One Day for Voters, Everyday for Lobbyists

Voters going to the polls on Tuesday will render judgment on California legislators who enacted 3,000 measures and on members of Congress who passed about 500 bills and resolutions during the last two years. Even if they are well-informed, people will not know the contents of 99% of this legislation or how their representatives voted. They will never have heard of some candidates on the ballot. They will make other choices on the basis of impressions left by 30-second television spots seemingly designed more to obfuscate than to enlighten. Americans not only cast ballots in secret, many of them also do it in the dark.

Elections are imperfect referendums because availability of information and accessibility of lawmakers are chronic problems for democratic government. The legislative process is complex and subject to a variety of influences. Newspapers have difficulty providing comprehensive coverage. Commercial television deals in pictorial headlines. Lobbyists contest the electorate for legislators’ attention and voting power. Since voters have little comprehension of how to influence the legislative process, and most live at distance from the scene of action, the scales are tilted in favor of the lobbyist, an on-the-spot professional.

Proximity, then, is a key element. The issues people are likely to be best informed about and take personal interest in are local. Constituents, appearing individually or in groups before councils and boards of supervisors, usually find that these bodies are responsive--responsiveness is a factor of accessibility.

While citizens generally represent themselves in business before local government, lobbyists, who made their debut outside the 17th-Century British Parliament, are primarily creatures of state and national capitals. The growth of government during the Depression and World War II gave the profession such an impetus that in 1946 Life magazine ran an eloquent letter from a reader, asking: Where are the lobbyists for America?

In the last quarter-century, the expansion of government has brought lobbying to even fuller flower. Whenever government enters a field, a multitude of lobbies germinate. If, for example, you’re an educator, a schools bill that is passed, with funds appropriated or not appropriated, will affect your livelihood; you want to have an input. Your perspective is likely to be the same as President Harry S. Truman’s. Asked how he justified lobbyists for his programs, he responded: “We probably wouldn’t call those people lobbyists. We would call them citizens appearing in the public interest.”

The approximately 10,000 active lobbyists and 4,000 political-action committees in Washington are a reflection of just how far the reaches of the government extend; and while emphasis may shift from administration to administration, the total keeps expanding. The stereotype of the individual influence peddler knocking on congressional doors has given way to professional organization--lobbying firms grow to rival corporate law firms. Advocacy is seldom any longer one-sided but resembles a kind of scrimmage, teams of lobbyists on opposite sides batting arms and butting heads.

Adept at manipulating public opinion, lobbies also work behind the scenes to create seemingly spontaneous groundswells. During Senate Finance Committee debate on the current tax reform bill, Sen. David H. Pryor (D-Ark.) observed: “I’ve been sitting here three years on this committee watching not only how the rich get rich but how they stay rich. And I think I have found the solution. We don’t see out here in these halls the General Electrics and the General Dynamics and the major corporations of America lobbying. What we see is hundreds of phone calls coming into my office from poor broke farmers that the Investment Tax Credit Coalition has told that if you bought a tractor a year ago you’re going to get back $212 if you get Sen. Pryor to get these Investment Tax Credits back. So they’re using the poor to do their work. They talk about the $200 the farmer gets back but they don’t talk about the $150 million or $600 million that one corporation is going to get back.”

All lobbyists are not equal, nor are all legislators. The Edison Electric Institute has an annual budget of $26.4 million. Environmental Action, sometimes an antagonist, has a budget of $450,000. The lobbyist who has the resources to put together a compelling presentation is well on his way to obtaining lawmakers’ votes. And whose votes will he obtain? First, those of the leadership and the chairman of the committee having jurisdiction over the bill. Next, other members of that committee. Only lastly, the general membership. Major legislation can provide a bonanza. During 1985, the 35 members of the House Ways and Means Committee and 21 members of the Senate Finance Committee involved in writing the tax bill received a total of $19.8 million in campaign contributions.

Key legislators are thereby transformed into a new genre of power brokers. When Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly, receives an average of more than $120,000 a month from 100 different contributors, the effect of the individual contributions on legislation may be marginal, but the impact of the total on the political system is substantial. Brown is established as a political banker with $1.5 million a year to parcel out to the reelection campaigns of sympathetic legislators. Such chits are not collected routinely, for power must be used circumspectly, and there are issues on which Brown and his supporters will engage in acerbic debate among themselves. But they are available whenever a piece of legislation comes along that Brown considers of particular importance.

Any politician will tell you, before you have a chance to ask, that money buys nothing except access. Yet that’s like saying wire is only the conduit for electricity. Access is the means to influence and to obtain information. It leases a line into the legislative system.

The proliferation of lobbyists and political-action committees indicates the American system’s current evolution into a novel sociopolitical order, with effects infinitely more important than whether we have Republicans or Democrats in power, or spend $20 billion more or less on defense. The American Revolution was largely an economic rebellion against the then-dominant mercantile order regulating private enterprise and linking it to governmental policy. But the role of government has become so pervasive--and nowhere more so than in defense-oriented industries--that we are reabsorbing some mercantile elements into our political structure. The National Education Assn., the American Medical Assn. and hundreds of similar organizations are modern-day versions of the old guilds attempting to assure that governmental policies and actions are consonant with the interests of their members.

The difficulty is that, despite the multitude of lobbyists, tens of millions of Americans without professional affiliation remain unrepresented; and the unrepresented are subject to discrimination, not by commission but by omission.

If, for example, 35 million Americans were organized into a specific interest group, elected officials would hasten to meet their needs. In fact, an estimated 35 million Americans have no medical coverage. The astronomical inflation of medical care, pushed up in part by governmental actions, makes them far worse off than the uninsured were 20 years ago. Yet 130,000 tobacco farmers, 600,000 lawyers, and 2.5 million public school teachers are able to promote their interests because they are organized; 35 million uninsured can’t because they aren’t.

Tens of millions of other Americans--temporary workers, housewives, single parents, the self-employed--are similarly relegated to second-class treatment because they lack advocacy. It is only human for legislators, pressured by lobbyists, to give some ground if there is no counterpressure. Although the electorate may vote ultimate approval or disapproval of their representatives, this is power so general and so limited by its either/or character that it pales in significance to lobbyists’ ability to promote action.

The electorate’s power has been further diluted by gerrymandering, which strips huge numbers of people of the capacity to influence elections. What could discourage political participation more than the creation of districts that are sinecures for incumbents, incumbents whose campaign coffers are already stuffed? When only a handful of districts are seriously contested, what is the point of a Republican running when he knows the Democratic candidate is a shoo-in, or vice versa? Since 1960 more than 92% of sitting members of the House of Representatives have been reelected, in the process collecting and spending more than $2 for every $1 by the challengers. In 1984 political action committee contributions favored incumbents more than 4-1. While the minority party may posture and pout when, after every census, winners redraw the boundaries to enhance their own numbers, the truth is that the principal consideration for each legislator is the safety of his or her own seat.

It may be that politicians in safe districts are as responsive to constituents as in contested ones. They may even be superior legislators if they need worry less about the next election and can concentrate more on their work. But honest democracy demands--to quote a currently popular political phrase--a level playing field. Reapportionment should not be a political football reinflated every decade. The party with the ball should not be permitted to put itself in scoring position before every election.

The late historian Will Durant remarked: “Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.” Yet when we have the best educated electorate in the world’s history, it is not so much intelligence that is lacking as information.

Voters are turned off when they can’t learn and don’t understand what is going on, when campaigns are more and more reduced to cretin-style commercials, when they feel their vote can make no difference in the outcome, or the outcome any difference in their lives. When half the eligible voters don’t participate, the system suffers a silent raspberry.

Yet the quantity of the vote should not be stressed at expense of the quality. More harm can be caused by the casting of ignorant or distorted votes than by failure to vote at all.

During the 1960s, Chicago social activist Saul Alinsky opened training schools to teach the poor how to deal with the system. The reality is that all people would benefit from a course in the practical operations of American politics. Most elected officials would welcome a better informed citizenry. The more everyone becomes involved, the closer we come to what politics, ideally, should be: power exercised in the public interest.