Stuck in the lobby
Are there good guys and bad guys in the business of influencing politics?
The New York Times ran a front-page story today in the continuing uproar surrounding the administration’s lobbying ban. The rule, intended to make good on Obama’s campaign promise to keep special interests from running his administration, bars lobbyists from entering the administration to work on issues for which they’ve lobbied in the recent past.
Insider reports suggest headaches on both sides: among lobbyists and in the administration. In particular, attention is falling on ostensibly “do-gooder” advocates who are also lobbyists. The example in the Times piece is of Tom Malinowski, the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, who was passed over for the top human rights position because he is a registered lobbyist.
Obama’s policy derives from the ethical stance that special interest politics has distorted governance. The Times reports that some critics have found Obama’s standard unduly scrupulous:
The assumption underlying the Obama policy, critics say, is that all lobbying is suspect, even legitimate advocacy at the heart of a democratic process.
An unexamined issue in the continuing Administration lobbying kerfuffle is the minor premise of this statement: that there is a meaningful distinction between suspect lobbying and “legitimate advocacy.”
The answer depends in large part on one’s theory of democracy. Almost no theory would countenance a Jack Abramoff: someone who willingly broke the law to wield political influence. But what about advocacy well within legal limits?
Aside from the fact that lots of people “feel” like advocating for victims of human rights violations is purer than advocating for the auto industry, what’s the real difference between the two kinds of advocacy?
It can’t be the common, public good. That debate is at least awash. The auto industry is a gigantic sector of the American economy and governmental regulations or aid will impact the livlihood of millions. How policymakers should help, regulate or hurt the auto industry is up for debate, but it would be patently incorrect to think that advocates for automakers have no stake in our national conversation.
A more successful argument would be to deepen not our understanding of the common good, but our understanding of legitimate public discourse. An argument along these lines would be to say that, while automakers sometimes represent the common good, it is a lucky coincidence between their profit motive and our broader understanding of what’s good for everyone. That is to say that, for automakers, the common good is at least ancillary to other goals, namely, profit. For this reason, their influence over policy making should be limited.
On this model, the “democratic process” is defined as the open competition of views and interests concerned exclusively with the common good and not at all with private gain.
Advocates from non-profits have offered an amendment to the Obama policy that embraces this approach, and suggest removing the lobbying ban for advocates from tax-exempt organizations. This would be a consistent distinctoin and uphold some of our intuitions about legitimate versus illegitimate advocacy.
Let’s just not forget that corporate interests are real interests. Defining legitimate interests in a democracy isn’t collateral to who can work for the President. It’s central.
-Sam
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- BP and criminal defense
- Gay marriage, continued . . .
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