How does the process work? From my very limited understanding X lobby donates X amount of money to persuade the legislature to introduce bills to further their agenda. Is this a correct assumption? I hope not, because it seems like with enough money you could basically buy what becomes law.
Actual lobbists are representatives of particular interest groups who work in the capital. Their job is to meet with politicians and talk with them about legislation that the group wants passed or defeated. It’s illegal for them to actually give money to the politicians, though. Their job is to alert them to the possibility and persuade them.
Now, interest groups also give money to politicians. In theory, they are merely supporting people who would have voted their way anyway, but no one really believes that. The money gives the the chance to talk to the politicians – if you give a guy $1000, he’s going to meet with you when you ask for an appointment.
Our industry has lobbyists, and we are a good case study to help you understand how it works.
Our industry (credit reporting/banking) is regulated be federal laws. When congress passes legislation that affects our industry, it affects our costs and the finances of our customers (the largerst U.S lenders, banks, mtg comps,etc). Congress could pass laws that make our business impossible to operate, impossible to profit from, or impossible to improve.
In our case, after lobbying, congress passed laws which drove up costs, eliminated jobs and resulted in higher costs for our customers and their customers. And that is the good news! We had lobbyists that helped us pitch our case, even getting congressmen into our operations. While things got harder after congress was done with us, if congress went unchecked, things would be impossible.
Now, without lobbyists, the laws congress would have passed would have been so damagingf that it would have become unprofitable to operate a national credit reporting agency.
What was in it for congress, besides money? Well, there was some money at stake because the largest US banks backed us up and lobbied with us. Losing the credit reporting industry would devastate the economy. Or it would mean forcing the industry to off shore all it’s jobs to remain alive …that wouldn’t sit well with voters either.
Lobbyists protect industry. Can their power be abused? SURE! But congress can’t be left to legislate industries into the ground. Each is responsible for checking off on the other - an informal check and balance system between industry and congress.
Money and power is sometimes the motivation, but sometimes legislators listen to a good case and modify their behavoir based on it.
Lobbying, influence peddling, having “access,” doing a favor, scratching my back so I’ll scratch yours is all about the same. Excepting there are some actual laws regarding lobbying.
Like the poster above said, a lot of the money is for access. Politicians have a limited amount of time so if you want your message heard, ante up.
Lobbying is, to me, putting forth my agenda to people in a position of influence and power who can advance my agenda.
Well, sort of. A lot more of lobbying has to do with information distribution. If all a lobbyist does is attend a few fundraisers and attempt to influence legistlation that way, that lobbyist is going to be laughed out of the building. There are certain industries/individuals who can get special treatment based on the size of their pocket book, but these people are few and far between. And the average legislator never meets them - just party leadership usually.
The average lobbyist is much more focused on building a case for his client using data supporting his position. (Or hers, of course). The problem is that Congressional staffs are really undermanned and there’s no way that the LAs can keep up with every little bill that comes their way - even with the committee and subcommittee system keeping things to a minimum workload. So they have to focus on key pieces of legislation to spend time researching. Granted, CRS helps out a lot but even with them they can’t look at everything.
So you’ve got an information vacuum here, which leaves the door open for the lobbyist. Take the sugar industry for example. It’s really not a key issue for most legislators so most staffs don’t spend a lot of time really looking at the issue or making the effort to look at the real costs of sugar subsidies vs. the benefits. That’s where the sugar lobbyists step in. They would come every few weeks and drop off a new paper with all sorts of figures and graphs and such proclaiming the huge benefits of the subsidies, while downplaying the costs. And they would sit down for 20-15 minutes with the Agriculture LA every couple months and go over the information in person.
Opponents of subsidies never came around and never bothered trying to put that amount of effort into lobbying. So we usually just went with the flow on sugar. It didn’t cost us any votes at home and it kept those Reps who did care about sugar on our good side. In other words, all benefits with no real costs.
If someone were to put together an actual organized lobbying campaign to get rid of the sugar protections then you might see a change in policy over this (probably not, but you might get some debate going).
You also don’t really need money if you’re from the district. If you can get a group together and show that you can turn out votes, you’ll get your congressman’s attention quick even if you never donate a cent. That’s a large chunk of the power that unions wield. Sure, they give money, but much more importantly they run huge GOTV drives with their members and contribute a ton of manpower to a campaign, which is usually at least as important as money.
My firm does, among other things, some executive branch (FCC) lobbying. No monay changes hands in our case. Ususally, we file comments on proceedings, try to build up coalitions with other people who agree with us (because a comment is a lot more impressive if it has a lot of supporters), and generally try to argue the merits of our case. Sometimes we meet with Commission staff or bring in clients to meet with Commission staff.
It’s not just a simple quid pro quo or bribery, especially with executive branch lobbying, as they’re all unelected bureaucrats, and its unfortunate that lobbying tends to get portrayed in that fashion.