has at his/her disposal, the more influence he/she has. I've read that big lobbying firms go far beyond waiting in the lobby to catch a congressman going from point A to B, acting as PR firms for their respective clients, relating to congress as the public. The implication here is that very wealthy clients hire the lobbying firms with the most resources and thereby gain the more influence.
3. Lobbying firms often hire former congressmen, congressional staff and/or federal agency and military employees to lobby the institutions they are intimately familiar with, which from a recruiting standpoint only makes sense. But the practice also holds out an implicit golden carrot to current congressmen and federal staff that if they play very nice with the big lobbying firm then they too will get a sweetheart job when they move on from government work. In other words, the ability to go on to such work is an inherrent conflict of interest.
4. Lobbying firms do much more than just convey the opinions of their clients and put on PR campaigns. Depending on the congressional officials, or on the executive branch officials, they actually write portions of legislation. The effect here is that with gigantic bills with thousands of pages of text the congressman who is introducing the legislation may not have any idea what details a lobbying firm may have hidden in it to benefit some select client. In that case we have unelected and highly specialized interests not only possessing enormous influence on congress but able in some cases to actually create parts of legislation specifically for clients.
So What to Do?
Those lay-perspectives disclosed, with the full acknowledgement that they could be partially or entirely wrong, I'm wondering what the folks here think about abolishing lobbying altogether. I don't mean to leave a complete "influence vacuum" and I don't mean to say that groups of individuals should not be able to pool their resources to lean on congress for their pet interests, but that there's a better way to go than our current lobbying methodology.
It's certainly true that sometimes constituents don't know their own best interests and the majority might want their representative to vote in a way opposite of what they ultimately decide, but that's why we have representatives (vs. enacting legislation by popular vote, right?). The masses can be dumb sometimes, to put it crudely.
And that's also why we have lobbyists, right? They should be a source of specialized, theoretically more knowledgable, influence on the Congressman. So we have the influence of the masses to consider and the influence of those closer to a particular issue who may know better than the majority. Then we have niche influences from groups who arn't experts or particularly impacted by a bill, but whose wants run counter to the majority or the experts.
Given the above categories, why couldn't we take care of all their desires to influence congress like this:
A. Require local opinion polls be taken for every congressional vote to gauge the community's opinion for each issue and require the results be made very public well before the vote.
B. Allow any industries or institutions or other private entities directly affected by proposed legislation, and with expertise in whatever the legislation pertains to, to make public appeals to their local Congressmen to influence their vote. This would entail some sort of televised meeting with each interest that the public and opposing interests may all observe, but not interrupt, with written transcripts and back up material made available to everyone.
C. Allow minority groups not necessarily directly affected by legislation, but who still have an interest, to voice their opinions in a similar forum as B.
D. Letter writing and phone calling by private individuals not as experts or professionals on behalf of a special interest would be allowed as normal. And public protesting would be allowed as it is today as well.
A,B, and C should probably be done in several rounds to allow some point and counterpoint. Allowing interest groups to debate and answer questions from their congressman might be effective too, maybe in a forum not unlike how parties argue before the Supreme Court.
*I think one possible drawback may be the time it takes to do this sort of thing correctly, giving everyone the proper amount of time and each issue enough rounds.
**Another possible drawback may be the sheer number of 'groups' with opinions that might pop up. There would need to be some sort of certification process, maybe handled by the court system, requiring proof of expertise or petition signatures.
Some perceived/ intended benefits:
A key result is there would be no private meetings or communications between congressmen, or their staffs, and a group or an individual backed by a group, intending to influence their vote. All attempts to influence the congressman would be open and public and subject to analysis and cross examination in the public arena. Furthermore, there would be:
1. Much less opportunity for good old boy networks to form
2. Much smaller opportunity for golden carrot conflicts of interest (revolving door)
3. Much less opportunity for other secret or implied quid pro quos
4. Much less influence strictly by virtue of having the cash to hire the best lobbying firm
5. The localization of influence on a congressman - interests from outside the district or the state would perhaps be allowed to plead their position in B or even C above, but their status as outside the district would be made plain.
6. A much more open political discourse allowing every major interest to express their positions and have their positions subjected to cross examination before a bill is voted on.
Note on Electoral Reform:
The above would work best in conjunction with electoral reform, particularly with advancing to an entirely publicly financed campaign system. Also there should be complete disclosure of funding for political advertising, restrictions on when advertisements can be placed (i.e. black out periods maybe two weeks before an election), restrictions on what sort of entity can run political advertisements, how much add time they can buy, and an independant fact checking system that would fine and publicly chastise any entity making blatantly false add claims.
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Originally Posted by Nessus
