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There seems to me a massive difference between corporate interests openly bribing lawmakers in a brazenly material fashion vs. a group of concerned citizens mer

There seems to me a massive difference between corporate interests openly bribing lawmakers in a brazenly material fashion vs. a group of concerned citizens merely voicing their concerns, yet the two are always conflated. Money is not speech and corporations are not people, I don't see why people tolerate this.

Gunax 5y ago
Bribery is not legal, never has been, and is not being advocates for. If you want to call lobbying 'bribery' in a sort of exaggerated way, go ahead. In my experience most of the rhetoric around bribery is reapoy just interested groups doing regular politics stuff--like 'if you do not support bill xyz we will tell our million newsletter subscribers you're a bad person'.
- bradlys 5y ago
  There is very clear bribery going on though… speaking engagement fees, expensive vacations that are under the guise of lobbying, etc. And it’s very clear that at least people in congress are very happy with this situation.
jjk166 5y ago
Well we do have laws against openly bribing lawmakers. Lobbyists aren't handing over wads of cash, they are spending money on things like ad campaigns, surveys, studies, talks, busing people in to talk to their representative, etc which are meant to legitimately sway the opinions of both the elected officials and the electorate. Maybe to get more politicians to show up the lobbyists pay to serve nice steak dinners at a talk, and in the extreme maybe the talk is just a thinly veiled guise for what is really an expensive gift of steak dinner, but conceptually it's no different from any other potential catering option, and there is no simple way to ban it. Sure you can make specific schemes illegal, but there will always be another loophole. So long as you allow people to interact with their elected representatives and speak freely, there will be people who have their politician's ear. You might be able to eliminate lobbying by sequestering the politicians throughout their term, but that's going to have the opposite of the desired effect of making government more democratic.

Gunax 5y ago

Bribery is not legal, never has been, and is not being advocates for. If you want to call lobbying 'bribery' in a sort of exaggerated way, go ahead. In my experience most of the rhetoric around bribery is reapoy just interested groups doing regular politics stuff--like 'if you do not support bill xyz we will tell our million newsletter subscribers you're a bad person'.

bradlys 5y ago
There is very clear bribery going on though… speaking engagement fees, expensive vacations that are under the guise of lobbying, etc. And it’s very clear that at least people in congress are very happy with this situation.

jjk166 5y ago

Well we do have laws against openly bribing lawmakers. Lobbyists aren't handing over wads of cash, they are spending money on things like ad campaigns, surveys, studies, talks, busing people in to talk to their representative, etc which are meant to legitimately sway the opinions of both the elected officials and the electorate. Maybe to get more politicians to show up the lobbyists pay to serve nice steak dinners at a talk, and in the extreme maybe the talk is just a thinly veiled guise for what is really an expensive gift of steak dinner, but conceptually it's no different from any other potential catering option, and there is no simple way to ban it. Sure you can make specific schemes illegal, but there will always be another loophole. So long as you allow people to interact with their elected representatives and speak freely, there will be people who have their politician's ear. You might be able to eliminate lobbying by sequestering the politicians throughout their term, but that's going to have the opposite of the desired effect of making government more democratic.