Banning lobbying is pretty difficult, especially if you have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom to petition
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Replying to @arthur_affect @nberlat
I mean it still feels like a lobby-proof democracy should be the aspiration, rather than resigning oneself to lobbying as an inevitability
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It's kind of weighted as to what counts as 'lobbying.' Constitutional issues aside, what are we aspiring to ban - probably not letters from constituents or whatever.
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I mean I'm given to understand corporate interests dispense a great deal of money to elected officials
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*Bribery* is different from lobbying Bribery itself is explicitly illegal at multiple levels, including in the Constitution itself Most of the laws around lobbying are intended to try to keep anything they do from being bribery
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Obviously rich people can and do look for loopholes to get around this and have ever since George Washington built his career on throwing parties at his giant plantation house But it's not clear that "not having lobbyists" would make that any better
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To be clear, I'm specifically criticizing the juxtaposition Noah was making, saying if the options really came down to perpetual gerontocracy or perpetual lobbyist power I'd much rather have the latter and curb its worst excesses
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Well no I'm not sure it was really responsive to the point he was making He's saying that some kind of "gerontocracy" - a "seniority system" - is inevitable, it's just the way the world works "You want to talk labor laws, that's Bob's thing, he's been doing it 20 years"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Right but the argument can’t both be “term limits are bad because it empowers lobbyists” and “lobbying is good, actually”
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Replying to @Cybren @Nymphomachy and
Sure, I'm actually not saying term limits are the worst thing in the world, but they won't change as much about the old boy network as you hope they will
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In some ways they arguably make it worse, by shifting the center of the old boy network to the lobbyists themselves It is arguably better to have an old undislodgeable senator outliving a series of young lobbyists pestering him one after another than the reverse
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Cybren and
Like having a revolving door of fresh faces figurehead senators who all just pass through and leave and they're all getting advice from one old lobbyist whom the public has never heard of is what most people think of as "corruption"
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