|
vate gain. In this instance, the public got
wind of the situation and was able to apply enough pressure to
correct it. But just the fact that this story made national news
indicates how rare it is for the public to be able to carry out
such a rescue. Supporters say that it's time to take a hard look
at the way special interests interact with public officials and to
make every effort to strip this interaction of anything that smacks
of corruption or conflict of interest. In this view, we need a
two-pronged approach: cracking down on lobbyists and giving citizens
more power to go around elected officials when the public will be
continually thwarted.
In a democracy like ours, citizens are sovereign and are the
ultimate source of political power. The trouble is that money can
buy power and access, taking it away from citizens, as is the case
now. The prior choice focuses on campaign finance reforms, but
propoents of a second choice insist that those reforms will ultimately
prove disappointing, even disillusioning, because of the many other
channels through which even larger amounts of political money can
flow. Political contributions are already dwarfed by the amount of
money spent on lobbying, advocacy research, and proposals for
special interests. So money that is banned from political campaigns
will simply be redirected. History shows that changes in campaign
finance laws have merely altered the pattern of spending in politics,
much the way squeezing a balloon just makes it bulge somewhere
else. After all, new campaign finance rules or publicly funded
election campaigns, as proposed by the prior choice, won't banish
a single lobbyist from the corridors of local, state, or federal
power. Unless steps are taken, corporate and special interests
will always slavishly attend to powerful politicians, gaining them
special access and influence -- typically at public expense.
Supporters of this choice say that lobbyists should be denied
private access to elected officials and public policy makers. Just
as no judge would confer with just one attorney in a pending court
case, politicians should be barred from holding private meetings
with individual lobbyists. Also, all of the ways lobbyists ingratiate
themselves with public officials should be banned, including
"hiring" politicians to give speeches, write articles,
or act as consultants; wining and dining politicians; and wooing
officials them with Super Bowl tickets, Florida vacations, and free
services such as organized fund-raisers. Many of these gifts are
made in secret, and sometimes even the beneficiaries are unaware
of the subtle ways lobbyists curry favor. Lobbyists for the tobacco
giant Philip Morris, for example, gave $30,000 to a nonprofit group
that helped pay for New York Governor George Pataki's 1995 and 1996
trips to Hungary, where he promoted trade and visited his relatives.
The Pataki administration said it had accepted the gift from the
Hungarian-American Chamber of Commerce without knowing the source
of the nonprofit organization's funds. At the time, Philip Morris
was lobbying the state to repeal smoking restrictions in New York
City and other places.
One reason for the cozy connection between lobbyists and
politicians is that many lobbyists are former public officials.
In 1999, 138 former members and leaders of Congress were registered
lobbyists in Washington. At every level of government across the
nation there is this revolving door between legislatures and lobbies,
which, in itself, is a corrupting influence on government. Choice
Two supporters argue that when a regulator or elected official is
considering a public issue, his or her judgment should not be
clouded by the lure of a future career as a special interest
lobbyist. Congressional rules bar former members and high-level
staff from lobbying Congress for a year after leaving public
employment, but this rule should be made into a lifetime ban in
Washington and across the nation, in this view.
Supporters say that new restrictions should also include provision
for strict enforcement and tough penalties for violators, including
fines and loss of the license to lobby.
In addition to imposing a variety of restrictions on lobbyists,
Choice Two calls for making sure that citizens have the last word
in our democracy. This is a call for a fundamental shift in power
from elected officials to the electorate. The primary mechanism
for making this shift in power is the ballot measure, which has
been used for a century in some states and simply needs to expanded
nationally. Citizens, in this view, should have the power to enact
or repeal laws, at every level of government. This gives citizens
the opportunity to pursue the public will when elected officials
can't or won't because of their own self-interests or special
interest pressures. In a similar vein, laws should make it easier
for voters to recall elected officials who ignore the public
will.
Lobbying: A Growth Industry
Between 1997 and 1999, lobbying expenditures in Washington grew
13 percent to $1.4 billion and the ranks of registered lobbyists
increased 37 percent to 20,512, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics in Washington, D.C. There are no comparable figures for
lobbying in cities, counties, and states, but estimates of these
annual expenditures run into the billions of dollars -- expenditures,
by the way, that are publicly subsidized, as our tax system wrongly
allows companies to write off these costs as business expenses.
What do these lobbyists do? Well,
take the Regulatory Fairness and Openness Act of 1999, which sponsors said would
improve the process of regulating potentially dangerous pesticides.
Farmers in overalls were flown into Washington to speak in favor
of the bill, and 219 House members and 37 Senators subsequently
signed on as co-sponsors. But the bill's future dimmed after the
Washington Post discovered that the legislation had been
written, word for word, by lawyers in Virginia who worked for a
group of pesticide makers, agricultural businesses, and food
processors. The legislation, it also turned out, was designed to
weaken protections for making food safe for children, protections
that had been requested by the National Academy of Sciences.
In this view, lobbyists' smooth work with the "Fairness
and Openness" bill demonstrates that efforts to control
political donations won't control the influence of special interests
in government. Lobbyists should not be allowed to draft laws. And
should legislation like the "Fairness and Openness" act
become law, voters should have authority to consider its repeal
and the recall of politicians associated with it.
Needed: More Voter Oversight
Choice Two's call for giving citizens more power to offset the
powerful influence of money might sound radical, but these ideas
date back to the founding of the republic and, what's more, have
been used successfully in some states.
Thomas Jefferson was among the first to call for states to
recognize the sovereignty of citizens in a democracy by giving
voters the right to enact and repeal laws in the voting booth.
Ballot measures serve as a final check on the power of elected
officials, allowing voters to enact or repeal law when, for whatever
reason, elected lawmakers ignore the public will. Choice Two notes
that citizens have used ballot initiatives to make laws after
legislators were unwilling or unable to act on issues as varied as
women's suffrage, term limits for elected officials and limits on
political fund-raising.
Since 1898, 27 states -- mostly in the Midwest and West -- have
adopted ballot measures, usually both referenda (laws enacted or
proposed by a legislature and then put on the ballot for acceptance
or rejection) and voter initiatives to enact or repeal laws (placed
on the ballot by petition from registered voters). Yet only five
states regularly use initiatives, largely because of burdensome
restrictions that make it hard to use the process in other states.
Choice Two advocates restoring citizen sovereignty by eliminating
burdensome restrictions on the initiative process and making it
available to citizens in all 50 states and at the federal level.
What Can Be Done?
Choice Two supporters generally favor the following measures:
Recognize that campaign finance reforms are of little value
because they would merely send more money underground, diverting
it to special-interest lobbying campaigns.
Take steps to restrict the influence
of lobbyists:
- Deny lobbyists private access to elected officials and public
policy makers. Make such meetings public.
- Ban lobbyists' gifts, in all their disguises, including paying
"honoraria" for politicians' speeches or articles;
wining and dining politicians; and providing free services
such as organizing fund-raisers.
- Close the revolving door between government and lobbying. Impose
a lifetime ban on former public officials becoming lobbyists.
- Enforce restrictions on lobbyists and impose tough
penalties for violations, including large fines and loss of
the license to lobby. Also impose fines, suspensions, and
other disciplinary measures on public officials who violate
restrictions on interacting with lobbyists.
- Reduce public officials' reliance on lobbyists for information
by hiring more professional staff.
Take steps to make elected officials more accountable:
- Give voters the final say. Expand upon the success of some states
in empowering voters to enact or repeal laws. Extend the
ballot initiative and referendum process to every state and
the federal government.
- Eliminate bureaucratic rules that make it too hard or expensive
to put issues on the ballot.
- Strengthen voters' ability to recall elected officials who disregard
the public interest.
|
In This View
- Why should lobbyists for special interests be allowed to deluge
public officials with gifts and free services? Why should
politicians be allowed to accept these gifts and services?
- Campaign finance reforms won't reduce the power of special interests,
they will just divert more money to lobbying. Today's problem
with money in politics is that largely hidden lobbying
expenditures for influencing politicians dwarf campaign
contributions, buying the special interests enormous political
power, to the public's detriment.
- If we want to clean up politics and make government more responsive
and accountable to the public, we need strict regulations on
the way lobbyists promote special interest agendas.
- Democracy is a work in progress, one that Thomas Jefferson and other
founding fathers said would need to be re-tuned and reaffirmed
by every generation. The time has come to fundamentally alter
the balance of power between elected officials and citizens.
Voters need the right to enact or repeal laws when politicians
can't or won't do the job.
- Unless citizens gain more authority to check and balance politicians'
power, history shows that incumbents' self-interest and the
moneyed interests tend to block popular public policies.
- Some states have used ballot initiatives for a century -- not to
replace the representative form of government, but to give
citizens another way to check and balance legislative power.
The best example of this is voters' enactment of term limits
for state officials, which legislators couldn't bring themselves
to accept.
|
In Contrary Views
- This choice attacks lobbyists, but democracy couldn't run effectively
without them. Lobbyists speak on behalf of all segments of
society and industry, and advise lawmakers about the likely
impact legislation would have. Coal miners, teachers, cops,
lawyers, environmentalists, chemical makers, and just about
everyone else in America is represented by lobbyists.
- This choice tries to fix something that isn't broken. The press,
existing bribery laws, and ethics rules do a very good job of
protecting us from the corrupt use of money by lobbyists.
Because lobbying is already so regulated, it's less of a concern
that more money is spent on lobbying than on political
campaigns.
- Laws to ban lobbying are unenforceable.
- Americans aren't asking to vote on complex issues. Most citizens
don't have the time or experience to evaluate policy issues,
and it's unfair and counterproductive to ask them to do so
in the voting booth.
- Ballot measures don't give citizens any more power; in fact, they
give special interests an easier way to influence public
policy. Many studies of ballot initiatives show that special
interests routinely use their money to determine the outcome
of many of these "citizen initiatives."
- This choice takes a step forward in acknowledging the futility of
efforts to control the campaign contributions. But instead
of taking the next logical step -- simply scrapping our
problematic campaign finance regulations -- this choice calls
for a huge program of new laws and regulations and making
risky experiments with our representative form of
government.
|
|
For Further Reading / Rein In Lobbyists and Politicians
Thomas Cronin, Direct Democracy: the Politics of Initiative,
Referenda and Recall (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989).
Ken Silverstein, Washington on $10 Million A Day: How Lobbyists
Plunder the Nation (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998).
www.iandrinstitute.org
is the Web site for the Initiative and Referendum Institute, which
provides non-partisan information about the initiative and referendum
process at the local, state, national, and international
level.
|
|
