How Lobbying Works

little freaked out. Well, it's this is out of close to eight shows, this is literally the first time it's ever just been you and me in a room. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Yeah? It really is, isn't it. It's I feel like I don't know, I feel like there with no one in here, even though no one ever guides us that we should just I don't know that we're gonna cut up and curse. And it's like when the teacher has left the room, it feels like there's a vast field, a portal to another dimension to my

right where Jerry usually said. So I had no idea what that extra silent human three ft from this meant I think now, this means that we've been put out to pastor Wow, this is disconcerting. Alright, I feel like you're gonna like knife me or something. I could right now and no one whatever now until we published the episode. Nope, no one would ever know. Wow. Man, that's gruesome. All right, this is just weird. Let's let's do it. Are you ready? Yeah?

Good choice. By the way, Yeah, I don't remember what episode we picked this in. We were talking about something and lobbying came up, where like, we should just do one on lobbying. Well, here it is. Yeah, it's it's I'm glad we're doing this because we'll clear up some misconceptions. Uh, it's not always evil, just the time maybe more. Yeah, um yeah, I remember when we said we were going to do a lobbying one. We got a lot of emails from lobbyists who were like, please, please, please, don't

just trash our profession like we ever would. Um, they're they were like, lobbyings, actually, it can be a really good thing, and sure, that's why. So we got a lot of feedback before this thing even came out, which hopefully will help us. Well, they're understandably a very defensive group. Yes, everyone thinks it's just rotten and corrupt across all channels,

rotten to the core. Um. And the reason I and just about everyone else walking the planet thinks that lobbyists are rotten, it's because of some very high profile cases like remember Jack Abramoff, who can forget what a and I usually don't publicly trash people, but that guy was a pile of garbage. You know, there's really no I

was trying to find some other way around it. It was like, no, he was awful and just ripped people off, unabashedly, ripped off Indian tribe, bribed officials, bribe people, pocketed money. And he was a highly highly successful, obvious people he was working for, he was He's not a good fellow, no, but again, he was a successful lobbyist. He was at the top of his field for many years actually, um.

And it wasn't until two thousand and six when he was convicted of I believe, like bribery and corruption and all sorts of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, um, And I ended up serving three three years. I think he did three three years in the Pokey yeah, and supposedly had to pay a lot of restitution and tax fines. Yeah, but who knows how that stuff works out. No one ever follows up to see, you know, we just say, oh, he got a he's supposed to pay all these people back.

Sure it happened. Yeah, who knows. He probably found a loophole to work on. He's probably working on a lawsuit against us right this moment. Chuck, Oh, can you not publicly call someone garbage? I think you can. Okay, can we find out? Can we read this opening statement from eighteen sixty nine, Yeah, because I think it makes a

pretty good point that Jack Abramoff wasn't the first despised lobbyist. No, this is written by Emily Edson Briggs, who was a Washington D c. Newspaper correspondent um at a time where there weren't a lot of women doing that, which is kind of cool. And I think she was the first allowed into the congressional press room. Yeah, they said let her, and she'll never say anything bad because we gave her this job, and she's like, he fell from my big cookies plan. So she wrote a column talk called the

Dragons of the Lobby. So you probably know where this is headed. And the opening line of the column said, winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage, crawling through the corridors, trailing at slimy length from gallery to committee room. At last it lies stretched at full length on the floor of the Congress, this dazzling reptile, this huge scaly serpent of the lobby. That could have

been our Halloween episode. You really could have. Maybe we should gus see that up increas with a little bit of sound effects. Yeah, that was in eighteen sixty nine. Yeah, not very flattering. Um. And it was actually I think it did come um at a time when lobbying and lobbyists were really getting a chokehold on um on Congress,

on legislation, on sweetheart deals from the federal government. Um. But lobbying goes further back than that, and lobbyists have been despised even further back than that as a matter of fact. Yeah, and it's uh again, it's something this article makes. I thought, this is a really well written article. Actually, yeah, this was the day US article and he did a

good job. Um. He points out that the knee drug reaction for your average person might be to say just make it all illegal, get rid of the lobby because it's awful. But he makes a good point that it is it is necessary. The First Amendment in our own Constitution says the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Is that necessary and constitutional and mandatory. Yeah, and that's what lobbyists do, is Uh.

It's not always a huge corporation. A lot of times they'll speak for the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts or you know, all kinds of special interest groups, and we all have them, so you me, everyone listening in America has a constitutional right to go and petition Congress to say, hey, guys, you guys aren't paying enough attention to government waste, or NASA deserves way more funding than

you're giving it. Whatever, you can go do that. That's lobbying technically, but unfortunately, almost from the beginning, UH, corporate and big business special interest groups figured out a way to basically exploit that to their to their own benefit. Yeah, and it's uh. Ruz also points out, and we'll get to this later, uh, which is one of the big problems. It's necessary because Congress and their staff don't have time to Uh, that's well again, we'll get to that later.

I don't want to spoil it, but they don't have time to go through the myriad request and and uh information, deluge of information that's necessary to make an educated decision, and so much so that Senator John F. Kennedy in said, uh that we are in many cases expert technicians capable of exact not we are, I'm sorry. Lobbyists are in many cases, I'm sorry, are in many cases expert technicians capable of examining complex and difficult subjects and a clear,

understandable fashion. So that's the reason we need them in many cases is to literally explain stuff too congress people and staff strapped for time and resources. It should be said, though, that um when Kennedy wrote that in the mid fifties, lobbying was not much of a thing. It had like it was established, had been established for a couple hundred years. People hated lobbyists. There were huge um lobbyists scandals in the Gilded Age from the Civil War to the nineteenth century.

But in the mid fifties, lobbying was not a huge thing. It wasn't so um. What he said, though, is accurate and it's still is accurate today. If you are an incoming congress person, Um, you make your name both to your constituency and in your party by getting bills passed, by coming up with bills and passing them. Right, look at all the work I accomplished. And then if you um get enough, you may end up on a nice committee, maybe even a committee chair, and then eventually a party leader.

And all that is because you introduced legislation that was favored and got passed. The thing is, you don't have the time or the staff to research and write legislation, so you have to you have to turn to lobbyists lobbying groups and say, hey, you guys are literally experts on this topic. I need your help, uh educate me, help me write this, and then um, we'll we'll be friends.

The problem is is there's not a there's not a special interest group like you said, whether it's the Girl Scouts or whether it's uh the Chamber of Commerce that doesn't have a slamt that isn't going to try to slamp that legislation in their favor. So that means that the laws that are written in this country today are the legislative equivalents of avertorials, you know, kind of thin on actual content and really heavy on stuff that benefits

the corporations running the show. You know, who would make good lobbyists? Who they're in this room right now? Oh you think so? I was just thinking, like generally unbiased research presented so someone can make a decision. Yeah, that's kind of what we do, except we're not paid like lobbyists just make a lot of dough. Uh. In fact, and to thousand fourteen lobbyists and these are people that

are officially registered as lobbyists, which we'll get to. There are a lot more people doing lobby esque work that aren't officially registered, but official registered lobbyists. Uh, we're paid out to three point two four billion dollars in two thousand fourteen, and that is only divided among how many people? Was it about ten thousand, six hundred people? What are you kidding? That's how many registered lobbyists there were and this year and that's but again just the registered one

from a high of about fourteen and change. And when was that two thousand six or seven? And two two thousand seven changes came along, and it's not because there are fewer lobbyists there there that just gave rise to people, or gave people the ability to be like, oh, I'm

not a lobbyists anymore. Because here's the thing. If you are a registered lobbyist, you are subject to some very strict i think old guidelines, legal guidelines, scrutiny of your business practices, and there's a lot of stuff you can't do. You just you're just completely outlawed from doing certain things. If if you can just skirt the definition of a lobbyist,

it's like open season. Man, it's the wild West on Capitol Hill for you, and you can make as much money as you possibly can while doing the same things just not having to register as a lobbyist. All right, But that's a lot of teasing. This is the like. But this is the current state of the American legislative process.

Our legislators rely on special interest groups almost entirely to tell them what they need to know from their slant and then actually writing the legislation for them to go take the Congress and be like, God, I got I'm gonna make my name with this. All right. There's one other thing too that we should say, and this is a this is one reason why lobbying is so pernicious. Um, lobbyists also as major fundraisers for the very politicians that

they're lobbying. Yeah, Like, I didn't give them money. I just called a fundraiser that raised four and a half million dollars at you know, three thousand dollars a plate. But hey, they they gave him the money. Right, they don't know me anything. I'm just doing this because I'm a patriotic citizen of the United States and I'll see you Monday, and I like to overcharge for salmon. Yeah,

isn't that crazy? So that's the current state, everybody. Let's go back to the beginning, because lobbyists have been around basically as long as America has. Yeah, let's take a little break and then we'll we'll get to the tease stuff and start off with a little bit of history. Yeah, all right. Uh, there's some misconceptions about the history of

the word itself. Laure says that it was invented uh in the Willard Hotel in Washington, d C. In that lobby when uh Ulystas Grant would kick back and have a drink like he so like to do, uh and would get disgusted by what he called those damn lobbyists that we're hanging out there, Yeah, asking him for stuff. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah.

And while that may have, um, that may have given rise to the term popularity wise here, but you can trace it back to England, uh in the sixteen forties, when they talked about the lobby in the House of Commons, where you could go right up to your representatives and in your cute little wig and say, here's what I think you should do, right, and here's some here's some good old fashioned English pounds in your pocket. And I

mean that's always just gone with it, part and parcel. Yeah, you know, if not outright bribery, at least favors or quid pro quo or tip for tad or it's the jackal and hide Beyonce tickets, all sorts of stuff. Yeah, first class or not first class. No one flies first class. Talking about the lear jet, the true first class, the private jet. Didn't they do away with first class? Announcesis called business class because of class resentment in the United States. Yeah,

and now they've well depends on the airline. There's all sorts of new rules and special things. You can pay for alright. So uh, in the United States, from the very first session of Congress, there were lobbying efforts and people treating congress. Uh. I'm gonna say congressmen for this one, because this was in We're gonna say congress person for later on. The women were at home brewing beer in their households, but they were applying congressmen with treats and dinners.

And that was a direct quote from Pennsylvania Senator William maclay from the very first session of Congress. He was saying, Yeah, they're lobbyists here. They're basically trying to bribe people. They're trying to install the terrifact of nine, which established um Congress's ability to basically extract duties and taxes on goods in the United States in order to support the government. Let's go out to dinner instead. And the New York merchants were like, you don't want to do that. Let

me get you hammered three ways from Sunday. What are you doing later? Yeah, I'll tell you what you're doing. You're gonna finish. It. Can't get wrong in one sitting. Uh. Then apparently the Bank of the United States was one of the first big corrupt organizations as far as literally having politicians in their pocket paying the money. Yeah, like, um, the United States used to have things like like an actual centralized bank. And Andrew Jackson came along. It's like,

this thing is just way too corrupt. We need to get it of it and put me on your money. Yeah, but the the scandals associated with it where things like, um, the National Bank had on its board as board members who are being paid by the bank, sitting congressman who were writing legislation in favor of the bank. Yeah, this quote is the best. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster sent a letter to the Bank of the United States that said this,

among other things. Since I arrived here, I have had an application to be concerned professionally against the bank, which I've declined. Of course, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. Uh, if it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer. In other words, I've noticed that you're not paying me. Now people are telling me to write legislation against you.

I'm turning them down for now. You may want to send that money again if you would like this, love Daniel. Yeah, like he flat out said, the bribes have sort of dried up. I've noticed, so why don't you start sending this again? Unbelievable history. So you talked about the Gilded Age post Civil War, it's all the close of the nineteenth century. We like to think that America's railroads were built on grit and determination, but in fact it was rife with insider deals and uh scandal, what was it

called the credit mobil your scandal? Yeah, I looked into this a little bit. It's mind boggling. Basically, Um, Union Pacific bogging. How overt it was, Yeah, you know. But but even just like, it was not just crooked in one way. It was crooked in a number of ways that formed one big, huge, crooked thing that Congress was involved in. The Union Pacific Railroad started a company that served as the soul agent of building and managing the

Union Pacific Railroad. Okay, um, And then they issued stock in this stuff, and they used the Credit Mobile Mobilier and um, Union Pacific itself to basically over charge and overpay one another so that the value of the stock went through the roof Okay, so it's a stock massaging scheme to begin with, like an insider deal with yourself

to raise the value artificially of your stock. Right. And then they took these these shares in this company and started handing them out to Congress at a discounted price. It's all Congress did it was go sell them on the market for their face value, which was again artificially inflated, and they made a bunch of cash. And they were taking these as bribes for giving like um land grants or breaking treaties with Native Americans so that the Union

Pacific Railroad could build their railroad across the Western States. Yeah, and this was they did this because, believe it or not, at the time, there wasn't a lot of private investors ponying up money for this railroad because it was sort of a new thing. And yeah, they didn't know although it was a great idea, they didn't know. Like all investors, what they care about is getting their money back in quick fashion, and they just didn't know if that was

going to be possible. And I mean, there's definitely something to be said for the federal government to step in and be like, look, we think that this is really going to help things out. We really want to fund it, But does it have to be totally fought with corruption while that happens, you know, no is the answer. Not yet. Uh. And then there was the famous Gilded Age lobby is Sam Ward, who um, he basically invented the social lobby.

So while he wouldn't we'll get into direct lobby versus social lobby, but social lobby is basically in Sam Ward's case, he was a great chef, and he was like, I'm gonna throw these great parties. I'm gonna have great food and fine wine. I'm gonna invite uh, special interest groups and corporation heads and politicians and get him in the same room. But we're not going to talk about that stuff directly. We're just all gonna get hammered together and

have a great time, become friends. That was that was his job, friends do things for one another. Right. Yeah, Well, I don't think we ever even said what K Street was. By the way, K Street is literally K the letter K Street where all just about every lobby in the country has an office. So that explains that if people are other ones, Yeah, you're right, but it's like saying, um,

Madison Avenue when you refer to advertising or Wall Street. Yeah. Um, so lobbying just kind of after the guilded, Asia America was sick to death of lobbying and lobbyists and didn't want to have anything to do with it. Um. So lobbying went. Didn't go away, but it fell to the wayside a little bit. It was still a thing, um throughout the twentieth century, it just kind of waxed. And Wayne in the mid forties, I believe Congress was like, we actually kind of need these guys, so let's set

up some rules for dealing with them. Um. Because at this time already what John Kennedy was writing about was true. You had a brain drain going on from Capitol Hill to K Street where people would go and um, become an aid to a senator or a congress person and make contacts, get a little bit of experience, and then after a couple of years they would move on over to K Street to a lobbying firm, make anywhere between five to ten times what they were as the congressional aid.

And um, K Street was sucking the talent away from Congress. And so these congress people in the forties said, hey, um, we need to work with these people because we need them, so let's make up some rules. Even still, lobbying was nothing like you would recognize it today. It wasn't until the seventies and eighties when business did an about face of dealing with the government. Up to that point, it was like, government, stay, just stay out of our business.

That's the lobbying we want to do, is to keep you off of our backs, keep you from regulating our stuff, to stay out of our business. And then at some point, and I'm not exactly sure who figured this out, but some lobbyists convinced corporations like, hey, guys, you're doing this

all wrong. You guys could get mind boggling amounts of money from the government in the form of subsidies or great contracts or sweetheart deals just by using our services and lobbying exploded and would just take comparatively a tiny bit of that. Right, even though it's a ton of money for individual lobbyists, it's nothing to these corporations, right exactly.

And I yeah, like the the Dave Ruse gave a really great example of um Northrop Gumman Grumman in uh in two thousand and twelve or something like that, I

believe under Mifflin. Yeah, they spent a hundred and seventies six million dollars from from in fourteen years from twelve, which that's nothing to them because in that time, in two thousand and twelve itself, Northrop Grumman got a hundreds have any six million dollar or or no, a hundred and eighty nine million dollar contract for a cybersecurity system for the d O D. So that that one contract paid for fourteen years of lobbying expenses, right, Yeah, and

then they got a one point seven billion dollar contract to build five drones and that's just Northrop Growman. Like, you can't really pick on them. The reason why we we called them out is because during twelve they were the ninth biggest spender on lobbying, not just corporations but industry as well. UM. General Electric was the the single entity that spent the most. Yeah this um as far

as the corporation goes. Uh, there's a great website if you want just good information and stats called open secrets dot org. And this past year two thou fourteen, the top ten spenders were the US Chamber of Commerce, which is always number one by a long shot because they represent a lot of businesses. The nash On Association of Realtors was number two, Blue Cross Blue Shield was number three.

American Hospital Association for American Medical Association five. Seeing a trend here, I wonder why National Association of Broadcasters, National Cable and telecom Comcast Again, it's you can literally look at the years where there's the most spending and what's going on in those industries. Uh, and then Google and Boeing round out the top ten at just a sixteen

million each. And so and I mean, like the amount of money spent has um I believe tripled in the last few years, right, yeah, I think so so so this is fairly new, but but it's not new. It's basically a return to the lobbying of the Gilded Age. The amount of money, attention time, questionable stuff that's been going on is just a replay of what happened a

hundred something years ago, right, um. And one of the reasons that we've we've it's become so rampant, it's been ratcheted up so much you can actually lay it at the feet of New Gingrich. So New Gingridge. Chuckers was speaker of the House in the nineties when Clinton was president, if you'll remember, and he decided that Congress was doing too much. Oh yeah, so he cut staffs, which means that lawmakers um that that were able to they did have enough of his staff or enough resources to write

their own legislation could definitely could not any longer. He also cut staff at some resources that are dedicated to providing research for Congress, like the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service. All of these things um that have been built up in response to dealing with lobbyists from like the forties on were cut by Gingrich, and all of a sudden, our our lawmakers are relying strictly on lobbyists for money. Yeah, and that's there's a correlation. I know, people,

you know, you hear about government spending. Let's cut government spending, which in theory sounds great. Sure, let's cut government spending. But what that means is now you don't have staff to do unbiased research and get the facts, like you said, You've got lobbyists to do that, right exactly. And the idea behind that tactic by Gingrich, if if it was just based on I'm cutting government spending by cutting jobs

or I think government is doing too much. There's actually a misstep because another UM senator from Oklahoma, his name escapes me right now, he had the Congressional Budget Office do an annual report starting in two thousand eleven, and they found that the Congressional Budget Office found that for every dollar spent on the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Budget Office managed to come up with ninety dollars of

recommended cuts to government waste. So for every dollar you spent, you made you saved eighty nine dollars just from the congres Sational Budget Office. So cutting their staff is the opposite of what you want to do here against like bloated,

wasteful government. It's pretty interesting on its specifically as interesting as far as new Gingridge goes to because him cutting Congress's ability to not rely on lobbyists really left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths during the two twelve primaries because he was like, he refused to admit that he was a lobbyist. Well yeah, and he's

he's not registered as a lobbyist. What he has is, ah, well, one of the things he does, he has a health care consulting firm where you can pay two hundred thousand dollars to become a member quote unquote, which you're not a client, you're a member. It's a membership group. So it's and he's not the only one. I mean, I think they have in here that they call it the revolving door. Basically, when you leave your position as a

congress person or a senator, you go directly to the lobby. Uh. The New York Times says they're more than four hundred former legislators who worked as lobbyists in the past decade. It's just like, let me go make some real money now. And that's just legislators either like them. There was very famously a guy who was running the the Pentagon, I believe ed Aldridge, and he was a longtime critic of Boeing, and then Bowing hired him, and on his way out

he approved a three billion dollar contract to Boeing. That's the revolving door at work. There was a Massachusetts representative named William Dela Hunt and um, he took a job lobbying for a wind project that he had just earmarked a bunch of money for right before he left. Yeah, so I mean this revolving door. People say like, well, let's just shut the revolving door, and it is a it's a proposal. But at the same time, if you do that, then then your anti job and you can't

you can't even appear anti job. So there's other solutions that I think are better for dealing with the lobby and crisis. I guess you could call it. Yeah, and uh well we'll get to that later. That great article sent um. You know what show actually does a really great job realistically with this is Veep. I haven't seen a second of that. It's fantastic, man, I mean it really shows you, like for Best Actress, yeah she won, and Veep one. And I think the writing team one.

I think it's the best written show on TV right now. But or the best written comedy. Oh have you seen Narcos yet? No? You canna check that out. Okay, but VP is really even though it's a comedy, really like shows that everything in d C is just about deals being made, like, well, you do this for me and I'll give you support on this bill and they're pulling that bill And what did that lobby say? Because they were my friend and it's all it's all just it's

such an insider's game. It's staggering. And and that's a comedy written by uh, English people, which is, yeah, the producers got there and they're all like from from England, and that's I don't know, for some reason, that's so interesting. And they even in their Emmy speech said, you know, it's kind of funny to be able to make fun of the American political system being English folks. But thank

you for this sword for that. Uh. All right, so let's talk a little bit about we keep saying registered lobbyists. Since eighteen seventy six, Congress is required that all professional lobbyist register with the Office of the Clerk of the House,

and uh since nineteen with the Lobbying Disclosure Act. In two thousand seven Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of two thousand seven, UH, they narrowly defined a lobbyist as someone who has one paid by client to services include more than one lobbying contact, and three whose lobbying activities constitute or more of their time on behalf of that client during any three month period. So that's actually it

seems broad. That's actually you're really narrow definition of a lobbyist. Yeah, and it's so narrow as it turns out that it's really easy to skirt those rules and not register because there are many ways you can say you can really budget your time and say no, I worked twenty point nine percent in this three month period for this firm, or I have so many people I work for, I

only spent about ten fifteent of my time, right. Or if you're like on any one group right, Or if you're like new g Rich, you're you're not working for a client, says client. I got members, so I'm doing all this, but it's for members, not clients. Or if

it's educational, it's not called lobbying. So hey, let me just hire this former senator, pay him a lot of money to go around and give speeches on education that are really trying to generate interest in legislation, or to educate the government on why um the thirty seven and a half billion dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that shelled out in two thousand fourteen is a good thing to redo and then double. But that's just education, that's not lobbying. So those are just some of the ways you can

skirt officially registering as a lobbyist. And actually, chuck, so you said that that was from the two thousand seven Act. Total, it was two thousand seven rights. And in two thousand seven when they added I guess they added that third one about the tent the time measure, like three thousand lobbyists de registered loophole. Oh, really, all I have to do is account for my time in this way, and

now all the rules don't apply to me. And so as a matter of fact, um, the American Bar Association said, if you just just get rid of that third one,

the time thing, that would help a lot. And actually, when Congress first started to deal with um, lobbying, uh, well, I shouldn't say first, because it was the nineteenth century, but in ninety five or six, when they passed an act about lobbying rules, Um, they said that a lobbyist someone who had to register it as a lobbyist was anyone who aids in the passage or defeat of legislation.

That's it. So, I mean, I'm sure there's loopholes in there and ways around that too, but it was much much more vague, which in the fact would sound it's counterintuitive, but that's actually better to be more vague in the description because you can't skirt it is easy. So let's let's take a break and then we'll talk about all of the stuff that lobbyists do, including some good stuff too. All right, Uh, lobbyists who are lobbyists? What do they do? They are full time Uh, as they puts it, full

time advocates for their clients. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. There's no job description you're gonna get. But you better be a people person. You better have great you better have a stuffed rollodex. You better. You better be good at networking, be super good at networking. Uh, smooth talker, Yeah, you should throw a good party, be good at fundraising. Yeah. Um, and like we said, you got to know a lot of good people. You've gotta

be a great communicator and persuasive. One might say slick, slick. I think it is probably right. But um, that and that I imagine that those are good qualities that haven't just about any But I also have the impression that there are lobbyists who are just like just strictly grinding out research and stuff like that. Yeah. I think there's

different types of lobbyists. Some are probably like there's the glad handers, yeah, like the front person maybe, and then there's like walks people who are literally like technical policy experts on a certain topic. They know the ins and outs, they know both sides of it, they know what senators care about it, um, they know what congress people could be persuaded maybe, like they know everything about this particular issue. Yeah,

and like up to the minute. Uh, they have to be really up on the very very latest policies and laws. I mean they have to be experts, like you said, like inside and out because they get paid a ton of money to do that. And there's typically three kinds of lobbying that people undertake. Again, whether it's the Girls Scouts or Green Peace or um, the Chamber of Commerce or whoever. Um, there's direct lobbying, indirect lobbying, and the

grassroots lobbying. And they probably any lobbying group takes part in all a combination of all these. Yeah. Direct lobbying is when you're when you can get a meeting with the congress person or senator or their aids. Yeah, and you sit down with their staff for them and say, uh, I'm experienced clearly because I'm in the room with you. And here's here's what we think is a good piece of legislation. Right, it's good for the country. Wink wink. Yeah.

So that's direct lobbying. Uh, indirect is if you, um, well, what's the difference between indirect and social? Aren't they kind of the same. Yeah, it's the same. Right. So that's like we said, the Sam Ward which would throw parties the king of lobby. Yeah, he invented the social lobbying

and that's still true today. You though a big swanky d C cocktail hour and get people in the same room and just connecting folks, that's indirect lobby and goosen them up with a little uh scotch maybe, and all of a sudden you're like you just sit back and you're like, yeah, this is working. Look at them talking to each other. I love myself. And then there's grassroots lobbying, which is kind of misleading actually because it can be

employed by uh deep deeply entrenched, deep pocketed interests. But you know, it still appears grassroots and folksy things like UM paying somebody who's an expert in a field or UM a recognized figure, maybe a former UM congress person or whatever to write an op ed. Yeah, And I mean name recognition counts for just about anything, so even op eds. And if if somebody's saying, if a former Treasury secretary is like, this is a really bad idea,

we shouldn't pass this legislation, that's going to inform voters minds. Yeah, I think it also is a huge message to the legislators who are also reading it that like Washington Post published this, so a lot of people just read you may want to listen to what I just said. Yeah. Or grassroots in the purest sense of the word, in the more traditional sense is uh could be a small little ngo that's all they can afford his grassroots campaigns

and uh, sadly it's it's uh. The dog that barks the loudest is the one that's going to get the most attention. And you're barking the loudest if you have the resources, too, I guess, get a bunch of dogs

barking at once. Which is a really good point, Chuck, because and this this article goes to great pains to make it clear that you know, not all lobbying is bad, that lobbying in and of itself isn't necessarily bad um, and that there are plenty of public interest groups that are dedicated to serving the common good that engage in lobbying. So it shouldn't be outlawed, it shouldn't be cut off.

We should figure out how to fix it. Um. The thing is is they found that for every dollar that a union and public interest group combined spents, corporations or big business spent thirty four dollars of the top one spenders were all corporate or corporate interests. Um. So it's the field is very much skewed towards whoever has the

most money or whoever is willing to spend the most. Uh. So to be two registers a lobbyists, which was required, like I said, since eighteen seventy six, and then a few years after that they required that members of the press register because with the House and Senate because they were had lobbyists posing as journalists, so they had to take care of that pretty early on. But if you are registered, uh, there are some things that you have to do according to the law. Um. Well, first of all,

you can't give gifts blatantly give gifts. Yeah, that's one of the things that Abram often trouble all sorts of ways around this, of course, but you can't blatantly give gifts. You have to register. You have to file quarterly reports that detail the contacts you've made with elected officials. You have to disclose how much money you were paid. Uh. You have to file semi annual reports at list contributions

UH made to political campaigns. See that. I have a question about that, because from what I understand, if in on the federal level, if you're a registered lobbyists, you cannot contribute to a political campaign. Yeah. Maybe it's has to do with like these three thousand dollar plate dinners or something. I don't know. Yeah, I wasn't sure about that either. Actually, but you mentioned the American Bar Association. They a lot of attorneys are lobbyists, um off and

on during their career. My uncle was actually a lobbyist, Is that right? Yeah, Congressman, my congressman uncle. Really he went through the revolving door. Huh. Yeah. I don't know much about it, but um oh man, you gotta ask him. Yeah I should, And I will say this, even though we were not on the same side of the political spectrum, which I won't even say, who's who. He's a Democrat. Huh. But he's a good dude and an honest person. So even though we don't agree on things, I always felt

like he, you know, he's not taking kickbacks. He's not one of those guys. And I really believe that he's a man pure of heart and so so in no way disparaging your uncle for going through the revolving door.

One of the problems with that revolving door is not just that it causes this brain drain from UM Capitol Hill to the lobbying companies or the law law firms, but um, it also makes Congress not really interested in passing any kind of lobbying reform or revolving door reform because pretty soon their term is going to be up and they can go get that job. Exactly. Yeah, because you don't as a public servant, I mean, you don't

make a lot of money. No, you don't, and especially well we'll get to this in a second, but finishing on the A B A UM. The American Bar Association has a real interest in trying to keep lobbying as above board as possible because a lot of them want to be lobbyist and they don't want to be tarnished and so, like you said earlier, they think the biggest thing you can do is to separate and have really strict lines drawn between fundraising and lobbying. They think that's

where it's the most corrupt. So get rid of the time, the time requirement of your time to be a registered lobbyist and just separate fundraising from from um lobbying. Yeah, I get the idea that that's where most of the hinky stuff is going on. So the thing is like that makes sense, but it's also kind of like trying to remove a hornet's nest by picking the hornets out one by one. Not the best idea, um, and need to smash it and set it on fire pretty much

and then p on the ashes. Actually, I believe you should leave a hornet's nest. You should never destroy hornet's nest. So uh, I know, apex predators and all um. So the the the other idea to just shut the revolving door or to just outlaw a lobbying all together. Again, not only is that a bad idea, especially if you just did it wholesale out of the gate. You can't do that, but it's also unconstitutional, right, So we read this really great article um Man that was good in

Washington Monthly. So who wrote this thing lead Drootman or Drutman, probably Drutman and Steven tell Us. They wrote it in Washington Monthly. Is called a New Agenda for Political Reform. It was a great article, lengthy, but it just and it's made a really good sense to me. Yeah, and

it's not too wonky. But I mean, these guys clearly know what they're talking about people, the long and short of it, and what they think is the problem is what we touched on earlier, which is staffing of congressional offices has been cut and slash so much and there are so much more information now to ingest than there used to be. They just can't do it. There are not the resources to do it, so that we have no choice but to turn to lobbyists to act as

the experts and to write legislation. So they propose and we have some stats in here actually that I thought were pretty striking. In the eighties, around nineteen eight is when they started cutting everything. The Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Services. What they do is they provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers. Right there are

fewer now than in nineteen seventy nine. And those are the very experts that were dedicated to serving Congress in a nonpartisan way so that they had all the information they needed to create legislation to actually make the government operate fewer than the nineteen seventies. Yeah, so gone gone. Starting in the eighties and then again uh in the mid nineties, Gingrich cut congressional staff. Yeah. And while this

is going on, it's a two way street. Lobbying is increasing by it's staggering how much lobbying has increased in money and just human power. And then one of the things about lobbying is that lobbying begets lobbying. The more a lobbyist can get legislation pushed through, the larger the federal register grows, the less ability any given congress person has to read and ingest and understand federal law. So the more they need lobbyists who do understand it. Yeah.

And so what you get is what we talked about the revolving door. Well, actually that's politicians themselves going to lobby. Well, but there's a brain drink because their aids are being sucked away K Street as well. There's another cycle where there's no incentive to be a congressional staffer for very long because you're not gonna make much money. I think they said the top ninety percentile of a congressional staff makes hundred thousand dollars a year. That's the top ninety percentile,

which sounds like six figures. That's good. DC is not cheap, no, and take out taxes and everything. That the median income was fifty grand, so you're making what like thirty five after taxes. You can't live on thirty dollars in d C. And they found that the median income for a lobbyist in Washington, d C. Median is three hundred thousand, and that's pretty attractive, especially if you're in your twenties and all of a sudden can go double or triple your income,

like right out of the gate. Well, it's the career path, like it's laid out there for everyone. Here's what you do. Go work on the staff for a little while, make contacts, which is invaluable, that's why you do it for not a whole lot of money, and then boom, you can get rich, make a lot of money as a lobbyist.

So Drumpman and tell us UM suggest first and foremost that the solution to the lobbying conundrum that we have now is basically equipped Congress with the UM information, research and policy experts that they need and that they can get the stuff that they're currently getting from obbyoists. And the way you do that start is just increased salaries.

And they make a really good point that you don't have to necessarily increase the salaries to to be completely on par with what UM K Streets offering, because K Street would probably just try to start to outspend the

just raised salaries UM. But if you can do it so that a person could make a pretty decent living UM, they would possibly choose congressional work over K Street because with congressional work, they're in there, they're like part of this machine that's really making decisions and policies and laws that are affecting the country, rather than working for a law firm that's trying to get some some legislation pass

that will benef fit this one corporate client. So so if you just factor in idealism along with a really good salary, these guys say, you could attract the right talent that you need. So their recommendation simply. I mean it's multi fold. But they say double committee staff, triple the money that they make, and you might be stepping in the right direction. Yeah. And again if you're like

wholl whoa, that's a lot of taxpayer money. Well again, if you if you look at what the CBO alone, spending a dollar on the CBO comes up with ninety dollars worth of places to cut government waste. These are these are these are good things to spend money on. Yeah. And you may have a cleaner, more legitimate government as

a result too, And that's priceless. Yeah. I mean, they made some some excellent case that in the seventies when the government had a lot of staff that was smart, that had a lot of institutional memory and knowledge that they got things done, like the Church Committee, um and the Pike Committee, both of which revealed a massive horrible stuff that the CIA was doing, like dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSC that came out at congressional investigations that you

do not see any longer. Um. If you had committee staff that were well paid, um, they would hang around and you would have a lot more laws being passed, a lot more deliberations being passed. Right now. It's all fundraising going on. That's what your legislators do. They get elected, they come to Washington, have their picture taken there, and then they go back out and start raising money for reelection, right and they're raising money from the very people who

are working as lobbyists. So yeah, all you have to do is create good jobs aggressional researchers, and you've got your lobbying problem largely licked. Yeah. I agree, man, I don't see any problem with this idea. It's it's sad whenever we dig into stuff like this. How Like I talked about the Insiders Club, how I don't know. It just seems like it's such a broken, messed up system.

It is. There was another thing I read UM about something called rent seeking, which is where UM, through lobbyists, the corporation will go and just try to get a piece of the pie, not for doing anything, not even necessarily a contract, but just say, like a subsidy. And like the fossil fuel subsidies are amounted to thirty seven and a half billion dollars in two thousand and fourteen. That was just stuff that the government gave, just money.

The government gave UM oil and other fossil fuel companies just for existing, right, And that's called rent seeking. It doesn't do anything. They don't they're not producing anything to generate that income. They're spending a bunch of income to go suck it out of the federal budget. Right. And I mean, if you want to talk about wealth redistribution, that's like the the the clearest version of it you

can possibly imagine. And that's through lobbying. And yeah, and this is just lobbying, Like, don't get me started on things like campaign finance and all the other ways. That's another one we should do. Yeah, I actually wrote that article. Um Man, how was it? But it was depressing. It was depressing and tough, and it's probably way out of date, so we will update it. Yeah, it would need a lot of like our dating, let's do it. Campaign financial reform,

big big thing. Remember our presidential um debates one that was eye opening. Remember there's like a whole commission that has a stranglehold on presidential debates and I have got to go back to listen to it is a good one, most of them. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that. All right, Uh, well, if you want to know more about lobbying. You can type that word in the search part how stuff works, and it will bring up this fine article. Uh. And since I said search parts, time

for listener mail. Alright, I'm gonna call this binge listening Colin newest the oldest, Uh. Dudes and Jerry. By the way, I labored over that subject line like a publicist, and it's still awful. It's been bad, is what Colin said, Dudes and Jerry. I've been slowly making my way through the analog of episodes, and for any new listeners, I'd like to advocate for listening through them from newest to oldest, in other words, reverse order, rather than oldest to newest,

which is how I assume most would listen. While the references to old episodes might be a little confusing, they also build a sense of anticipation once you get there. I could see that, for example, I finally listened to the infamous episode on the Sun. You made so many references over the years to how bad that episode was that by the time I got to it, I was literally laughing from beginning to end, so it becomes like a comedy episode. At that you could almost hear Chuck's

brain sizzling and melting as the episode went on. True. Uh, if I didn't have that sense of anticipation, your agony wouldn't have been as sweet. I like this idea. I think he makes a lot of sense. I dread the day that I run out of episodes and experience of withdrawals, the shakes, the Jimmy legs that will inevitably come when I'm jones and for new stuff. And that is Colin and or Land. Oh alright, Colling, great email, terrible subject line,

but totally forgivable because of the body. I didn't think it was so bad being listening to us to hold us. It's a sink. I guess it's a it's just like this the d That's fine, right, do better, Coling, But great email calling. Oh but if he's listening, has he he hasn't made it all the way back? Well, if he's listening to us to old us, so does he just make time each week to listen to the newest one and then go back to wherever he loves? I don't know. We need to hear a follow up. God

knows when he'll hear this, Chuck. We need to contact him directly from feeling a great since of regret. I feel bad for him because he's just heading straight for disappointment Land as he goes further and further back in The cattle Man. There's some episodes I'd just like to just redo, which we have done some of them, like when they were like five minutes then they were cool topics. You know, should just remove those from the Internet. Let's

do um. I would like to redo the trolley problem one you and I didn't do idea with Chris Palette, and it deserves like its own, big current modern incarnation of stuff. You should not like the stode. We should probably do all the ones I wasn't on. How about that, Let's do it. We'll call it the Summer of Chuck. If you want to be like calling and get in touch with us and let us scrutinize your words, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff

you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com