{"id":64,"date":"2009-09-03T20:51:29","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T00:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/?p=64"},"modified":"2009-09-25T09:05:54","modified_gmt":"2009-09-25T13:05:54","slug":"lobbying-pays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/2009\/09\/03\/lobbying-pays\/","title":{"rendered":"Lobbying pays"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2002, McCain\/Feingold<\/a> was passed with the noble-sounding goal of limiting the influence of\u00a0 money on our legislative and election processes.\u00a0 Less than two years later, the statute survived a challenge at the Supreme Court level<\/span><\/a>, to the complete shock of anyone with a traditional definition of “free speech”.\u00a0\u00a0 In addition,\u00a0 there is plenty of evidence that it was political speech, and in particular, the right to speak out against<\/em> the policies and members of the government that The Framers sought to protect.\u00a0 And in today’s day and age, “speaking out” can take many forms, including television, print, radio and the Internet.\u00a0 Money, sometimes a lot of money, is required to participate in these mediums (although the Internet is changing this game entirely). \u00a0 To now have strict limits on such expenditures, has the unintended (or perhaps entirely intended) consequence of limiting the amount and\/or effectiveness of a single individual or organization’s ability to “speak out” and most troubling, to challenge our elected officials and their policies.<\/p>\n

Why people would want to speak out?\u00a0 In the same First Amendment<\/a>, it states (in part) that “Congress shall make no law…abridging …the right… to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”\u00a0 — in other words, to communicate to the government one’s thoughts or desires on how the government should or should not act.\u00a0 Today, this activity is often referred to as lobbying.\u00a0 As the number of issues that the government gets involved with grows, the incentive or requirement<\/em> to lobby the government, to “speak out” in one way or another in an effort to affect the outcome, increases as well.<\/p>\n

Originally, the number of issues that the government got involved with was very small, because the Constitution<\/span> dictated as such.\u00a0 So to petition the government, possibly spending money to do so, about an issue that the government was not going to address because it was legally bound not to<\/em> would be an irrational act.\u00a0 Then around the time of FDR<\/span>, through a variety of new interpretations of the Constitution<\/a>, suddenly many more issues were fair game for petitioning, that is, lobbying.\u00a0 That trend has only accelerated to the present day.<\/p>\n

So lobbying, therefore, is more important than ever before, and for entirely understandable reasons.\u00a0 Politicians listen<\/em> to the lobbying, because they feel they are in a position to do something about it, with “it” nowadays being just about anything.\u00a0\u00a0 With the stakes so high, the contributions to politicians’ campaigns soar proportionally.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to McCain\/Feingold and the limiting of expenditures.\u00a0 If there is greater-than-ever-before incentive to lobby, and yet the mechanisms to undertake that lobby are restricted, there is tension in the system.\u00a0\u00a0 Like excess pressure in any system, the pressure will seek to relieve itself any way it can, and again<\/a>, government can not successfully figure out those ways in advance.\u00a0\u00a0 The collective will of the people is simply too complex.\u00a0 Therefore, efforts to regulate or manage this pressure will certainly fail, which renders efforts to do so a waste of resources, and worse, a needless stimulation of civil discord.\u00a0\u00a0 With McCain\/Feingold, Congress attacked the symptom and not the disease.<\/p>\n

What would work instead?\u00a0\u00a0 Going back to root cause of the problem, namely, that government is now entangled with every aspect of our lives, in ways far more numerous than The Framers sought.\u00a0\u00a0 If we instead seek to strictly limit the role of government, we will necessarily limit the need to lobby.\u00a0\u00a0 The money spent doing so will drop as an uninteresting byproduct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Test<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}