Reply #8: I'm not so sure about that.

[sofa king]

Lobbyists are the closest thing to direct representation that we have. It's the shortest circuit between what we, the people want and what they, our elected representatives, actually do.

If you take them away, you're taking out a valuable component of free speech, and more importantly, you're adding a potentially dangerous level of haughty isolation between the representatives and their constituents. Worse still, the most powerful lobbyists won't actually go away. Instead they'll simply take up informal positions as "advisors" and the like. The wealthiest interests will always be able to pay enough to make sure that their people are inside, but the rest of us will be left out in the cold.

I once had a curious inside-the-beltway conversation with Bill Paxon's former chief of staff. After Newt Gingrich had destroyed Paxon's career, the guy moved over to K Street (so too did Paxon, though he styled himself an "advisor" precisely as I cautioned above). "I don't understand why everyone hates lobbyists so much," he said. "Everyone in America has lobbyists here in DC--they just don't know it." I suppose that to extra-Beltway Americans that sounds absurd, but it's really quite true. Someone out there really is working to forward interests which you support--I'm sure someone's being paid right now to lobby against all other lobbyists.

Anyone who acts as a third-party between you and your Representative is a lobbyist to some degree; that holds as true for moms writing their Congressmen to get their kids back from Iraq as it does for a slick lawyer shilling for the tobacco industry. Though everyone would like to level the playing field in their own personal favor, it's difficult to hamstring one without also crippling the other.

That's not to say that there isn't a heck of a lot of reform that needs to be done. Perhaps we could restrict lobbyists from approaching anyone but their own Representative and Senators in Congress (though it ain't cheap to fly between the Pribilof Islands and DC, as I have seen). We can certainly reduce their influence on the electoral process. And we absolutely must force Congress to make lobbying records public, as they were before the DeLay era and legally should be right now.

But running all the lobbyists off presents the danger of creating a Senate more worthy of the Roman Republic than our own. In those days, the people had a voice (a really smelly one, according to Shakespeare), but that voice really had only one message, which was "if you can hear us, it means we're about to tear this damned city down and kill every last one of you." We deserve the ability to present a more insightful and constructive message, whatever it may be.

Edit: Ooooh, I just did a really bad thing. Nowhere above did I disclose that I myself have acted as a lobbyist! That's very uncool, and I apologize for not stating it clearly and up front. I suppose it doesn't matter whom I've lobbied for, but I have always thought it was for the right people and the right reasons. There are a lot of people like me in this town, too.