The previous chapter in this series is located here.
The Role of Lobbying in the Death of Democracy in America
Lobbying is generally felt to be protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee “... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, and a number of laws have been passed over the years defining what is and is not permissible. These laws have focused on defining reporting requirements in an effort to make lobbying activities more transparent and thus reduce the potential for misuse.
Related to lobbies are Political Action Committees (PAC), since PAC’s are often managed and financed by lobbies. However, PAC’s are regulated (if at all) by virtue of the Federal Elections Campaign Act. They are generally created to elect political candidates or to advance political issues or legislation and to influence their outcome.
For the purposes of this discussion I will use Lobbies and PACs interchangeably.
Most people have an uncomfortable feeling that the boundary between lobbying and corruption is a very fluid and gray area, as evidenced by the repeated and on-going national debate about the proper role of lobbying and lobbyists. In an interesting research paper by Nauro F. Campos and Francesco Giovannoni(23) the authors attempt to formally investigate the proposition that “[c]onventional wisdom suggests that lobbying is the preferred means for exerting political influence in rich countries and corruption the preferred one in poor countries”.
The above cited study also points out (with evidence) that one of the major differences between how corruption and lobbying seek to gain favors and (unfair) advantages is that corruption focuses on the executive and its bureaucracy, while lobbying focuses on the legislative arms of government. Furthermore, they find that corruption tends to be used more in non-democratic states or early-emerging democracies while lobbying is more prevalent in stable democracies, or to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, lobbying is the expression of corruption by other means.
In an article in Forbes(24), Michael Maiello points out that
“... the power of the lobbyist is far greater than the power of the briber. A powerful lobbyist can get laws changed even if there's no public consensus to do so, and yet those laws still apply to everyone”.
Similarly Thomas Gais(25) writes
“Not only are organized groups still believed to control too much money and to be too important in formulating government policies; such groups, especially when they are organized as PACs, are viewed as unrepresentative of, and even alien to, the interests of most citizens”.
One of the more extreme examples of how powerful lobbies can be and how they can corrupt the legislative process was highlighted in a CBS 60 Minutes report(26), first aired on April 1, 2007 (and no, it was not an April Fools joke). It described the middle of the night vote to pass one of the biggest government give-aways to the pharmaceutical industry, popularly known as Medicare Part D Drug Coverage. From the report’s transcript:
"The pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote the bill," says [Rep. Walter] Jones. "The bill was over 1,000 pages. And it got to the members of the House that morning, and we voted for it at about 3 a.m. in the morning," remembers Jones.
Why did the vote finally take place at 3 a.m.?
"Well, I think a lot of the shenanigans that were going on that night, they didn't want on national television in primetime," according to [Rep. Dan] Burton.
It is estimated that this bill will provide the pharmaceutical industry with $40 billion in government transfer payments over 10 years.
This bill passed almost entirely along party lines and all Republicans, who today are clamoring to cut government spending, pushed this bill through congress over strong objections from Democrats. The parallels with the Health Care bill passed by the Democratic congress in 2009 are fascinating, in that that vote too was completely along party lines, but with roles reversed. More about the role of politicians in killing American democracy in a later chapter.
It is especially egregious in my view that there is a “revolving” door between lobbies and political offices, both elected, appointed and at the staff level. Former members of congress, who move to lobbies, retain many of the privileges of their former elected office, including access to the floors of both House and Senate. Access is the bread and butter of lobbyists and these former members of congress have unequaled access, which is exactly what they sell to lobbying firms.
It is interesting to note that none other than Senator Robert C. Byrd, then the Senate Majority Leader, felt obliged in 1980 to hold a lengthy series of lectures in support of lobbyist(27) to protect them from “... the media [who] tend to portray legislative lobbyists as some form of monster.” Senator Byrd reviews the entire 200 year history of lobbying activity in the US Congress, recounting the many instances in which lobbying has led to obviously corrupt actions which were counter to the interests of the majority of citizens. Each time Senator Byrd ponderously proclaims “Mr. President, this practice has been discontinued, as we all know.”
Senator Byrd goes on to favorably reference Margaret Thompson(28), who defines lobbying as "the process by which the interests of discrete clienteles are represented within the policy-making system." She defined lobbyists as "representatives who act concurrently with, and supplement the capabilities of, those who are selected at the polls. Lobbyists fill roles that in many ways are comparable to those of legislators: helping to transmit and obtain satisfaction for demands upon the government, thereby advancing the substantive interests of those whom they have taken it upon themselves to serve”.
Note how lobbyists are here defined as virtually equivalent to our elected representatives and senators. But who elected the lobbyists?
Senator Byrd ends his lecture with a paragraph which is almost pathetic in its defense of lobbyists:
“They spend many hours and considerable shoe leather trying to convince 535 members of Congress of the wisdom or folly of certain legislation. They face vigorous competition. They still bear the brunt of press criticism and take the blame for the sins of a small minority of their numbers. But they have a job to do, and most of them do it very well indeed. It is hard to imagine Congress without them”. [Emphasis mine]
These lectures are now part of the official WEB site of the United States Senate!
My indictment of lobbying, however, is not restricted to the potential for corruption of both the electoral and the legislative processes as a legal or ethical matter. Equally important is that lobbying corrupts democracy itself by violating the “one person, one vote” doctrine, which is basic to democracy.
The one person one vote principle, although not explicitly guaranteed in the constitution, has been repeatedly affirmed by Supreme Court decisions to mean that all citizens, regardless of where they reside in a state, are entitled to equal legislative representation. This interpretation is primarily based on the requirement in the US Constitution for a decennial census to assure a fair distribution of seats in the House of Representative. Note that the Senate and the President are not included in the one person, one vote requirement, but since all money bills must originate from the House of Representative (HR), the founders were intent on ensuring that every citizen had an equal vote at the very least when it comes to money matters.
The average voter, like you and I, have one vote every two years with which we can try to influence the general and specific direction the HR will take for a two year period. Note that even this one chance to influence the direction of America is not really made in a “free and open” environment, but rather we , the citizens, are “constrained” in this act by the information we are given about the candidates and policy options. This information is heavily influenced by the media in general (see previous chapter), and by the PACs, which finance the campaigns and manage the way the media present the candidates and the issues. So even in this one vote, special interest groups, lobbies and PAC’s are already exerting their pervasive influence and control over us, the citizens.
Once we have cast our votes we, the citizens, are essentially side-lined, and lobbies take over, almost literally. So while we as ordinary citizens have one vote every two years, lobbyists essentially have a vote every time they meet with “our” representative. It is said that Rep. Boehner meets with lobbyists several times per week where decisions are made on which lobbyist will take the lead on drafting which new (spending) bill or other piece of legislation. So in that case it would be something on the order of 100 votes for lobbyists, 1 vote for the citizen. Even if for the typical Representative you assume only one tenth the number of contacts with lobbyists, the “one person one vote” principle would still be skewed by a factor of 10 in favor of special interests.
This concern that lobbying and PACs violate the one person one vote principle is also reflected in the literature. Alexander Heard, as cited in the previously referenced book by Thomas Gais, states:
“A deeply cherished slogan of American democracy is “one man - one vote”... Concern over the private financing of political campaigns stems in significant measure from the belief that the gift is an especially important kind of vote. It is grounded in the thought that persons who give in larger sums or to more candidates than their fellow citizens are in effect voting more than once”.
Efforts to control lobbying from degenerating into corruption and ensuring that large well financed groups do not “buy” disproportionate influence in the legislative process have been ongoing for decades. These efforts have tended to concentrate on two areas:
- restricting the size of contributions to try and ensure a “grassroots approach” of a large base with a common interest;
- implementing (rather toothless) reporting requirements to make the process more transparent.
Overall these “reforms” have not shown any visible improvements. Moreover Gais demonstrates that the well-meaning “grassroots” approach, with many small contributions, together with the expensive and complex book-keeping and reporting rules, have the unintended side effect of preventing significant “interest groups”, which however do not have existing sponsorship and organizational infrastructure, from engaging in effective lobbying or support of political candidates.
For example, the currently about 45 million Americans who for one reason or the other have no health insurance and might want to make their interests known and felt in the legislative process, will find it difficult if not impossible to put together an “organization” capable of soliciting many small contributions and satisfying the accounting and reporting requirements for PACs. Thus, in any political debate about alternative policies to provide health insurance to these 45 million uninsured, the lobbying and PAC avenue of making input to this legislative process is dominated by those who already have existing organizational structures: the medical establishment, insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry and the like. This all but guarantees a one-sided, non-representative approach to health care legislation.
And to make matters even worse, a recent Supreme Court ruling overturned existing rules against both non-profit groups and for-profit corporations from using unlimited “treasury” funds to fund TV and radio ads. This opened the floodgates for corporations to use their general funds use the well-honed advertising techniques (deceptive or downright false) for political purposes also, rather than just to get people to spend their money on inferior or unneeded products and services (see also the previous chapter on the media).
Personal Experience
Since I was never involved in politics in Germany (if you ignore the short period as a teenage boy when I helped my father distribute leaflets for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in our neighborhood while he was stationed in Bonn at the Foreign Office headquarters), I can claim no direct experience with lobbying in Germany. I can only describe indirect experiences about how lobbies affect (or not) political campaigns.
To that extent I repeat my observations from the chapter on the media: Political parties and candidates are not permitted to buy commercial time on radio or TV.
This would, of course, cut off the primary method by which lobbies and PAC’s in the US influence and (mis-)inform American voters about candidates and issues.
For the individual this means that one is not inundated with the flood of mostly negative, entirely uninformative, often downright untrue paid political ads on TV. That in itself is a blessing. However, beyond that, it gives the entire political campaign in Germany a more serious and more responsible tone. It is difficult not to become completely discouraged and disengaged with the American political process and American politicians given the constant stream of negative campaign ads. Even politicians, who one basically feels some sympathy for, end up looking like complete fools based on the political ads they “authorize”, containing such obvious misstatements about issues and their opponents. It is no wonder that voter turnout in America continues to go down.
As mentioned previously, candidates in Germany are forced to present themselves to the electorate in personal appearances and interviews on radio and TV. In these interviews (generally not staged events such as the “TV Debates” in the US, although, sadly, that’s becoming more prevalent in Europe, also) the interviewers generally do not allow obviously non-responsive answers, slogans, or even downright false statements to go unchallenged.
Although there is a certain amount of “analysis” after such political interviews on German media, this analysis will tend to focus on the substance of the debates, rather than concentrating on the form, strategy, speculation and endless recounting of “public opinion polls”. It is significant that in a recent CNN “show” after the House voted on the repeal of the Health Insurance Reform Act, a number of public opinion polls were “analyzed” by the talking heads, which came to the conclusion that “the American public is still very confused and uninformed” about what this legislation actually included. Not a single participant in that “analysis” asked the obvious question: Why is the American public still ignorant about the contents of this “health care reform” bill?
Conclusions
The key points I want to make in this section about how lobbying has helped to kill American democracy are:
- Lobbies have been an integral part of the political process in America from the very start.
- Even the most staunch defenders of lobbies concede the equally long history of corruption and distortion of the democratic process caused by lobbies and PAC’s.
- Years of attempts to control lobbies and PAC’s through legislation and oversight have had no visible beneficial results.
- The Supreme Court has seen fit to negate even these small and ineffectual attempts to control lobbies and PAC’s by removing all controls over how money is funneled into this process.
- Lobbies and PAC’s use the highly sophisticated methods developed by corporate advertising media to control the issues visible to the public, and to distort the information about these issues and about political candidates. This is tantamount to censorship and brain-washing.
- Most destructively of all, lobbies and PAC’s make a mockery of the one-person, one-vote concept by allowing lobbies to exercise continuous influence on the legislative process in between the virtually meaningless votes which we as citizens are allowed to cast every two years.
Footnotes:
(23) Nauro F. Campos Francesco Giovannoni, Lobbying, Corruption and Political Influence, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit Institute for the Study of Labor, IZA DP No. 2313
(24) Michael Maiello, Corruption, American Style, Forbes.com, Jan 22, 2009
(25) Thomas L. Gais, Improper Influence: Campaign Finance Law, Political Interest Groups, and the Problem of Equality, University of Michigan Press (May 1, 1996)
(26) see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/29/60minutes/main2625305.shtml
(28)
Thompson, Margaret S. The "Spider Web": Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (1985)
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