October 6, 2015 • 53 mins
Lobbying is an entrenched part of American politics and one that many people think is breaking government. But petitioning the government is protected in the Constitution. How can this system be fixed?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant and Crickets. So weird. Yeah,
we're doing this um ghost style. Yeah, So what happened
(00:23):
was and I didn't you explain to me? But I
don't know. Maybe my mind was elsewhere and I didn't
fully understand. But what happened is guest producer Noel got
the record, He put them mouse on the hamster wheel,
got the computer running and left And now you're a
little freaked out. Well, it's this is out of close
(00:46):
to eight shows, this is literally the first time it's
ever just been you and me in a room. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? Yeah? It really is, isn't it. It's
I feel like I don't know, I feel like there
with no one in here, even though no one ever
guides us that we should just I don't know that
we're gonna cut up and curse. And it's like when
the teacher has left the room, it feels like there's
(01:06):
a vast field, a portal to another dimension to my
right where Jerry usually said. So I had no idea
what that extra silent human three ft from this meant
I think now, this means that we've been put out
to pastor Wow, this is disconcerting. Alright, I feel like
you're gonna like knife me or something. I could right
(01:28):
now and no one whatever now until we published the episode. Nope,
no one would ever know. Wow. Man, that's gruesome. All right,
this is just weird. Let's let's do it. Are you ready? Yeah?
Good choice. By the way, Yeah, I don't remember what
episode we picked this in. We were talking about something
and lobbying came up, where like, we should just do
one on lobbying. Well, here it is. Yeah, it's it's
(01:48):
I'm glad we're doing this because we'll clear up some misconceptions. Uh,
it's not always evil, just the time maybe more. Yeah,
um yeah, I remember when we said we were going
to do a lobbying one. We got a lot of
emails from lobbyists who were like, please, please, please, don't
just trash our profession like we ever would. Um, they're
(02:09):
they were like, lobbyings, actually, it can be a really
good thing, and sure, that's why. So we got a
lot of feedback before this thing even came out, which
hopefully will help us. Well, they're understandably a very defensive group. Yes,
everyone thinks it's just rotten and corrupt across all channels,
rotten to the core. Um. And the reason I and
(02:33):
just about everyone else walking the planet thinks that lobbyists
are rotten, it's because of some very high profile cases
like remember Jack Abramoff, who can forget what a and
I usually don't publicly trash people, but that guy was
a pile of garbage. You know, there's really no I
was trying to find some other way around it. It
was like, no, he was awful and just ripped people off, unabashedly,
(02:58):
ripped off Indian tribe, bribed officials, bribe people, pocketed money.
And he was a highly highly successful, obvious people he
was working for, he was He's not a good fellow, no,
but again, he was a successful lobbyist. He was at
the top of his field for many years actually, um.
And it wasn't until two thousand and six when he
(03:19):
was convicted of I believe, like bribery and corruption and
all sorts of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, um,
And I ended up serving three three years. I think
he did three three years in the Pokey yeah, and
supposedly had to pay a lot of restitution and tax fines. Yeah,
but who knows how that stuff works out. No one
ever follows up to see, you know, we just say, oh,
(03:41):
he got a he's supposed to pay all these people back.
Sure it happened. Yeah, who knows. He probably found a
loophole to work on. He's probably working on a lawsuit
against us right this moment. Chuck, Oh, can you not
publicly call someone garbage? I think you can. Okay, can
we find out? Can we read this opening statement from
eighteen sixty nine, Yeah, because I think it makes a
(04:03):
pretty good point that Jack Abramoff wasn't the first despised lobbyist. No,
this is written by Emily Edson Briggs, who was a
Washington D c. Newspaper correspondent um at a time where
there weren't a lot of women doing that, which is
kind of cool. And I think she was the first
allowed into the congressional press room. Yeah, they said let her,
(04:23):
and she'll never say anything bad because we gave her
this job, and she's like, he fell from my big
cookies plan. So she wrote a column talk called the
Dragons of the Lobby. So you probably know where this
is headed. And the opening line of the column said,
winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage,
crawling through the corridors, trailing at slimy length from gallery
(04:45):
to committee room. At last it lies stretched at full
length on the floor of the Congress, this dazzling reptile,
this huge scaly serpent of the lobby. That could have
been our Halloween episode. You really could have. Maybe we
should gus see that up increas with a little bit
of sound effects. Yeah, that was in eighteen sixty nine. Yeah,
not very flattering. Um. And it was actually I think
(05:07):
it did come um at a time when lobbying and
lobbyists were really getting a chokehold on um on Congress,
on legislation, on sweetheart deals from the federal government. Um.
But lobbying goes further back than that, and lobbyists have
been despised even further back than that as a matter
(05:30):
of fact. Yeah, and it's uh again, it's something this
article makes. I thought, this is a really well written article. Actually, yeah,
this was the day US article and he did a
good job. Um. He points out that the knee drug
reaction for your average person might be to say just
make it all illegal, get rid of the lobby because
it's awful. But he makes a good point that it
(05:51):
is it is necessary. The First Amendment in our own
Constitution says the right of the people to petition the
government for a redress of grievances. Is that necessary and
constitutional and mandatory. Yeah, and that's what lobbyists do, is Uh.
It's not always a huge corporation. A lot of times
they'll speak for the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts
(06:13):
or you know, all kinds of special interest groups, and
we all have them, so you me, everyone listening in
America has a constitutional right to go and petition Congress
to say, hey, guys, you guys aren't paying enough attention
to government waste, or NASA deserves way more funding than
you're giving it. Whatever, you can go do that. That's
(06:34):
lobbying technically, but unfortunately, almost from the beginning, UH, corporate
and big business special interest groups figured out a way
to basically exploit that to their to their own benefit. Yeah,
and it's uh. Ruz also points out, and we'll get
to this later, uh, which is one of the big problems.
It's necessary because Congress and their staff don't have time
(06:57):
to Uh, that's well again, we'll get to that later.
I don't want to spoil it, but they don't have
time to go through the myriad request and and uh information,
deluge of information that's necessary to make an educated decision,
and so much so that Senator John F. Kennedy in said,
(07:18):
uh that we are in many cases expert technicians capable
of exact not we are, I'm sorry. Lobbyists are in
many cases, I'm sorry, are in many cases expert technicians
capable of examining complex and difficult subjects and a clear,
understandable fashion. So that's the reason we need them in
(07:40):
many cases is to literally explain stuff too congress people
and staff strapped for time and resources. It should be said, though,
that um when Kennedy wrote that in the mid fifties,
lobbying was not much of a thing. It had like
it was established, had been established for a couple hundred years.
People hated lobbyists. There were huge um lobbyists scandals in
(08:04):
the Gilded Age from the Civil War to the nineteenth century.
But in the mid fifties, lobbying was not a huge thing.
It wasn't so um. What he said, though, is accurate
and it's still is accurate today. If you are an
incoming congress person, Um, you make your name both to
your constituency and in your party by getting bills passed,
(08:27):
by coming up with bills and passing them. Right, look
at all the work I accomplished. And then if you
um get enough, you may end up on a nice committee,
maybe even a committee chair, and then eventually a party leader.
And all that is because you introduced legislation that was
favored and got passed. The thing is, you don't have
the time or the staff to research and write legislation,
(08:52):
so you have to you have to turn to lobbyists
lobbying groups and say, hey, you guys are literally experts
on this topic. I need your help, uh educate me,
help me write this, and then um, we'll we'll be friends.
The problem is is there's not a there's not a
special interest group like you said, whether it's the Girl
(09:13):
Scouts or whether it's uh the Chamber of Commerce that
doesn't have a slamt that isn't going to try to
slamp that legislation in their favor. So that means that
the laws that are written in this country today are
the legislative equivalents of avertorials, you know, kind of thin
on actual content and really heavy on stuff that benefits
(09:37):
the corporations running the show. You know, who would make
good lobbyists? Who they're in this room right now? Oh
you think so? I was just thinking, like generally unbiased
research presented so someone can make a decision. Yeah, that's
kind of what we do, except we're not paid like
lobbyists just make a lot of dough. Uh. In fact,
(09:59):
and to thousand fourteen lobbyists and these are people that
are officially registered as lobbyists, which we'll get to. There
are a lot more people doing lobby esque work that
aren't officially registered, but official registered lobbyists. Uh, we're paid
out to three point two four billion dollars in two
thousand fourteen, and that is only divided among how many people?
(10:22):
Was it about ten thousand, six hundred people? What are
you kidding? That's how many registered lobbyists there were and
this year and that's but again just the registered one
from a high of about fourteen and change. And when
was that two thousand six or seven? And two two
(10:44):
thousand seven changes came along, and it's not because there
are fewer lobbyists there there that just gave rise to people,
or gave people the ability to be like, oh, I'm
not a lobbyists anymore. Because here's the thing. If you
are a registered lobbyist, you are subject to some very
strict i think old guidelines, legal guidelines, scrutiny of your
(11:04):
business practices, and there's a lot of stuff you can't do.
You just you're just completely outlawed from doing certain things.
If if you can just skirt the definition of a lobbyist,
it's like open season. Man, it's the wild West on
Capitol Hill for you, and you can make as much
money as you possibly can while doing the same things
(11:25):
just not having to register as a lobbyist. All right,
But that's a lot of teasing. This is the like.
But this is the current state of the American legislative process.
Our legislators rely on special interest groups almost entirely to
tell them what they need to know from their slant
and then actually writing the legislation for them to go
(11:47):
take the Congress and be like, God, I got I'm
gonna make my name with this. All right. There's one
other thing too that we should say, and this is
a this is one reason why lobbying is so pernicious. Um,
lobbyists also as major fundraisers for the very politicians that
they're lobbying. Yeah, Like, I didn't give them money. I
(12:08):
just called a fundraiser that raised four and a half
million dollars at you know, three thousand dollars a plate.
But hey, they they gave him the money. Right, they
don't know me anything. I'm just doing this because I'm
a patriotic citizen of the United States and I'll see
you Monday, and I like to overcharge for salmon. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? So that's the current state, everybody. Let's
(12:30):
go back to the beginning, because lobbyists have been around
basically as long as America has. Yeah, let's take a
little break and then we'll we'll get to the tease
stuff and start off with a little bit of history. Yeah,
(13:03):
all right. Uh, there's some misconceptions about the history of
the word itself. Laure says that it was invented uh
in the Willard Hotel in Washington, d C. In that
lobby when uh Ulystas Grant would kick back and have
a drink like he so like to do, uh and
would get disgusted by what he called those damn lobbyists
(13:26):
that we're hanging out there, Yeah, asking him for stuff. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah.
And while that may have, um, that may have given
rise to the term popularity wise here, but you can
trace it back to England, uh in the sixteen forties,
when they talked about the lobby in the House of Commons,
where you could go right up to your representatives and
in your cute little wig and say, here's what I
(13:49):
think you should do, right, and here's some here's some
good old fashioned English pounds in your pocket. And I
mean that's always just gone with it, part and parcel. Yeah,
you know, if not outright bribery, at least favors or
quid pro quo or tip for tad or it's the
jackal and hide Beyonce tickets, all sorts of stuff. Yeah,
(14:11):
first class or not first class. No one flies first class.
Talking about the lear jet, the true first class, the
private jet. Didn't they do away with first class? Announcesis
called business class because of class resentment in the United States. Yeah,
and now they've well depends on the airline. There's all
sorts of new rules and special things. You can pay
for alright. So uh, in the United States, from the
(14:35):
very first session of Congress, there were lobbying efforts and
people treating congress. Uh. I'm gonna say congressmen for this one,
because this was in We're gonna say congress person for
later on. The women were at home brewing beer in
their households, but they were applying congressmen with treats and dinners.
(14:57):
And that was a direct quote from Pennsylvania Senator William
maclay from the very first session of Congress. He was saying, Yeah,
they're lobbyists here. They're basically trying to bribe people. They're
trying to install the terrifact of nine, which established um
Congress's ability to basically extract duties and taxes on goods
(15:19):
in the United States in order to support the government.
Let's go out to dinner instead. And the New York
merchants were like, you don't want to do that. Let
me get you hammered three ways from Sunday. What are
you doing later? Yeah, I'll tell you what you're doing.
You're gonna finish. It. Can't get wrong in one sitting. Uh.
Then apparently the Bank of the United States was one
(15:40):
of the first big corrupt organizations as far as literally
having politicians in their pocket paying the money. Yeah, like, um,
the United States used to have things like like an
actual centralized bank. And Andrew Jackson came along. It's like,
this thing is just way too corrupt. We need to
get it of it and put me on your money. Yeah,
(16:01):
but the the scandals associated with it where things like, um,
the National Bank had on its board as board members
who are being paid by the bank, sitting congressman who
were writing legislation in favor of the bank. Yeah, this
quote is the best. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster sent a
(16:24):
letter to the Bank of the United States that said this,
among other things. Since I arrived here, I have had
an application to be concerned professionally against the bank, which
I've declined. Of course, although I believe my retainer has
not been renewed or refreshed as usual. Uh, if it
be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued,
(16:45):
it may be well to send me the usual retainer.
In other words, I've noticed that you're not paying me.
Now people are telling me to write legislation against you.
I'm turning them down for now. You may want to
send that money again if you would like this, love Daniel. Yeah,
like he flat out said, the bribes have sort of
dried up. I've noticed, so why don't you start sending
(17:07):
this again? Unbelievable history. So you talked about the Gilded
Age post Civil War, it's all the close of the
nineteenth century. We like to think that America's railroads were
built on grit and determination, but in fact it was
rife with insider deals and uh scandal, what was it
(17:28):
called the credit mobil your scandal? Yeah, I looked into
this a little bit. It's mind boggling. Basically, Um, Union
Pacific bogging. How overt it was, Yeah, you know. But
but even just like, it was not just crooked in
one way. It was crooked in a number of ways
that formed one big, huge, crooked thing that Congress was
involved in. The Union Pacific Railroad started a company that
(17:53):
served as the soul agent of building and managing the
Union Pacific Railroad. Okay, um, And then they issued stock
in this stuff, and they used the Credit Mobile Mobilier
and um, Union Pacific itself to basically over charge and
(18:14):
overpay one another so that the value of the stock
went through the roof Okay, so it's a stock massaging
scheme to begin with, like an insider deal with yourself
to raise the value artificially of your stock. Right. And
then they took these these shares in this company and
started handing them out to Congress at a discounted price.
(18:37):
It's all Congress did it was go sell them on
the market for their face value, which was again artificially inflated,
and they made a bunch of cash. And they were
taking these as bribes for giving like um land grants
or breaking treaties with Native Americans so that the Union
Pacific Railroad could build their railroad across the Western States. Yeah,
and this was they did this because, believe it or not,
(18:59):
at the time, there wasn't a lot of private investors
ponying up money for this railroad because it was sort
of a new thing. And yeah, they didn't know although
it was a great idea, they didn't know. Like all investors,
what they care about is getting their money back in
quick fashion, and they just didn't know if that was
going to be possible. And I mean, there's definitely something
to be said for the federal government to step in
(19:21):
and be like, look, we think that this is really
going to help things out. We really want to fund it,
But does it have to be totally fought with corruption
while that happens, you know, no is the answer. Not yet. Uh.
And then there was the famous Gilded Age lobby is
Sam Ward, who um, he basically invented the social lobby.
(19:41):
So while he wouldn't we'll get into direct lobby versus
social lobby, but social lobby is basically in Sam Ward's case,
he was a great chef, and he was like, I'm
gonna throw these great parties. I'm gonna have great food
and fine wine. I'm gonna invite uh, special interest groups
and corporation heads and politicians and get him in the
same room. But we're not going to talk about that
(20:02):
stuff directly. We're just all gonna get hammered together and
have a great time, become friends. That was that was
his job, friends do things for one another. Right. Yeah, Well,
I don't think we ever even said what K Street was.
By the way, K Street is literally K the letter
K Street where all just about every lobby in the
country has an office. So that explains that if people
(20:23):
are other ones, Yeah, you're right, but it's like saying, um,
Madison Avenue when you refer to advertising or Wall Street. Yeah. Um,
so lobbying just kind of after the guilded, Asia America
was sick to death of lobbying and lobbyists and didn't
want to have anything to do with it. Um. So
lobbying went. Didn't go away, but it fell to the
wayside a little bit. It was still a thing, um
(20:45):
throughout the twentieth century, it just kind of waxed. And
Wayne in the mid forties, I believe Congress was like,
we actually kind of need these guys, so let's set
up some rules for dealing with them. Um. Because at
this time already what John Kennedy was writing about was true.
You had a brain drain going on from Capitol Hill
to K Street where people would go and um, become
(21:09):
an aid to a senator or a congress person and
make contacts, get a little bit of experience, and then
after a couple of years they would move on over
to K Street to a lobbying firm, make anywhere between
five to ten times what they were as the congressional aid.
And um, K Street was sucking the talent away from Congress.
(21:33):
And so these congress people in the forties said, hey, um,
we need to work with these people because we need them,
so let's make up some rules. Even still, lobbying was
nothing like you would recognize it today. It wasn't until
the seventies and eighties when business did an about face
of dealing with the government. Up to that point, it
was like, government, stay, just stay out of our business.
(21:56):
That's the lobbying we want to do, is to keep
you off of our backs, keep you from regulating our stuff,
to stay out of our business. And then at some point,
and I'm not exactly sure who figured this out, but
some lobbyists convinced corporations like, hey, guys, you're doing this
all wrong. You guys could get mind boggling amounts of
money from the government in the form of subsidies or
(22:18):
great contracts or sweetheart deals just by using our services
and lobbying exploded and would just take comparatively a tiny
bit of that. Right, even though it's a ton of
money for individual lobbyists, it's nothing to these corporations, right exactly.
And I yeah, like the the Dave Ruse gave a
really great example of um Northrop Gumman Grumman in uh
(22:41):
in two thousand and twelve or something like that, I
believe under Mifflin. Yeah, they spent a hundred and seventies
six million dollars from from in fourteen years from twelve,
which that's nothing to them because in that time, in
two thousand and twelve itself, Northrop Grumman got a hundreds
have any six million dollar or or no, a hundred
(23:02):
and eighty nine million dollar contract for a cybersecurity system
for the d O D. So that that one contract
paid for fourteen years of lobbying expenses, right, Yeah, and
then they got a one point seven billion dollar contract
to build five drones and that's just Northrop Growman. Like,
you can't really pick on them. The reason why we
(23:22):
we called them out is because during twelve they were
the ninth biggest spender on lobbying, not just corporations but
industry as well. UM. General Electric was the the single
entity that spent the most. Yeah this um as far
as the corporation goes. Uh, there's a great website if
you want just good information and stats called open secrets
(23:45):
dot org. And this past year two thou fourteen, the
top ten spenders were the US Chamber of Commerce, which
is always number one by a long shot because they
represent a lot of businesses. The nash On Association of
Realtors was number two, Blue Cross Blue Shield was number three.
American Hospital Association for American Medical Association five. Seeing a
(24:10):
trend here, I wonder why National Association of Broadcasters, National
Cable and telecom Comcast Again, it's you can literally look
at the years where there's the most spending and what's
going on in those industries. Uh, and then Google and
Boeing round out the top ten at just a sixteen
million each. And so and I mean, like the amount
(24:33):
of money spent has um I believe tripled in the
last few years, right, yeah, I think so so so
this is fairly new, but but it's not new. It's
basically a return to the lobbying of the Gilded Age.
The amount of money, attention time, questionable stuff that's been
going on is just a replay of what happened a
(24:55):
hundred something years ago, right, um. And one of the
reasons that we've we've it's become so rampant, it's been
ratcheted up so much you can actually lay it at
the feet of New Gingrich. So New Gingridge. Chuckers was
speaker of the House in the nineties when Clinton was president,
if you'll remember, and he decided that Congress was doing
(25:17):
too much. Oh yeah, so he cut staffs, which means
that lawmakers um that that were able to they did
have enough of his staff or enough resources to write
their own legislation could definitely could not any longer. He
also cut staff at some resources that are dedicated to
providing research for Congress, like the Congressional Budget Office, the
(25:41):
Congressional Research Service. All of these things um that have
been built up in response to dealing with lobbyists from
like the forties on were cut by Gingrich, and all
of a sudden, our our lawmakers are relying strictly on
lobbyists for money. Yeah, and that's there's a correlation. I know, people,
(26:01):
you know, you hear about government spending. Let's cut government spending,
which in theory sounds great. Sure, let's cut government spending.
But what that means is now you don't have staff
to do unbiased research and get the facts, like you said,
You've got lobbyists to do that, right exactly. And the
idea behind that tactic by Gingrich, if if it was
(26:22):
just based on I'm cutting government spending by cutting jobs
or I think government is doing too much. There's actually
a misstep because another UM senator from Oklahoma, his name
escapes me right now, he had the Congressional Budget Office
do an annual report starting in two thousand eleven, and
they found that the Congressional Budget Office found that for
(26:45):
every dollar spent on the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional
Budget Office managed to come up with ninety dollars of
recommended cuts to government waste. So for every dollar you spent,
you made you saved eighty nine dollars just from the
congres Sational Budget Office. So cutting their staff is the
opposite of what you want to do here against like bloated,
(27:05):
wasteful government. It's pretty interesting on its specifically as interesting
as far as new Gingridge goes to because him cutting
Congress's ability to not rely on lobbyists really left a
sour taste in a lot of people's mouths during the
two twelve primaries because he was like, he refused to
(27:25):
admit that he was a lobbyist. Well yeah, and he's
he's not registered as a lobbyist. What he has is, ah, well,
one of the things he does, he has a health
care consulting firm where you can pay two hundred thousand
dollars to become a member quote unquote, which you're not
a client, you're a member. It's a membership group. So
it's and he's not the only one. I mean, I
(27:46):
think they have in here that they call it the
revolving door. Basically, when you leave your position as a
congress person or a senator, you go directly to the lobby. Uh.
The New York Times says they're more than four hundred
former legislators who worked as lobbyists in the past decade.
It's just like, let me go make some real money now.
And that's just legislators either like them. There was very
(28:08):
famously a guy who was running the the Pentagon, I
believe ed Aldridge, and he was a longtime critic of Boeing,
and then Bowing hired him, and on his way out
he approved a three billion dollar contract to Boeing. That's
the revolving door at work. There was a Massachusetts representative
named William Dela Hunt and um, he took a job
(28:30):
lobbying for a wind project that he had just earmarked
a bunch of money for right before he left. Yeah,
so I mean this revolving door. People say like, well,
let's just shut the revolving door, and it is a
it's a proposal. But at the same time, if you
do that, then then your anti job and you can't
you can't even appear anti job. So there's other solutions
(28:51):
that I think are better for dealing with the lobby
and crisis. I guess you could call it. Yeah, and
uh well we'll get to that later. That great article
sent um. You know what show actually does a really
great job realistically with this is Veep. I haven't seen
a second of that. It's fantastic, man, I mean it
really shows you, like for Best Actress, yeah she won,
(29:12):
and Veep one. And I think the writing team one.
I think it's the best written show on TV right now.
But or the best written comedy. Oh have you seen
Narcos yet? No? You canna check that out. Okay, but
VP is really even though it's a comedy, really like
shows that everything in d C is just about deals
being made, like, well, you do this for me and
(29:34):
I'll give you support on this bill and they're pulling
that bill And what did that lobby say? Because they
were my friend and it's all it's all just it's
such an insider's game. It's staggering. And and that's a
comedy written by uh, English people, which is, yeah, the
producers got there and they're all like from from England,
(29:54):
and that's I don't know, for some reason, that's so interesting.
And they even in their Emmy speech said, you know,
it's kind of funny to be able to make fun
of the American political system being English folks. But thank
you for this sword for that. Uh. All right, so
let's talk a little bit about we keep saying registered lobbyists.
Since eighteen seventy six, Congress is required that all professional
(30:16):
lobbyist register with the Office of the Clerk of the House,
and uh since nineteen with the Lobbying Disclosure Act. In
two thousand seven Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of
two thousand seven, UH, they narrowly defined a lobbyist as
someone who has one paid by client to services include
(30:38):
more than one lobbying contact, and three whose lobbying activities
constitute or more of their time on behalf of that
client during any three month period. So that's actually it
seems broad. That's actually you're really narrow definition of a lobbyist. Yeah,
and it's so narrow as it turns out that it's
really easy to skirt those rules and not register because
(31:00):
there are many ways you can say you can really
budget your time and say no, I worked twenty point
nine percent in this three month period for this firm,
or I have so many people I work for, I
only spent about ten fifteent of my time, right. Or
if you're like on any one group right, Or if
you're like new g Rich, you're you're not working for
a client, says client. I got members, so I'm doing
(31:23):
all this, but it's for members, not clients. Or if
it's educational, it's not called lobbying. So hey, let me
just hire this former senator, pay him a lot of
money to go around and give speeches on education that
are really trying to generate interest in legislation, or to
educate the government on why um the thirty seven and
(31:45):
a half billion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that shelled
out in two thousand fourteen is a good thing to
redo and then double. But that's just education, that's not lobbying.
So those are just some of the ways you can
skirt officially registering as a lobbyist. And actually, chuck, so
you said that that was from the two thousand seven Act. Total,
it was two thousand seven rights. And in two thousand
(32:07):
seven when they added I guess they added that third
one about the tent the time measure, like three thousand
lobbyists de registered loophole. Oh, really, all I have to
do is account for my time in this way, and
now all the rules don't apply to me. And so
as a matter of fact, um, the American Bar Association said,
(32:30):
if you just just get rid of that third one,
the time thing, that would help a lot. And actually,
when Congress first started to deal with um, lobbying, uh, well,
I shouldn't say first, because it was the nineteenth century,
but in ninety five or six, when they passed an
act about lobbying rules, Um, they said that a lobbyist
(32:52):
someone who had to register it as a lobbyist was
anyone who aids in the passage or defeat of legislation.
That's it. So, I mean, I'm sure there's loopholes in
there and ways around that too, but it was much
much more vague, which in the fact would sound it's counterintuitive,
but that's actually better to be more vague in the
description because you can't skirt it is easy. So let's
(33:13):
let's take a break and then we'll talk about all
of the stuff that lobbyists do, including some good stuff too.
(33:40):
All right, Uh, lobbyists who are lobbyists? What do they do?
They are full time Uh, as they puts it, full
time advocates for their clients. Yeah, that's a good way
to put it. There's no job description you're gonna get.
But you better be a people person. You better have
great you better have a stuffed rollodex. You better. You
better be good at networking, be super good at networking. Uh,
(34:03):
smooth talker, Yeah, you should throw a good party, be
good at fundraising. Yeah. Um, and like we said, you
got to know a lot of good people. You've gotta
be a great communicator and persuasive. One might say slick, slick.
I think it is probably right. But um, that and
that I imagine that those are good qualities that haven't
(34:23):
just about any But I also have the impression that
there are lobbyists who are just like just strictly grinding
out research and stuff like that. Yeah. I think there's
different types of lobbyists. Some are probably like there's the
glad handers, yeah, like the front person maybe, and then
there's like walks people who are literally like technical policy
experts on a certain topic. They know the ins and outs,
(34:44):
they know both sides of it, they know what senators
care about it, um, they know what congress people could
be persuaded maybe, like they know everything about this particular issue. Yeah,
and like up to the minute. Uh, they have to
be really up on the very very latest policies and laws.
I mean they have to be experts, like you said,
(35:06):
like inside and out because they get paid a ton
of money to do that. And there's typically three kinds
of lobbying that people undertake. Again, whether it's the Girls
Scouts or Green Peace or um, the Chamber of Commerce
or whoever. Um, there's direct lobbying, indirect lobbying, and the
grassroots lobbying. And they probably any lobbying group takes part
(35:29):
in all a combination of all these. Yeah. Direct lobbying
is when you're when you can get a meeting with
the congress person or senator or their aids. Yeah, and
you sit down with their staff for them and say, uh,
I'm experienced clearly because I'm in the room with you.
And here's here's what we think is a good piece
of legislation. Right, it's good for the country. Wink wink. Yeah.
(35:51):
So that's direct lobbying. Uh, indirect is if you, um, well,
what's the difference between indirect and social? Aren't they kind
of the same. Yeah, it's the same. Right. So that's
like we said, the Sam Ward which would throw parties
the king of lobby. Yeah, he invented the social lobbying
and that's still true today. You though a big swanky
(36:12):
d C cocktail hour and get people in the same
room and just connecting folks, that's indirect lobby and goosen
them up with a little uh scotch maybe, and all
of a sudden you're like you just sit back and
you're like, yeah, this is working. Look at them talking
to each other. I love myself. And then there's grassroots lobbying,
which is kind of misleading actually because it can be
(36:33):
employed by uh deep deeply entrenched, deep pocketed interests. But
you know, it still appears grassroots and folksy things like
UM paying somebody who's an expert in a field or
UM a recognized figure, maybe a former UM congress person
(36:53):
or whatever to write an op ed. Yeah, And I
mean name recognition counts for just about anything, so even
op eds. And if if somebody's saying, if a former
Treasury secretary is like, this is a really bad idea,
we shouldn't pass this legislation, that's going to inform voters minds. Yeah,
I think it also is a huge message to the
(37:17):
legislators who are also reading it that like Washington Post
published this, so a lot of people just read you
may want to listen to what I just said. Yeah.
Or grassroots in the purest sense of the word, in
the more traditional sense is uh could be a small
little ngo that's all they can afford his grassroots campaigns
and uh, sadly it's it's uh. The dog that barks
(37:40):
the loudest is the one that's going to get the
most attention. And you're barking the loudest if you have
the resources, too, I guess, get a bunch of dogs
barking at once. Which is a really good point, Chuck,
because and this this article goes to great pains to
make it clear that you know, not all lobbying is bad,
that lobbying in and of itself isn't necessarily bad um,
(38:02):
and that there are plenty of public interest groups that
are dedicated to serving the common good that engage in lobbying.
So it shouldn't be outlawed, it shouldn't be cut off.
We should figure out how to fix it. Um. The
thing is is they found that for every dollar that
a union and public interest group combined spents, corporations or
(38:27):
big business spent thirty four dollars of the top one
spenders were all corporate or corporate interests. Um. So it's
the field is very much skewed towards whoever has the
most money or whoever is willing to spend the most. Uh.
So to be two registers a lobbyists, which was required,
like I said, since eighteen seventy six, and then a
(38:49):
few years after that they required that members of the
press register because with the House and Senate because they
were had lobbyists posing as journalists, so they had to
take care of that pretty early on. But if you
are registered, uh, there are some things that you have
to do according to the law. Um. Well, first of all,
(39:10):
you can't give gifts blatantly give gifts. Yeah, that's one
of the things that Abram often trouble all sorts of
ways around this, of course, but you can't blatantly give gifts.
You have to register. You have to file quarterly reports
that detail the contacts you've made with elected officials. You
have to disclose how much money you were paid. Uh.
You have to file semi annual reports at list contributions
(39:33):
UH made to political campaigns. See that. I have a
question about that, because from what I understand, if in
on the federal level, if you're a registered lobbyists, you
cannot contribute to a political campaign. Yeah. Maybe it's has
to do with like these three thousand dollar plate dinners
or something. I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't sure about
that either. Actually, but you mentioned the American Bar Association.
(39:55):
They a lot of attorneys are lobbyists, um off and
on during their career. My uncle was actually a lobbyist,
Is that right? Yeah, Congressman, my congressman uncle. Really he
went through the revolving door. Huh. Yeah. I don't know
much about it, but um oh man, you gotta ask him.
Yeah I should, And I will say this, even though
(40:18):
we were not on the same side of the political spectrum,
which I won't even say, who's who. He's a Democrat. Huh.
But he's a good dude and an honest person. So
even though we don't agree on things, I always felt
like he, you know, he's not taking kickbacks. He's not
one of those guys. And I really believe that he's
a man pure of heart and so so in no
(40:41):
way disparaging your uncle for going through the revolving door.
One of the problems with that revolving door is not
just that it causes this brain drain from UM Capitol
Hill to the lobbying companies or the law law firms,
but um, it also makes Congress not really interested in
passing any kind of lobbying reform or revolving door reform
(41:03):
because pretty soon their term is going to be up
and they can go get that job. Exactly. Yeah, because
you don't as a public servant, I mean, you don't
make a lot of money. No, you don't, and especially
well we'll get to this in a second, but finishing
on the A B A UM. The American Bar Association
has a real interest in trying to keep lobbying as
(41:23):
above board as possible because a lot of them want
to be lobbyist and they don't want to be tarnished
and so, like you said earlier, they think the biggest
thing you can do is to separate and have really
strict lines drawn between fundraising and lobbying. They think that's
where it's the most corrupt. So get rid of the time,
the time requirement of your time to be a registered
(41:47):
lobbyist and just separate fundraising from from um lobbying. Yeah,
I get the idea that that's where most of the
hinky stuff is going on. So the thing is like
that makes sense, but it's also kind of like trying
to remove a hornet's nest by picking the hornets out
one by one. Not the best idea, um, and need
(42:08):
to smash it and set it on fire pretty much
and then p on the ashes. Actually, I believe you
should leave a hornet's nest. You should never destroy hornet's nest.
So uh, I know, apex predators and all um. So
the the the other idea to just shut the revolving
door or to just outlaw a lobbying all together. Again,
(42:30):
not only is that a bad idea, especially if you
just did it wholesale out of the gate. You can't
do that, but it's also unconstitutional, right, So we read
this really great article um Man that was good in
Washington Monthly. So who wrote this thing lead Drootman or Drutman,
probably Drutman and Steven tell Us. They wrote it in
Washington Monthly. Is called a New Agenda for Political Reform.
(42:52):
It was a great article, lengthy, but it just and
it's made a really good sense to me. Yeah, and
it's not too wonky. But I mean, these guys clearly
know what they're talking about people, the long and short
of it, and what they think is the problem is
what we touched on earlier, which is staffing of congressional
(43:12):
offices has been cut and slash so much and there
are so much more information now to ingest than there
used to be. They just can't do it. There are
not the resources to do it, so that we have
no choice but to turn to lobbyists to act as
the experts and to write legislation. So they propose and
we have some stats in here actually that I thought
(43:33):
were pretty striking. In the eighties, around nineteen eight is
when they started cutting everything. The Government Accountability Office and
the Congressional Research Services. What they do is they provide
nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers. Right there are
fewer now than in nineteen seventy nine. And those are
(43:54):
the very experts that were dedicated to serving Congress in
a nonpartisan way so that they had all the information
they needed to create legislation to actually make the government
operate fewer than the nineteen seventies. Yeah, so gone gone.
Starting in the eighties and then again uh in the
mid nineties, Gingrich cut congressional staff. Yeah. And while this
(44:17):
is going on, it's a two way street. Lobbying is
increasing by it's staggering how much lobbying has increased in
money and just human power. And then one of the
things about lobbying is that lobbying begets lobbying. The more
a lobbyist can get legislation pushed through, the larger the
federal register grows, the less ability any given congress person
(44:41):
has to read and ingest and understand federal law. So
the more they need lobbyists who do understand it. Yeah.
And so what you get is what we talked about
the revolving door. Well, actually that's politicians themselves going to lobby. Well,
but there's a brain drink because their aids are being
sucked away K Street as well. There's another cycle where
(45:03):
there's no incentive to be a congressional staffer for very
long because you're not gonna make much money. I think
they said the top ninety percentile of a congressional staff
makes hundred thousand dollars a year. That's the top ninety percentile,
which sounds like six figures. That's good. DC is not cheap, no,
and take out taxes and everything. That the median income
(45:23):
was fifty grand, so you're making what like thirty five
after taxes. You can't live on thirty dollars in d C.
And they found that the median income for a lobbyist
in Washington, d C. Median is three hundred thousand, and
that's pretty attractive, especially if you're in your twenties and
all of a sudden can go double or triple your income,
like right out of the gate. Well, it's the career path,
(45:44):
like it's laid out there for everyone. Here's what you do.
Go work on the staff for a little while, make contacts,
which is invaluable, that's why you do it for not
a whole lot of money, and then boom, you can
get rich, make a lot of money as a lobbyist.
So Drumpman and tell us UM suggest first and foremost
that the solution to the lobbying conundrum that we have
now is basically equipped Congress with the UM information, research
(46:10):
and policy experts that they need and that they can
get the stuff that they're currently getting from obbyoists. And
the way you do that start is just increased salaries.
And they make a really good point that you don't
have to necessarily increase the salaries to to be completely
on par with what UM K Streets offering, because K
(46:31):
Street would probably just try to start to outspend the
just raised salaries UM. But if you can do it
so that a person could make a pretty decent living UM,
they would possibly choose congressional work over K Street because
with congressional work, they're in there, they're like part of
this machine that's really making decisions and policies and laws
(46:52):
that are affecting the country, rather than working for a
law firm that's trying to get some some legislation pass
that will benef fit this one corporate client. So so
if you just factor in idealism along with a really
good salary, these guys say, you could attract the right
talent that you need. So their recommendation simply. I mean
(47:12):
it's multi fold. But they say double committee staff, triple
the money that they make, and you might be stepping
in the right direction. Yeah. And again if you're like
wholl whoa, that's a lot of taxpayer money. Well again,
if you if you look at what the CBO alone,
spending a dollar on the CBO comes up with ninety
dollars worth of places to cut government waste. These are
(47:35):
these are these are good things to spend money on. Yeah.
And you may have a cleaner, more legitimate government as
a result too, And that's priceless. Yeah. I mean, they
made some some excellent case that in the seventies when
the government had a lot of staff that was smart,
that had a lot of institutional memory and knowledge that
they got things done, like the Church Committee, um and
(47:57):
the Pike Committee, both of which revealed a massive horrible
stuff that the CIA was doing, like dosing unsuspecting Americans
with LSC that came out at congressional investigations that you
do not see any longer. Um. If you had committee
staff that were well paid, um, they would hang around
and you would have a lot more laws being passed,
(48:18):
a lot more deliberations being passed. Right now. It's all
fundraising going on. That's what your legislators do. They get elected,
they come to Washington, have their picture taken there, and
then they go back out and start raising money for reelection,
right and they're raising money from the very people who
are working as lobbyists. So yeah, all you have to
do is create good jobs aggressional researchers, and you've got
(48:43):
your lobbying problem largely licked. Yeah. I agree, man, I
don't see any problem with this idea. It's it's sad
whenever we dig into stuff like this. How Like I
talked about the Insiders Club, how I don't know. It
just seems like it's such a broken, messed up system.
It is. There was another thing I read UM about
(49:03):
something called rent seeking, which is where UM, through lobbyists,
the corporation will go and just try to get a
piece of the pie, not for doing anything, not even
necessarily a contract, but just say, like a subsidy. And
like the fossil fuel subsidies are amounted to thirty seven
and a half billion dollars in two thousand and fourteen.
That was just stuff that the government gave, just money.
(49:25):
The government gave UM oil and other fossil fuel companies
just for existing, right, And that's called rent seeking. It
doesn't do anything. They don't they're not producing anything to
generate that income. They're spending a bunch of income to
go suck it out of the federal budget. Right. And
I mean, if you want to talk about wealth redistribution,
that's like the the the clearest version of it you
(49:45):
can possibly imagine. And that's through lobbying. And yeah, and
this is just lobbying, Like, don't get me started on
things like campaign finance and all the other ways. That's
another one we should do. Yeah, I actually wrote that article.
Um Man, how was it? But it was depressing. It
was depressing and tough, and it's probably way out of date,
(50:06):
so we will update it. Yeah, it would need a
lot of like our dating, let's do it. Campaign financial reform,
big big thing. Remember our presidential um debates one that
was eye opening. Remember there's like a whole commission that
has a stranglehold on presidential debates and I have got
to go back to listen to it is a good one,
(50:27):
most of them. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that.
All right, Uh, well, if you want to know more
about lobbying. You can type that word in the search
part how stuff works, and it will bring up this
fine article. Uh. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna call this binge listening
Colin newest the oldest, Uh. Dudes and Jerry. By the way,
(50:50):
I labored over that subject line like a publicist, and
it's still awful. It's been bad, is what Colin said,
Dudes and Jerry. I've been slowly making my way through
the analog of episodes, and for any new listeners, I'd
like to advocate for listening through them from newest to oldest,
in other words, reverse order, rather than oldest to newest,
which is how I assume most would listen. While the
(51:13):
references to old episodes might be a little confusing, they
also build a sense of anticipation once you get there.
I could see that, for example, I finally listened to
the infamous episode on the Sun. You made so many
references over the years to how bad that episode was
that by the time I got to it, I was
literally laughing from beginning to end, so it becomes like
(51:33):
a comedy episode. At that you could almost hear Chuck's
brain sizzling and melting as the episode went on. True. Uh,
if I didn't have that sense of anticipation, your agony
wouldn't have been as sweet. I like this idea. I
think he makes a lot of sense. I dread the
day that I run out of episodes and experience of withdrawals,
(51:54):
the shakes, the Jimmy legs that will inevitably come when
I'm jones and for new stuff. And that is Colin
and or Land. Oh alright, Colling, great email, terrible subject line,
but totally forgivable because of the body. I didn't think
it was so bad being listening to us to hold us.
It's a sink. I guess it's a it's just like
(52:16):
this the d That's fine, right, do better, Coling, But
great email calling. Oh but if he's listening, has he
he hasn't made it all the way back? Well, if
he's listening to us to old us, so does he
just make time each week to listen to the newest
one and then go back to wherever he loves? I
don't know. We need to hear a follow up. God
(52:39):
knows when he'll hear this, Chuck. We need to contact
him directly from feeling a great since of regret. I
feel bad for him because he's just heading straight for
disappointment Land as he goes further and further back in
The cattle Man. There's some episodes I'd just like to
just redo, which we have done some of them, like
when they were like five minutes then they were cool topics.
(52:59):
You know, should just remove those from the Internet. Let's
do um. I would like to redo the trolley problem
one you and I didn't do idea with Chris Palette,
and it deserves like its own, big current modern incarnation
of stuff. You should not like the stode. We should
probably do all the ones I wasn't on. How about that,
Let's do it. We'll call it the Summer of Chuck.
(53:21):
If you want to be like calling and get in
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You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
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Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
join us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
(53:45):
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant and Crickets. So weird. Yeah,
we're doing this um ghost style. Yeah, So what happened
(00:23):
was and I didn't you explain to me? But I
don't know. Maybe my mind was elsewhere and I didn't
fully understand. But what happened is guest producer Noel got
the record, He put them mouse on the hamster wheel,
got the computer running and left And now you're a
little freaked out. Well, it's this is out of close
(00:46):
to eight shows, this is literally the first time it's
ever just been you and me in a room. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? Yeah? It really is, isn't it. It's
I feel like I don't know, I feel like there
with no one in here, even though no one ever
guides us that we should just I don't know that
we're gonna cut up and curse. And it's like when
the teacher has left the room, it feels like there's
(01:06):
a vast field, a portal to another dimension to my
right where Jerry usually said. So I had no idea
what that extra silent human three ft from this meant
I think now, this means that we've been put out
to pastor Wow, this is disconcerting. Alright, I feel like
you're gonna like knife me or something. I could right
(01:28):
now and no one whatever now until we published the episode. Nope,
no one would ever know. Wow. Man, that's gruesome. All right,
this is just weird. Let's let's do it. Are you ready? Yeah?
Good choice. By the way, Yeah, I don't remember what
episode we picked this in. We were talking about something
and lobbying came up, where like, we should just do
one on lobbying. Well, here it is. Yeah, it's it's
(01:48):
I'm glad we're doing this because we'll clear up some misconceptions. Uh,
it's not always evil, just the time maybe more. Yeah,
um yeah, I remember when we said we were going
to do a lobbying one. We got a lot of
emails from lobbyists who were like, please, please, please, don't
just trash our profession like we ever would. Um, they're
(02:09):
they were like, lobbyings, actually, it can be a really
good thing, and sure, that's why. So we got a
lot of feedback before this thing even came out, which
hopefully will help us. Well, they're understandably a very defensive group. Yes,
everyone thinks it's just rotten and corrupt across all channels,
rotten to the core. Um. And the reason I and
(02:33):
just about everyone else walking the planet thinks that lobbyists
are rotten, it's because of some very high profile cases
like remember Jack Abramoff, who can forget what a and
I usually don't publicly trash people, but that guy was
a pile of garbage. You know, there's really no I
was trying to find some other way around it. It
was like, no, he was awful and just ripped people off, unabashedly,
(02:58):
ripped off Indian tribe, bribed officials, bribe people, pocketed money.
And he was a highly highly successful, obvious people he
was working for, he was He's not a good fellow, no,
but again, he was a successful lobbyist. He was at
the top of his field for many years actually, um.
And it wasn't until two thousand and six when he
(03:19):
was convicted of I believe, like bribery and corruption and
all sorts of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, um,
And I ended up serving three three years. I think
he did three three years in the Pokey yeah, and
supposedly had to pay a lot of restitution and tax fines. Yeah,
but who knows how that stuff works out. No one
ever follows up to see, you know, we just say, oh,
(03:41):
he got a he's supposed to pay all these people back.
Sure it happened. Yeah, who knows. He probably found a
loophole to work on. He's probably working on a lawsuit
against us right this moment. Chuck, Oh, can you not
publicly call someone garbage? I think you can. Okay, can
we find out? Can we read this opening statement from
eighteen sixty nine, Yeah, because I think it makes a
(04:03):
pretty good point that Jack Abramoff wasn't the first despised lobbyist. No,
this is written by Emily Edson Briggs, who was a
Washington D c. Newspaper correspondent um at a time where
there weren't a lot of women doing that, which is
kind of cool. And I think she was the first
allowed into the congressional press room. Yeah, they said let her,
(04:23):
and she'll never say anything bad because we gave her
this job, and she's like, he fell from my big
cookies plan. So she wrote a column talk called the
Dragons of the Lobby. So you probably know where this
is headed. And the opening line of the column said,
winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage,
crawling through the corridors, trailing at slimy length from gallery
(04:45):
to committee room. At last it lies stretched at full
length on the floor of the Congress, this dazzling reptile,
this huge scaly serpent of the lobby. That could have
been our Halloween episode. You really could have. Maybe we
should gus see that up increas with a little bit
of sound effects. Yeah, that was in eighteen sixty nine. Yeah,
not very flattering. Um. And it was actually I think
(05:07):
it did come um at a time when lobbying and
lobbyists were really getting a chokehold on um on Congress,
on legislation, on sweetheart deals from the federal government. Um.
But lobbying goes further back than that, and lobbyists have
been despised even further back than that as a matter
(05:30):
of fact. Yeah, and it's uh again, it's something this
article makes. I thought, this is a really well written article. Actually, yeah,
this was the day US article and he did a
good job. Um. He points out that the knee drug
reaction for your average person might be to say just
make it all illegal, get rid of the lobby because
it's awful. But he makes a good point that it
(05:51):
is it is necessary. The First Amendment in our own
Constitution says the right of the people to petition the
government for a redress of grievances. Is that necessary and
constitutional and mandatory. Yeah, and that's what lobbyists do, is Uh.
It's not always a huge corporation. A lot of times
they'll speak for the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts
(06:13):
or you know, all kinds of special interest groups, and
we all have them, so you me, everyone listening in
America has a constitutional right to go and petition Congress
to say, hey, guys, you guys aren't paying enough attention
to government waste, or NASA deserves way more funding than
you're giving it. Whatever, you can go do that. That's
(06:34):
lobbying technically, but unfortunately, almost from the beginning, UH, corporate
and big business special interest groups figured out a way
to basically exploit that to their to their own benefit. Yeah,
and it's uh. Ruz also points out, and we'll get
to this later, uh, which is one of the big problems.
It's necessary because Congress and their staff don't have time
(06:57):
to Uh, that's well again, we'll get to that later.
I don't want to spoil it, but they don't have
time to go through the myriad request and and uh information,
deluge of information that's necessary to make an educated decision,
and so much so that Senator John F. Kennedy in said,
(07:18):
uh that we are in many cases expert technicians capable
of exact not we are, I'm sorry. Lobbyists are in
many cases, I'm sorry, are in many cases expert technicians
capable of examining complex and difficult subjects and a clear,
understandable fashion. So that's the reason we need them in
(07:40):
many cases is to literally explain stuff too congress people
and staff strapped for time and resources. It should be said, though,
that um when Kennedy wrote that in the mid fifties,
lobbying was not much of a thing. It had like
it was established, had been established for a couple hundred years.
People hated lobbyists. There were huge um lobbyists scandals in
(08:04):
the Gilded Age from the Civil War to the nineteenth century.
But in the mid fifties, lobbying was not a huge thing.
It wasn't so um. What he said, though, is accurate
and it's still is accurate today. If you are an
incoming congress person, Um, you make your name both to
your constituency and in your party by getting bills passed,
(08:27):
by coming up with bills and passing them. Right, look
at all the work I accomplished. And then if you
um get enough, you may end up on a nice committee,
maybe even a committee chair, and then eventually a party leader.
And all that is because you introduced legislation that was
favored and got passed. The thing is, you don't have
the time or the staff to research and write legislation,
(08:52):
so you have to you have to turn to lobbyists
lobbying groups and say, hey, you guys are literally experts
on this topic. I need your help, uh educate me,
help me write this, and then um, we'll we'll be friends.
The problem is is there's not a there's not a
special interest group like you said, whether it's the Girl
(09:13):
Scouts or whether it's uh the Chamber of Commerce that
doesn't have a slamt that isn't going to try to
slamp that legislation in their favor. So that means that
the laws that are written in this country today are
the legislative equivalents of avertorials, you know, kind of thin
on actual content and really heavy on stuff that benefits
(09:37):
the corporations running the show. You know, who would make
good lobbyists? Who they're in this room right now? Oh
you think so? I was just thinking, like generally unbiased
research presented so someone can make a decision. Yeah, that's
kind of what we do, except we're not paid like
lobbyists just make a lot of dough. Uh. In fact,
(09:59):
and to thousand fourteen lobbyists and these are people that
are officially registered as lobbyists, which we'll get to. There
are a lot more people doing lobby esque work that
aren't officially registered, but official registered lobbyists. Uh, we're paid
out to three point two four billion dollars in two
thousand fourteen, and that is only divided among how many people?
(10:22):
Was it about ten thousand, six hundred people? What are
you kidding? That's how many registered lobbyists there were and
this year and that's but again just the registered one
from a high of about fourteen and change. And when
was that two thousand six or seven? And two two
(10:44):
thousand seven changes came along, and it's not because there
are fewer lobbyists there there that just gave rise to people,
or gave people the ability to be like, oh, I'm
not a lobbyists anymore. Because here's the thing. If you
are a registered lobbyist, you are subject to some very
strict i think old guidelines, legal guidelines, scrutiny of your
(11:04):
business practices, and there's a lot of stuff you can't do.
You just you're just completely outlawed from doing certain things.
If if you can just skirt the definition of a lobbyist,
it's like open season. Man, it's the wild West on
Capitol Hill for you, and you can make as much
money as you possibly can while doing the same things
(11:25):
just not having to register as a lobbyist. All right,
But that's a lot of teasing. This is the like.
But this is the current state of the American legislative process.
Our legislators rely on special interest groups almost entirely to
tell them what they need to know from their slant
and then actually writing the legislation for them to go
(11:47):
take the Congress and be like, God, I got I'm
gonna make my name with this. All right. There's one
other thing too that we should say, and this is
a this is one reason why lobbying is so pernicious. Um,
lobbyists also as major fundraisers for the very politicians that
they're lobbying. Yeah, Like, I didn't give them money. I
(12:08):
just called a fundraiser that raised four and a half
million dollars at you know, three thousand dollars a plate.
But hey, they they gave him the money. Right, they
don't know me anything. I'm just doing this because I'm
a patriotic citizen of the United States and I'll see
you Monday, and I like to overcharge for salmon. Yeah,
isn't that crazy? So that's the current state, everybody. Let's
(12:30):
go back to the beginning, because lobbyists have been around
basically as long as America has. Yeah, let's take a
little break and then we'll we'll get to the tease
stuff and start off with a little bit of history. Yeah,
(13:03):
all right. Uh, there's some misconceptions about the history of
the word itself. Laure says that it was invented uh
in the Willard Hotel in Washington, d C. In that
lobby when uh Ulystas Grant would kick back and have
a drink like he so like to do, uh and
would get disgusted by what he called those damn lobbyists
(13:26):
that we're hanging out there, Yeah, asking him for stuff. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah.
And while that may have, um, that may have given
rise to the term popularity wise here, but you can
trace it back to England, uh in the sixteen forties,
when they talked about the lobby in the House of Commons,
where you could go right up to your representatives and
in your cute little wig and say, here's what I
(13:49):
think you should do, right, and here's some here's some
good old fashioned English pounds in your pocket. And I
mean that's always just gone with it, part and parcel. Yeah,
you know, if not outright bribery, at least favors or
quid pro quo or tip for tad or it's the
jackal and hide Beyonce tickets, all sorts of stuff. Yeah,
(14:11):
first class or not first class. No one flies first class.
Talking about the lear jet, the true first class, the
private jet. Didn't they do away with first class? Announcesis
called business class because of class resentment in the United States. Yeah,
and now they've well depends on the airline. There's all
sorts of new rules and special things. You can pay
for alright. So uh, in the United States, from the
(14:35):
very first session of Congress, there were lobbying efforts and
people treating congress. Uh. I'm gonna say congressmen for this one,
because this was in We're gonna say congress person for
later on. The women were at home brewing beer in
their households, but they were applying congressmen with treats and dinners.
(14:57):
And that was a direct quote from Pennsylvania Senator William
maclay from the very first session of Congress. He was saying, Yeah,
they're lobbyists here. They're basically trying to bribe people. They're
trying to install the terrifact of nine, which established um
Congress's ability to basically extract duties and taxes on goods
(15:19):
in the United States in order to support the government.
Let's go out to dinner instead. And the New York
merchants were like, you don't want to do that. Let
me get you hammered three ways from Sunday. What are
you doing later? Yeah, I'll tell you what you're doing.
You're gonna finish. It. Can't get wrong in one sitting. Uh.
Then apparently the Bank of the United States was one
(15:40):
of the first big corrupt organizations as far as literally
having politicians in their pocket paying the money. Yeah, like, um,
the United States used to have things like like an
actual centralized bank. And Andrew Jackson came along. It's like,
this thing is just way too corrupt. We need to
get it of it and put me on your money. Yeah,
(16:01):
but the the scandals associated with it where things like, um,
the National Bank had on its board as board members
who are being paid by the bank, sitting congressman who
were writing legislation in favor of the bank. Yeah, this
quote is the best. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster sent a
(16:24):
letter to the Bank of the United States that said this,
among other things. Since I arrived here, I have had
an application to be concerned professionally against the bank, which
I've declined. Of course, although I believe my retainer has
not been renewed or refreshed as usual. Uh, if it
be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued,
(16:45):
it may be well to send me the usual retainer.
In other words, I've noticed that you're not paying me.
Now people are telling me to write legislation against you.
I'm turning them down for now. You may want to
send that money again if you would like this, love Daniel. Yeah,
like he flat out said, the bribes have sort of
dried up. I've noticed, so why don't you start sending
(17:07):
this again? Unbelievable history. So you talked about the Gilded
Age post Civil War, it's all the close of the
nineteenth century. We like to think that America's railroads were
built on grit and determination, but in fact it was
rife with insider deals and uh scandal, what was it
(17:28):
called the credit mobil your scandal? Yeah, I looked into
this a little bit. It's mind boggling. Basically, Um, Union
Pacific bogging. How overt it was, Yeah, you know. But
but even just like, it was not just crooked in
one way. It was crooked in a number of ways
that formed one big, huge, crooked thing that Congress was
involved in. The Union Pacific Railroad started a company that
(17:53):
served as the soul agent of building and managing the
Union Pacific Railroad. Okay, um, And then they issued stock
in this stuff, and they used the Credit Mobile Mobilier
and um, Union Pacific itself to basically over charge and
(18:14):
overpay one another so that the value of the stock
went through the roof Okay, so it's a stock massaging
scheme to begin with, like an insider deal with yourself
to raise the value artificially of your stock. Right. And
then they took these these shares in this company and
started handing them out to Congress at a discounted price.
(18:37):
It's all Congress did it was go sell them on
the market for their face value, which was again artificially inflated,
and they made a bunch of cash. And they were
taking these as bribes for giving like um land grants
or breaking treaties with Native Americans so that the Union
Pacific Railroad could build their railroad across the Western States. Yeah,
and this was they did this because, believe it or not,
(18:59):
at the time, there wasn't a lot of private investors
ponying up money for this railroad because it was sort
of a new thing. And yeah, they didn't know although
it was a great idea, they didn't know. Like all investors,
what they care about is getting their money back in
quick fashion, and they just didn't know if that was
going to be possible. And I mean, there's definitely something
to be said for the federal government to step in
(19:21):
and be like, look, we think that this is really
going to help things out. We really want to fund it,
But does it have to be totally fought with corruption
while that happens, you know, no is the answer. Not yet. Uh.
And then there was the famous Gilded Age lobby is
Sam Ward, who um, he basically invented the social lobby.
(19:41):
So while he wouldn't we'll get into direct lobby versus
social lobby, but social lobby is basically in Sam Ward's case,
he was a great chef, and he was like, I'm
gonna throw these great parties. I'm gonna have great food
and fine wine. I'm gonna invite uh, special interest groups
and corporation heads and politicians and get him in the
same room. But we're not going to talk about that
(20:02):
stuff directly. We're just all gonna get hammered together and
have a great time, become friends. That was that was
his job, friends do things for one another. Right. Yeah, Well,
I don't think we ever even said what K Street was.
By the way, K Street is literally K the letter
K Street where all just about every lobby in the
country has an office. So that explains that if people
(20:23):
are other ones, Yeah, you're right, but it's like saying, um,
Madison Avenue when you refer to advertising or Wall Street. Yeah. Um,
so lobbying just kind of after the guilded, Asia America
was sick to death of lobbying and lobbyists and didn't
want to have anything to do with it. Um. So
lobbying went. Didn't go away, but it fell to the
wayside a little bit. It was still a thing, um
(20:45):
throughout the twentieth century, it just kind of waxed. And
Wayne in the mid forties, I believe Congress was like,
we actually kind of need these guys, so let's set
up some rules for dealing with them. Um. Because at
this time already what John Kennedy was writing about was true.
You had a brain drain going on from Capitol Hill
to K Street where people would go and um, become
(21:09):
an aid to a senator or a congress person and
make contacts, get a little bit of experience, and then
after a couple of years they would move on over
to K Street to a lobbying firm, make anywhere between
five to ten times what they were as the congressional aid.
And um, K Street was sucking the talent away from Congress.
(21:33):
And so these congress people in the forties said, hey, um,
we need to work with these people because we need them,
so let's make up some rules. Even still, lobbying was
nothing like you would recognize it today. It wasn't until
the seventies and eighties when business did an about face
of dealing with the government. Up to that point, it
was like, government, stay, just stay out of our business.
(21:56):
That's the lobbying we want to do, is to keep
you off of our backs, keep you from regulating our stuff,
to stay out of our business. And then at some point,
and I'm not exactly sure who figured this out, but
some lobbyists convinced corporations like, hey, guys, you're doing this
all wrong. You guys could get mind boggling amounts of
money from the government in the form of subsidies or
(22:18):
great contracts or sweetheart deals just by using our services
and lobbying exploded and would just take comparatively a tiny
bit of that. Right, even though it's a ton of
money for individual lobbyists, it's nothing to these corporations, right exactly.
And I yeah, like the the Dave Ruse gave a
really great example of um Northrop Gumman Grumman in uh
(22:41):
in two thousand and twelve or something like that, I
believe under Mifflin. Yeah, they spent a hundred and seventies
six million dollars from from in fourteen years from twelve,
which that's nothing to them because in that time, in
two thousand and twelve itself, Northrop Grumman got a hundreds
have any six million dollar or or no, a hundred
(23:02):
and eighty nine million dollar contract for a cybersecurity system
for the d O D. So that that one contract
paid for fourteen years of lobbying expenses, right, Yeah, and
then they got a one point seven billion dollar contract
to build five drones and that's just Northrop Growman. Like,
you can't really pick on them. The reason why we
(23:22):
we called them out is because during twelve they were
the ninth biggest spender on lobbying, not just corporations but
industry as well. UM. General Electric was the the single
entity that spent the most. Yeah this um as far
as the corporation goes. Uh, there's a great website if
you want just good information and stats called open secrets
(23:45):
dot org. And this past year two thou fourteen, the
top ten spenders were the US Chamber of Commerce, which
is always number one by a long shot because they
represent a lot of businesses. The nash On Association of
Realtors was number two, Blue Cross Blue Shield was number three.
American Hospital Association for American Medical Association five. Seeing a
(24:10):
trend here, I wonder why National Association of Broadcasters, National
Cable and telecom Comcast Again, it's you can literally look
at the years where there's the most spending and what's
going on in those industries. Uh, and then Google and
Boeing round out the top ten at just a sixteen
million each. And so and I mean, like the amount
(24:33):
of money spent has um I believe tripled in the
last few years, right, yeah, I think so so so
this is fairly new, but but it's not new. It's
basically a return to the lobbying of the Gilded Age.
The amount of money, attention time, questionable stuff that's been
going on is just a replay of what happened a
(24:55):
hundred something years ago, right, um. And one of the
reasons that we've we've it's become so rampant, it's been
ratcheted up so much you can actually lay it at
the feet of New Gingrich. So New Gingridge. Chuckers was
speaker of the House in the nineties when Clinton was president,
if you'll remember, and he decided that Congress was doing
(25:17):
too much. Oh yeah, so he cut staffs, which means
that lawmakers um that that were able to they did
have enough of his staff or enough resources to write
their own legislation could definitely could not any longer. He
also cut staff at some resources that are dedicated to
providing research for Congress, like the Congressional Budget Office, the
(25:41):
Congressional Research Service. All of these things um that have
been built up in response to dealing with lobbyists from
like the forties on were cut by Gingrich, and all
of a sudden, our our lawmakers are relying strictly on
lobbyists for money. Yeah, and that's there's a correlation. I know, people,
(26:01):
you know, you hear about government spending. Let's cut government spending,
which in theory sounds great. Sure, let's cut government spending.
But what that means is now you don't have staff
to do unbiased research and get the facts, like you said,
You've got lobbyists to do that, right exactly. And the
idea behind that tactic by Gingrich, if if it was
(26:22):
just based on I'm cutting government spending by cutting jobs
or I think government is doing too much. There's actually
a misstep because another UM senator from Oklahoma, his name
escapes me right now, he had the Congressional Budget Office
do an annual report starting in two thousand eleven, and
they found that the Congressional Budget Office found that for
(26:45):
every dollar spent on the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional
Budget Office managed to come up with ninety dollars of
recommended cuts to government waste. So for every dollar you spent,
you made you saved eighty nine dollars just from the
congres Sational Budget Office. So cutting their staff is the
opposite of what you want to do here against like bloated,
(27:05):
wasteful government. It's pretty interesting on its specifically as interesting
as far as new Gingridge goes to because him cutting
Congress's ability to not rely on lobbyists really left a
sour taste in a lot of people's mouths during the
two twelve primaries because he was like, he refused to
(27:25):
admit that he was a lobbyist. Well yeah, and he's
he's not registered as a lobbyist. What he has is, ah, well,
one of the things he does, he has a health
care consulting firm where you can pay two hundred thousand
dollars to become a member quote unquote, which you're not
a client, you're a member. It's a membership group. So
it's and he's not the only one. I mean, I
(27:46):
think they have in here that they call it the
revolving door. Basically, when you leave your position as a
congress person or a senator, you go directly to the lobby. Uh.
The New York Times says they're more than four hundred
former legislators who worked as lobbyists in the past decade.
It's just like, let me go make some real money now.
And that's just legislators either like them. There was very
(28:08):
famously a guy who was running the the Pentagon, I
believe ed Aldridge, and he was a longtime critic of Boeing,
and then Bowing hired him, and on his way out
he approved a three billion dollar contract to Boeing. That's
the revolving door at work. There was a Massachusetts representative
named William Dela Hunt and um, he took a job
(28:30):
lobbying for a wind project that he had just earmarked
a bunch of money for right before he left. Yeah,
so I mean this revolving door. People say like, well,
let's just shut the revolving door, and it is a
it's a proposal. But at the same time, if you
do that, then then your anti job and you can't
you can't even appear anti job. So there's other solutions
(28:51):
that I think are better for dealing with the lobby
and crisis. I guess you could call it. Yeah, and
uh well we'll get to that later. That great article
sent um. You know what show actually does a really
great job realistically with this is Veep. I haven't seen
a second of that. It's fantastic, man, I mean it
really shows you, like for Best Actress, yeah she won,
(29:12):
and Veep one. And I think the writing team one.
I think it's the best written show on TV right now.
But or the best written comedy. Oh have you seen
Narcos yet? No? You canna check that out. Okay, but
VP is really even though it's a comedy, really like
shows that everything in d C is just about deals
being made, like, well, you do this for me and
(29:34):
I'll give you support on this bill and they're pulling
that bill And what did that lobby say? Because they
were my friend and it's all it's all just it's
such an insider's game. It's staggering. And and that's a
comedy written by uh, English people, which is, yeah, the
producers got there and they're all like from from England,
(29:54):
and that's I don't know, for some reason, that's so interesting.
And they even in their Emmy speech said, you know,
it's kind of funny to be able to make fun
of the American political system being English folks. But thank
you for this sword for that. Uh. All right, so
let's talk a little bit about we keep saying registered lobbyists.
Since eighteen seventy six, Congress is required that all professional
(30:16):
lobbyist register with the Office of the Clerk of the House,
and uh since nineteen with the Lobbying Disclosure Act. In
two thousand seven Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of
two thousand seven, UH, they narrowly defined a lobbyist as
someone who has one paid by client to services include
(30:38):
more than one lobbying contact, and three whose lobbying activities
constitute or more of their time on behalf of that
client during any three month period. So that's actually it
seems broad. That's actually you're really narrow definition of a lobbyist. Yeah,
and it's so narrow as it turns out that it's
really easy to skirt those rules and not register because
(31:00):
there are many ways you can say you can really
budget your time and say no, I worked twenty point
nine percent in this three month period for this firm,
or I have so many people I work for, I
only spent about ten fifteent of my time, right. Or
if you're like on any one group right, Or if
you're like new g Rich, you're you're not working for
a client, says client. I got members, so I'm doing
(31:23):
all this, but it's for members, not clients. Or if
it's educational, it's not called lobbying. So hey, let me
just hire this former senator, pay him a lot of
money to go around and give speeches on education that
are really trying to generate interest in legislation, or to
educate the government on why um the thirty seven and
(31:45):
a half billion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that shelled
out in two thousand fourteen is a good thing to
redo and then double. But that's just education, that's not lobbying.
So those are just some of the ways you can
skirt officially registering as a lobbyist. And actually, chuck, so
you said that that was from the two thousand seven Act. Total,
it was two thousand seven rights. And in two thousand
(32:07):
seven when they added I guess they added that third
one about the tent the time measure, like three thousand
lobbyists de registered loophole. Oh, really, all I have to
do is account for my time in this way, and
now all the rules don't apply to me. And so
as a matter of fact, um, the American Bar Association said,
(32:30):
if you just just get rid of that third one,
the time thing, that would help a lot. And actually,
when Congress first started to deal with um, lobbying, uh, well,
I shouldn't say first, because it was the nineteenth century,
but in ninety five or six, when they passed an
act about lobbying rules, Um, they said that a lobbyist
(32:52):
someone who had to register it as a lobbyist was
anyone who aids in the passage or defeat of legislation.
That's it. So, I mean, I'm sure there's loopholes in
there and ways around that too, but it was much
much more vague, which in the fact would sound it's counterintuitive,
but that's actually better to be more vague in the
description because you can't skirt it is easy. So let's
(33:13):
let's take a break and then we'll talk about all
of the stuff that lobbyists do, including some good stuff too.
(33:40):
All right, Uh, lobbyists who are lobbyists? What do they do?
They are full time Uh, as they puts it, full
time advocates for their clients. Yeah, that's a good way
to put it. There's no job description you're gonna get.
But you better be a people person. You better have
great you better have a stuffed rollodex. You better. You
better be good at networking, be super good at networking. Uh,
(34:03):
smooth talker, Yeah, you should throw a good party, be
good at fundraising. Yeah. Um, and like we said, you
got to know a lot of good people. You've gotta
be a great communicator and persuasive. One might say slick, slick.
I think it is probably right. But um, that and
that I imagine that those are good qualities that haven't
(34:23):
just about any But I also have the impression that
there are lobbyists who are just like just strictly grinding
out research and stuff like that. Yeah. I think there's
different types of lobbyists. Some are probably like there's the
glad handers, yeah, like the front person maybe, and then
there's like walks people who are literally like technical policy
experts on a certain topic. They know the ins and outs,
(34:44):
they know both sides of it, they know what senators
care about it, um, they know what congress people could
be persuaded maybe, like they know everything about this particular issue. Yeah,
and like up to the minute. Uh, they have to
be really up on the very very latest policies and laws.
I mean they have to be experts, like you said,
(35:06):
like inside and out because they get paid a ton
of money to do that. And there's typically three kinds
of lobbying that people undertake. Again, whether it's the Girls
Scouts or Green Peace or um, the Chamber of Commerce
or whoever. Um, there's direct lobbying, indirect lobbying, and the
grassroots lobbying. And they probably any lobbying group takes part
(35:29):
in all a combination of all these. Yeah. Direct lobbying
is when you're when you can get a meeting with
the congress person or senator or their aids. Yeah, and
you sit down with their staff for them and say, uh,
I'm experienced clearly because I'm in the room with you.
And here's here's what we think is a good piece
of legislation. Right, it's good for the country. Wink wink. Yeah.
(35:51):
So that's direct lobbying. Uh, indirect is if you, um, well,
what's the difference between indirect and social? Aren't they kind
of the same. Yeah, it's the same. Right. So that's
like we said, the Sam Ward which would throw parties
the king of lobby. Yeah, he invented the social lobbying
and that's still true today. You though a big swanky
(36:12):
d C cocktail hour and get people in the same
room and just connecting folks, that's indirect lobby and goosen
them up with a little uh scotch maybe, and all
of a sudden you're like you just sit back and
you're like, yeah, this is working. Look at them talking
to each other. I love myself. And then there's grassroots lobbying,
which is kind of misleading actually because it can be
(36:33):
employed by uh deep deeply entrenched, deep pocketed interests. But
you know, it still appears grassroots and folksy things like
UM paying somebody who's an expert in a field or
UM a recognized figure, maybe a former UM congress person
(36:53):
or whatever to write an op ed. Yeah, And I
mean name recognition counts for just about anything, so even
op eds. And if if somebody's saying, if a former
Treasury secretary is like, this is a really bad idea,
we shouldn't pass this legislation, that's going to inform voters minds. Yeah,
I think it also is a huge message to the
(37:17):
legislators who are also reading it that like Washington Post
published this, so a lot of people just read you
may want to listen to what I just said. Yeah.
Or grassroots in the purest sense of the word, in
the more traditional sense is uh could be a small
little ngo that's all they can afford his grassroots campaigns
and uh, sadly it's it's uh. The dog that barks
(37:40):
the loudest is the one that's going to get the
most attention. And you're barking the loudest if you have
the resources, too, I guess, get a bunch of dogs
barking at once. Which is a really good point, Chuck,
because and this this article goes to great pains to
make it clear that you know, not all lobbying is bad,
that lobbying in and of itself isn't necessarily bad um,
(38:02):
and that there are plenty of public interest groups that
are dedicated to serving the common good that engage in lobbying.
So it shouldn't be outlawed, it shouldn't be cut off.
We should figure out how to fix it. Um. The
thing is is they found that for every dollar that
a union and public interest group combined spents, corporations or
(38:27):
big business spent thirty four dollars of the top one
spenders were all corporate or corporate interests. Um. So it's
the field is very much skewed towards whoever has the
most money or whoever is willing to spend the most. Uh.
So to be two registers a lobbyists, which was required,
like I said, since eighteen seventy six, and then a
(38:49):
few years after that they required that members of the
press register because with the House and Senate because they
were had lobbyists posing as journalists, so they had to
take care of that pretty early on. But if you
are registered, uh, there are some things that you have
to do according to the law. Um. Well, first of all,
(39:10):
you can't give gifts blatantly give gifts. Yeah, that's one
of the things that Abram often trouble all sorts of
ways around this, of course, but you can't blatantly give gifts.
You have to register. You have to file quarterly reports
that detail the contacts you've made with elected officials. You
have to disclose how much money you were paid. Uh.
You have to file semi annual reports at list contributions
(39:33):
UH made to political campaigns. See that. I have a
question about that, because from what I understand, if in
on the federal level, if you're a registered lobbyists, you
cannot contribute to a political campaign. Yeah. Maybe it's has
to do with like these three thousand dollar plate dinners
or something. I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't sure about
that either. Actually, but you mentioned the American Bar Association.
(39:55):
They a lot of attorneys are lobbyists, um off and
on during their career. My uncle was actually a lobbyist,
Is that right? Yeah, Congressman, my congressman uncle. Really he
went through the revolving door. Huh. Yeah. I don't know
much about it, but um oh man, you gotta ask him.
Yeah I should, And I will say this, even though
(40:18):
we were not on the same side of the political spectrum,
which I won't even say, who's who. He's a Democrat. Huh.
But he's a good dude and an honest person. So
even though we don't agree on things, I always felt
like he, you know, he's not taking kickbacks. He's not
one of those guys. And I really believe that he's
a man pure of heart and so so in no
(40:41):
way disparaging your uncle for going through the revolving door.
One of the problems with that revolving door is not
just that it causes this brain drain from UM Capitol
Hill to the lobbying companies or the law law firms,
but um, it also makes Congress not really interested in
passing any kind of lobbying reform or revolving door reform
(41:03):
because pretty soon their term is going to be up
and they can go get that job. Exactly. Yeah, because
you don't as a public servant, I mean, you don't
make a lot of money. No, you don't, and especially
well we'll get to this in a second, but finishing
on the A B A UM. The American Bar Association
has a real interest in trying to keep lobbying as
(41:23):
above board as possible because a lot of them want
to be lobbyist and they don't want to be tarnished
and so, like you said earlier, they think the biggest
thing you can do is to separate and have really
strict lines drawn between fundraising and lobbying. They think that's
where it's the most corrupt. So get rid of the time,
the time requirement of your time to be a registered
(41:47):
lobbyist and just separate fundraising from from um lobbying. Yeah,
I get the idea that that's where most of the
hinky stuff is going on. So the thing is like
that makes sense, but it's also kind of like trying
to remove a hornet's nest by picking the hornets out
one by one. Not the best idea, um, and need
(42:08):
to smash it and set it on fire pretty much
and then p on the ashes. Actually, I believe you
should leave a hornet's nest. You should never destroy hornet's nest.
So uh, I know, apex predators and all um. So
the the the other idea to just shut the revolving
door or to just outlaw a lobbying all together. Again,
(42:30):
not only is that a bad idea, especially if you
just did it wholesale out of the gate. You can't
do that, but it's also unconstitutional, right, So we read
this really great article um Man that was good in
Washington Monthly. So who wrote this thing lead Drootman or Drutman,
probably Drutman and Steven tell Us. They wrote it in
Washington Monthly. Is called a New Agenda for Political Reform.
(42:52):
It was a great article, lengthy, but it just and
it's made a really good sense to me. Yeah, and
it's not too wonky. But I mean, these guys clearly
know what they're talking about people, the long and short
of it, and what they think is the problem is
what we touched on earlier, which is staffing of congressional
(43:12):
offices has been cut and slash so much and there
are so much more information now to ingest than there
used to be. They just can't do it. There are
not the resources to do it, so that we have
no choice but to turn to lobbyists to act as
the experts and to write legislation. So they propose and
we have some stats in here actually that I thought
(43:33):
were pretty striking. In the eighties, around nineteen eight is
when they started cutting everything. The Government Accountability Office and
the Congressional Research Services. What they do is they provide
nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers. Right there are
fewer now than in nineteen seventy nine. And those are
(43:54):
the very experts that were dedicated to serving Congress in
a nonpartisan way so that they had all the information
they needed to create legislation to actually make the government
operate fewer than the nineteen seventies. Yeah, so gone gone.
Starting in the eighties and then again uh in the
mid nineties, Gingrich cut congressional staff. Yeah. And while this
(44:17):
is going on, it's a two way street. Lobbying is
increasing by it's staggering how much lobbying has increased in
money and just human power. And then one of the
things about lobbying is that lobbying begets lobbying. The more
a lobbyist can get legislation pushed through, the larger the
federal register grows, the less ability any given congress person
(44:41):
has to read and ingest and understand federal law. So
the more they need lobbyists who do understand it. Yeah.
And so what you get is what we talked about
the revolving door. Well, actually that's politicians themselves going to lobby. Well,
but there's a brain drink because their aids are being
sucked away K Street as well. There's another cycle where
(45:03):
there's no incentive to be a congressional staffer for very
long because you're not gonna make much money. I think
they said the top ninety percentile of a congressional staff
makes hundred thousand dollars a year. That's the top ninety percentile,
which sounds like six figures. That's good. DC is not cheap, no,
and take out taxes and everything. That the median income
(45:23):
was fifty grand, so you're making what like thirty five
after taxes. You can't live on thirty dollars in d C.
And they found that the median income for a lobbyist
in Washington, d C. Median is three hundred thousand, and
that's pretty attractive, especially if you're in your twenties and
all of a sudden can go double or triple your income,
like right out of the gate. Well, it's the career path,
(45:44):
like it's laid out there for everyone. Here's what you do.
Go work on the staff for a little while, make contacts,
which is invaluable, that's why you do it for not
a whole lot of money, and then boom, you can
get rich, make a lot of money as a lobbyist.
So Drumpman and tell us UM suggest first and foremost
that the solution to the lobbying conundrum that we have
now is basically equipped Congress with the UM information, research
(46:10):
and policy experts that they need and that they can
get the stuff that they're currently getting from obbyoists. And
the way you do that start is just increased salaries.
And they make a really good point that you don't
have to necessarily increase the salaries to to be completely
on par with what UM K Streets offering, because K
(46:31):
Street would probably just try to start to outspend the
just raised salaries UM. But if you can do it
so that a person could make a pretty decent living UM,
they would possibly choose congressional work over K Street because
with congressional work, they're in there, they're like part of
this machine that's really making decisions and policies and laws
(46:52):
that are affecting the country, rather than working for a
law firm that's trying to get some some legislation pass
that will benef fit this one corporate client. So so
if you just factor in idealism along with a really
good salary, these guys say, you could attract the right
talent that you need. So their recommendation simply. I mean
(47:12):
it's multi fold. But they say double committee staff, triple
the money that they make, and you might be stepping
in the right direction. Yeah. And again if you're like
wholl whoa, that's a lot of taxpayer money. Well again,
if you if you look at what the CBO alone,
spending a dollar on the CBO comes up with ninety
dollars worth of places to cut government waste. These are
(47:35):
these are these are good things to spend money on. Yeah.
And you may have a cleaner, more legitimate government as
a result too, And that's priceless. Yeah. I mean, they
made some some excellent case that in the seventies when
the government had a lot of staff that was smart,
that had a lot of institutional memory and knowledge that
they got things done, like the Church Committee, um and
(47:57):
the Pike Committee, both of which revealed a massive horrible
stuff that the CIA was doing, like dosing unsuspecting Americans
with LSC that came out at congressional investigations that you
do not see any longer. Um. If you had committee
staff that were well paid, um, they would hang around
and you would have a lot more laws being passed,
(48:18):
a lot more deliberations being passed. Right now. It's all
fundraising going on. That's what your legislators do. They get elected,
they come to Washington, have their picture taken there, and
then they go back out and start raising money for reelection,
right and they're raising money from the very people who
are working as lobbyists. So yeah, all you have to
do is create good jobs aggressional researchers, and you've got
(48:43):
your lobbying problem largely licked. Yeah. I agree, man, I
don't see any problem with this idea. It's it's sad
whenever we dig into stuff like this. How Like I
talked about the Insiders Club, how I don't know. It
just seems like it's such a broken, messed up system.
It is. There was another thing I read UM about
(49:03):
something called rent seeking, which is where UM, through lobbyists,
the corporation will go and just try to get a
piece of the pie, not for doing anything, not even
necessarily a contract, but just say, like a subsidy. And
like the fossil fuel subsidies are amounted to thirty seven
and a half billion dollars in two thousand and fourteen.
That was just stuff that the government gave, just money.
(49:25):
The government gave UM oil and other fossil fuel companies
just for existing, right, And that's called rent seeking. It
doesn't do anything. They don't they're not producing anything to
generate that income. They're spending a bunch of income to
go suck it out of the federal budget. Right. And
I mean, if you want to talk about wealth redistribution,
that's like the the the clearest version of it you
(49:45):
can possibly imagine. And that's through lobbying. And yeah, and
this is just lobbying, Like, don't get me started on
things like campaign finance and all the other ways. That's
another one we should do. Yeah, I actually wrote that article.
Um Man, how was it? But it was depressing. It
was depressing and tough, and it's probably way out of date,
(50:06):
so we will update it. Yeah, it would need a
lot of like our dating, let's do it. Campaign financial reform,
big big thing. Remember our presidential um debates one that
was eye opening. Remember there's like a whole commission that
has a stranglehold on presidential debates and I have got
to go back to listen to it is a good one,
(50:27):
most of them. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that.
All right, Uh, well, if you want to know more
about lobbying. You can type that word in the search
part how stuff works, and it will bring up this
fine article. Uh. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna call this binge listening
Colin newest the oldest, Uh. Dudes and Jerry. By the way,
(50:50):
I labored over that subject line like a publicist, and
it's still awful. It's been bad, is what Colin said,
Dudes and Jerry. I've been slowly making my way through
the analog of episodes, and for any new listeners, I'd
like to advocate for listening through them from newest to oldest,
in other words, reverse order, rather than oldest to newest,
which is how I assume most would listen. While the
(51:13):
references to old episodes might be a little confusing, they
also build a sense of anticipation once you get there.
I could see that, for example, I finally listened to
the infamous episode on the Sun. You made so many
references over the years to how bad that episode was
that by the time I got to it, I was
literally laughing from beginning to end, so it becomes like
(51:33):
a comedy episode. At that you could almost hear Chuck's
brain sizzling and melting as the episode went on. True. Uh,
if I didn't have that sense of anticipation, your agony
wouldn't have been as sweet. I like this idea. I
think he makes a lot of sense. I dread the
day that I run out of episodes and experience of withdrawals,
(51:54):
the shakes, the Jimmy legs that will inevitably come when
I'm jones and for new stuff. And that is Colin
and or Land. Oh alright, Colling, great email, terrible subject line,
but totally forgivable because of the body. I didn't think
it was so bad being listening to us to hold us.
It's a sink. I guess it's a it's just like
(52:16):
this the d That's fine, right, do better, Coling, But
great email calling. Oh but if he's listening, has he
he hasn't made it all the way back? Well, if
he's listening to us to old us, so does he
just make time each week to listen to the newest
one and then go back to wherever he loves? I
don't know. We need to hear a follow up. God
(52:39):
knows when he'll hear this, Chuck. We need to contact
him directly from feeling a great since of regret. I
feel bad for him because he's just heading straight for
disappointment Land as he goes further and further back in
The cattle Man. There's some episodes I'd just like to
just redo, which we have done some of them, like
when they were like five minutes then they were cool topics.
(52:59):
You know, should just remove those from the Internet. Let's
do um. I would like to redo the trolley problem
one you and I didn't do idea with Chris Palette,
and it deserves like its own, big current modern incarnation
of stuff. You should not like the stode. We should
probably do all the ones I wasn't on. How about that,
Let's do it. We'll call it the Summer of Chuck.
(53:21):
If you want to be like calling and get in
touch with us and let us scrutinize your words, you
can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always,
join us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
(53:45):
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