How America Can Lobby Into a 3.5 Billion Industry
WORDBND.COM - WordFinance. Lobbying is arguably the American government's the oldest profession. It's an industry worth over three and a half a billion dollars, with around twelve thousand professionals and hundreds of firms, unions, trade associations and interest groups in the field.
It's one of the main drivers of
policymaking in the U.S., but people still don't
know much about it. I think one of the
misconceptions about lobbyists is that, you know,
we walk around with bags of money and say, vote
our way or support this or oppose this, that it's
not even close to the truth.
We want ultimately our policies to be based on the merits, and we want as much information as
possible as long as it is truthful and relevant
and meaningful.
Almost everyone agrees with that premise, but
consensus pretty much ends there.
Who gets the tax breaks and who gets the subsidies
and who gets the bailouts and who gets the
regulatory rollbacks that increase profits?
Well, obviously, it's the biggest corporations
and the wealthiest people at the top.
We've got to get big money out of politics.
There's no real oversight of the lobbying
industry. I understand the complaints.
I think they're unjustified.
In ninety-nine point nine percent of time.
The pandemic has spurred record spending on
the lobbying in the first quarter in 2020.
But public perception of the profession remains
low. So how does this elusive industry work and
is it as corrupt as it appears?
My name Marci McSwain and I work as a lobbyist.
Marcy started her own firm in early 2019.
Before that, she worked nearly a decade for
former Congressman Ray McGrath.
Lobbyists need to be the most trustworthy people.
You can't have a job in this town very long if
you're trying to trick.
If you don't equip the member of Congress with
information that's going to be helpful to his or
her district. Lobbying is an age-old profession
that dates back to when the Constitution was
created. Experts claim the framers included the
practice intentionally to make sure no one
the interest group became too powerful.
The ability of individuals, groups and
corporations to lobby the government was
therefore, protected by the right to petition in
the First Amendment.
But there's a sense that, you know, we're a large
and diverse country with a lot of different
people who have a lot of different interests.
And there should be a way for people to speak
directly to their elected officials and say, hey,
you should support this policy or, hey, you
should oppose this policy.
In 2019, 12,170 bills, resolutions and amendments
were taken up by Congress.
Many more a thousand were killed.
With about twelve thousand professionals at trade
associations in House unions or private firms.
Lobbyists play a major role in American
policymaking. I think there's a popular
perception that lobbyists come in and do all this
sweet-talking, lay down piles of cash, lavish
the dinners and get what they want.
And in reality, lobbying is much more boring.
It's making the same argument over and over
again, and it's slowly building coalitions.
It's talking to lots of different people and then
trying to build a case for your client or your
perspective. You get to a breakfast fundraiser in
the morning, then you go to work, you do your job
and you go to lunch fundraiser.
Then you come back and you have another committee
hearing or a markup or you go start calling on
your offices and then you'd go to a cocktail
fundraiser and then you go to a dinner fundraiser
and then you rinse and repeat.
Jimmy Williams lives on a 50 acre farm in rural
South Carolina. But before moving back here, he
spent nearly 20 years in Washington, DC's
political scene. Anyone that ever tells you that
the idea of the money the lure of money is not
the there, then they're lying to you because it's
absolutely there.
Between 2000 and 2002, Jimmy was the economic
policy adviser to Illinois Democratic State
Senator Dick Durban.
He says with a degree in literature, he needed
the information that lobbyists shared with him.
I did everything from trade to taxes to budgets.
If it had money signs on it, I did it.
And I learned a lot from those guys than I
learned over time that lobbyists will only tell
you what they want you to know that I would say,
OK, great. Who's Against you and I start writing
it down.
So who's against you?
No no one is against you.
This should never be a problem to get this passed
because nobody's against you.
And they would look at me like, well, we may have
like, OK, so who's against you?
Say it's part teacher, educator and a park lawyer
is defending or protecting or trying to implement
something people will say, we don't want
lobbyists writing bills. You'd rather have us
writing them than you would a member of Congress
who has zero experience in the issues that you're
dealing with? The problem is that there are only
twenty-four hours in the day.