We Pay A High Price for Special-Interest Lobbying

As Congress gets closer to imposing new limits on lobbyists, it's hard to miss the air of cheerful optimism that has settled over K Street. Despite the list of lobbyist-supplied attractions that House and Senate members appear ready to eliminate — meals, gifts, travel — you get the sense that well-heeled interests won't miss a beat in their unceasing efforts to get lawmakers' attention and compliance.

This is because key lobbying strategies that money can buy these days are likely to remain untouched. These include campaign contributions, contributions to independent groups for election-season television advertising, gifts to think tanks and charities tied to lawmakers, and funds for "grass-roots" campaigns targeted at votes on Capitol Hill. Basically, if you've got money to spend on influencing the federal government, you've got little to fear from "lobby reform." That should worry the vast majority of us who don't have those kinds of resources.

We pay a high price, both as a society and as individual citizens, for the kind of unchecked special-interest pleading that has become so common in Washington.

Our system is built on the notion that citizens should have access to their representatives — and we do. But there is a difference between our letters, emails and attendance at the occasional town meeting, and the attention that the lobbying corps commands.

There are some 35,000 lobbyists who now ply their trade in the halls of government. They spend, according to American University political scientist James A. Thurber, $10 billion a year on their activities; only $2 billion of this goes to actual salaries. The rest is used to buy — there's no other word for it — lawmakers' time and support.

What do we as a nation get for this unbalanced "access"? In part, we get legislation that is clearly tilted in favor of those willing to invest a lot of money in order to reap even better returns.

We get a tax code that is extraordinarily complex, that goes out of its way to favor particular interests, and that often costs the U.S. Treasury — you and me, in other words — billions of dollars in foregone revenue.

We get the recent highway bill or the current federal budget, which spend billions of dollars on so-called "earmarks," or pork-barrel projects that may have a congressman's name on them but were often submitted on behalf of a lobbyist and his clients.

And we get regulations or interpretations of federal law that favor those who are well-organized and rich enough to prevail over what most people would consider the national interest. As a heavily lobbied Transportation Department gets ready to issue new regulations on fuel standards for light trucks, for instance, does anyone actually believe it is good public policy to require just a small increase in miles per gallon, when there is a general consensus that stricter standards would be good for the air and reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

But tax breaks, pollution, oil dependence, global warming and a host of bad public policy decisions are only the half of it. We pay an even higher price in the dislocation endured by our political system. We depend in a representative democracy on the accountability of our legislators and on knowing how they arrive at the decisions they make; yet weak reporting requirements undermine our ability to know all of the lobbying that aims to affect the votes of our representatives.

We depend on the notion that our lawmakers owe their attention and their allegiance to the ordinary people who send them to Washington; yet it is getting easier every year to believe that the voters have been surpassed by big campaign contributors, corporations that put their private jets at legislators' disposal, and the lobbyists who organize these inducements.

We depend on the idea that we, the people, can be heard in the halls of power, and that the interests of every side will be fairly weighed as legislation and regulations are crafted; yet if polls are to be believed, large numbers of Americans now believe they don't stand a chance against wealthy special interests.

Special interests' impact on Washington is not, of course, all bad. Over the years, I have seen many "special interests" representing a broad cross-section of Americans contribute to our nation's advancement: leaders in business, labor, education, environment, religion, and civil rights. Many of them have made outstanding contributions to the common good.

But in recent years, money and a willingness to spend it to promote narrow and particular interests have become the defining components of "clout" in Washington, and this has bred a level of cynicism about the system that is unmatched in my four decades of involvement in politics.

That is unquestionably the most pernicious effect that special-interest lobbying has had on our system. We cannot sustain indefinitely this erosion in the integrity of our system. Someday, special-interest democracy and representative democracy will collide. Let us start working now to strengthen democracy of, by, and for all the people, not for just a few.

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Three Fixes for American Democracy

By a quirk of scheduling, the U.S. Supreme Court has just heard arguments in two cases that illustrate the core problems that ail Congress and our democracy. The Court seems an awfully slender reed upon which to rely, however. These are matters that will demand political will to resolve, not a judicial remedy alone.

The court cases involve Vermont's law imposing strict limits on spending and fundraising in political campaigns, and a challenge to the mid-decade congressional redistricting pushed through in Texas by former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. These issues — the chase for campaign dollars and the gerrymandering of congressional districts — form two of the three most glaring shortcomings in our political system at the moment. The third is the no-holds-barred lobbying atmosphere that, until recently, enshrouded Capitol Hill. Address these forthrightly, and we'll have gone a long way toward shoring up our troubled democracy.

Anyone who is paying attention can come up with a long list of reforms that would help Congress and our republican form of government function better, from fixing the budget process to banning privately funded congressional travel. But the three big things that most distort the behavior of our elected officials and the functioning of our system are campaign money, lobbying, and gerrymandering.

Let's start with money. The Court ruled 30 years ago, in a case known as Buckley v. Valeo, that limiting campaign spending amounted to placing limits on free speech. We can go around and around on whether its logic was justified or not, but the results are obvious to anyone: a campaign-spending smackdown that gets more brutal with every passing year.

It now costs a huge amount of money to run credibly for Congress. This makes it hard for challengers to mount effective campaigns, and demands that incumbents spend absurd amounts of their time and attention raising money, rather than focusing on the matters we send them to Washington to focus on. Even worse, it also makes incumbents reliant on those who can help them raise money — you'll be stunned, I'm sure, to learn that K Street lobbyists excel at this — and fundamentally distorts the entire process of generating legislation.

As long as Buckley v. Valeo is the final word on the matter, there are only limited steps we can take to remedy the matter. But there's another possibility. Former U.S. Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina has proposed a constitutional amendment authorizing Congress to regulate or control spending in federal elections. Constitutional amendments are justifiably difficult to enact, but we are in dire straits, and Hollings'idea deserves support.

Even if we were to end the campaign financing arms race, though, special interests with money to spend will still find creative ways to cozy up to legislators. So at the very least, we must resolve right now to make all lobbying as open and transparent as possible.

We live in an age when the web and powerful databases make it eminently possible to follow the activities of lobbyists, the "grassroots" efforts they fund, and the legislators they try to influence or with whom they interact. Lobby disclosure laws at the moment are an open joke in Washington, and though there are several reform proposals that would create a disclosure regimen with teeth, they are still controversial.

They shouldn't be. Lobbyists and special interests should be required regularly to detail what they spend on influencing legislation and how they go about it: which specific members of Congress they meet; which grassroots campaigns they fund; which anonymous-sounding organizations they create to pressure Capitol Hill; how much they spend on dinners, lunches, meetings...You get the idea.

All of this should be available with a few taps on a keyboard to anyone who wants to look it up, and all of it actually needs to be enforceable — that is, any disclosure law must be accompanied by provisions for enforcing it, so that the activities of special interests are made known, and violations of the rules enforced.

There is one more piece of business that needs addressing. Our election system is becoming obstructed by redistricting efforts that, in the last two election cycles, made it possible for 98 percent of incumbents running again to be re-elected. Competitive elections for the House are rare. Districts drawn to favor one party over another make it almost impossible for voters to express their opinion about the direction the country is taking, and allow incumbents to behave very differently than if they have to justify their actions to a skeptical audience.

Back in 2003, an aide to a Texas congressman sent a memo to his colleagues explaining the benefits of the partisan gerrymander. "This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood," he wrote. Does that sound like a recipe for democracy to you? It is time for all 50 states to follow the example set by a handful of them, and put redistricting in non-partisan hands.

So there you have it. This is a reform moment in Washington, and we should use it to focus on the most important steps we can take to fix our Republic. Get control of spending on elections, enforce complete disclosure of lobbying activities, and end the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, and we will have gone a long way toward that goal.

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