Lobbyists Aren’t Just Influencing Legislation, They’re Literally Writing Our Laws
How an underfunded Congress led lobbyists to write our legislation
Lobbying, including from big oil, big tech, and pretty much and big [insert industry], is protected by the constitution, even if most American’s would rather see them gone. While corporate America and lobbyists might see themselves as civically important for a functioning democracy, they’re universally derided for being corrupt and helping impede progress
For example, health lobbyists spent $75 million on trying to kill bills aimed at preventing surprise medical bills, or how defense contractors spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year in lobbying, ostensibly to get Congress to get the military to pay for defense contractor’s new weapons.
While we may think of lobbyists are people who influence legislation, often through questionable means such as quid pro quo donations, there’s also an even worse way lobbyists exert their influence over Washington: they literally write the bills that are being passed in Congress.
Defund Congress
Congress used to have a lot more staff on congressional committees. In the 1990s, Congress had over 2000 staffers on its committees, yet that all changed when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House. In a campaign strategy to help Republicans take back the House, Gingrich wrote the ‘contract with America,’ a set of policies designed to shrink the government, and especially the House. In it, he vowed to cut down congressional committee staff by 1/3, and after he led Republicans to take back the House, he delivered.
Immediately after becoming the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich significantly cut down congressional staff and disbanded three committees in Congress. Through his efforts, he brought down congresses committee staff from 2000 staffers to 1000 staffers, which has essentially been unchanged for the last 30 years. In exchange, he shifted much of the responsibilities of drafting legislation to individual House members, specifically the Speaker’s office.
It’s Going Down
This has continued since, and for the past three decades, Congress members have mostly relied on their staff to help draft legislation, yet their staff members are chronically underfunded. According to the Congressional Research Service, House members only get $944,671 to pay their staff and on average employ 14 staffers. These staffers need to cover a whole host of issues, including constituent services, press, social media, administration, and legislation.
With such little resources, it leads staffers to be heavily overworked. Staffers report working 12 to 14 hour days to meet deadlines.
Because staffers are so overworked and stressed out, they turn to lobbyists to help draft up legislation. It’s essentially a well-accepted fact that lobbyists are the ones writing legislation, not the staffers themselves. For example, Dodd-Frank, a landmark piece of legislation meant to regulate big banks, was nearly identical to the language suggested by lobbyists.
Raise Their Funds
House members are given around a million dollars a year to pay for their employees. While that may seem a lot, divided across 14 staffers and in one of the most expensive cities in the country, it adds up to very little. Many staff members can barely afford to work in Congress, leading most of them to leave in a couple of years to pursue more lucrative opportunities. Raising the funds for house members would allow their staffers to make a living wage and afford to live in DC. It would also mean that legislators could hire more staffers to work on their legislation.
But, the personal staff of Congress members shouldn’t really be drafting and researching legislation. While we should still raise funding to allow staffers to have a living wage, we shouldn’t increase personal legislative committee staff, we should increase congressional committee staff. Unlike personal staff, they aren’t subject to possibly losing their job if their boss loses the election. Committee staff also only work on one subject matter, such as education or foreign affairs, meaning that they’re more focused and knowledgeable than their personal staff counterparts. This all would mean that we’d have more experienced people drafting the legislation, making legislation much better for the American people.
By increasing the funding of legislative staff in Congress, we could ensure that legislative staff would be freer of lobbying interests. It would mean that all people, not just the interests of big money, would be represented in Congress.
Last Thing
Before we leave, I wanted to give a book recommendation. I just finished reading “I alone can fix it” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. It’s an incredibly important book that helps reveal how far America came to falling apart in the last year of the Trump presidency.
It gives a stark warning to Americans about how fragile democracy is, and how important it is to ensure that the country never ends up in this situation again.