Second Things Second: End lobbying as we know it

Years ago, I was sitting at a table talking with the members of a jazz band from L.A. It was just after the videotape had come to light showing twenty L.A. cops beating the daylights out of Rodney King. We had been discussing it for a while when I noticed that the drummer, a Hispanic guy, was silent. I asked him his opinion and he said, “The only difference between Rodney King and anyone else is that he happened to have a camera pointed at him.”

The investigation of uber-lobbyist Jack Abramhoff is like the video of Rodney King in that respect. The consternation and disgust of those who are paying attention to the Abramhoff case would cause their skulls to explode if they were fully aware of the everyday system of corruption we call lobbying.

We should ask ourselves, who has the right to lobby Congress? According to the US Constitution, it is we, the people of this country, and nobody and nothing else. I say “nothing” because a corporation is a thing, not a person.

Corporations have tried to obtain the rights of persons since nearly the beginning of this nation, and have succeeded in practice, although not truly in law. Back in the 1880’s, the clerk of the Supreme Court added his own spin on a decision that has been wrongly accepted ever since as legal personhood for corporations. (Read Thom Hartmann’s excellent book “Unequal Protection” for the details.) Their well-financed minions have swarmed the capitol before and since, distributing favors, junkets, and money. Their interests are mostly at odds with those of the American public. I’ll repeat: The Constitution guarantees political rights to U.S. citizens, period. The extension of political rights to things such as corporations has contaminated our experiment with democracy, and we need to clean that up.

Lobbying should be limited to two types. First, individual U.S. citizens and groups of U.S. citizens, unpaid, on their own time, have a constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Second, given the distances of most Americans from Washington D.C. and the time pressures of everyday life, we must allow paid lobbyists representing groups of U.S. citizens to express the views of those groups to Congress, under certain restrictions. The primary restriction is monetary. These lobbying organizations must be limited to collecting donations of no more than $50 per person per year. I discussed this limit in another essay on campaign finance. The purpose of the $50 limit is to prevent tiny groups of wealthy people from drowning out the voices of large groups of ordinary people. The corollary restriction is that these citizen’s lobbying organizations cannot receive funding, support in kind, or guidance from any corporation or foreign government.

The first amendment to our constitution prohibits the government from making any law “abridging” “The right of the people……to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The financial limit could well be interpreted as an abridgment, but it also could be interpreted as a guarantee. In practice, the absence of such a limit has resulted in the voices of the people in general being drowned out by the voices of corporations and a microscopic minority of wealthy individuals. The uncontrolled flow of hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying efforts is as effective an abridgement of our constitutional rights as a repeal of the petitioning clause of the first amendment. Looking back at the long acceptance of various wrongheaded supreme court decisions, I see a tough fight on this point, but a much needed fight.

I’ll repeat my call from an earlier essay: We need a movement dedicated solely to political and electoral reform – campaign finance, lobbying, conflict of interest, voting rights, voting districts, paper ballots, and candidate registration. I’d say that campaign finance and the integrity of the actual voting process come first. We need to put our multitude of issues on the back burner and deal with the fundamental political problems that keep us from making progress. The system as it stands is specifically designed to defeat us.

(See my earlier post, "First Things First," for thoughts on the priority of campaign finance reform.)