We are going to drain the swamp.
It is undermining American democracy.
Lobbying is arguably the American government's
oldest profession.
It's an industry worth over three and a half
billion dollars, with around twelve thousand
professionals and hundreds of firms, unions,
trade associations and interest groups in the
field. It's one of the main drivers of
policymaking in the U.S., but people still don't
know much about it. I think one of the
misconceptions about lobbyists is that, you know,
we walk around with bags of money and say, vote
our way or support this or oppose this, that it's
not even close to the truth.
We want ultimately our policies to be based on the
merits and we want as much information as
possible as long as it is truthful and relevant
and meaningful.
Almost everyone agrees with that premise, but
consensus pretty much ends there.
Who gets the tax breaks and who gets the subsidies
and who gets the bailouts and who gets the
regulatory rollbacks that increase profits?
Well, obviously, it's the biggest corporations
and the wealthiest people at the top.
We've got to get big money out of politics.
There's no real oversight of the lobbying
industry. I understand the complaints.
I think they're unjustified.
In ninety nine point nine percent of time.
the pandemic has spurred record spending on
lobbying in the first quarter in 2020.
But public perception of the profession remains
low. So how does this elusive industry work and
is it as corrupt as it appears?
My name Marci McSwain and I work as a lobbyist.
Marcy started her own firm in early 2019.
Before that, she worked nearly a decade for
former Congressman Ray McGrath.
Lobbyists need to be the most trustworthy people.
You can't have a job in this town very long if
you're trying to trick.
If you don't equip the member of Congress with
information that's going to be helpful to his or
her district. Lobbying is an age old profession
that dates back to when the Constitution was
created. Experts claim the framers included the
practice intentionally to make sure no one
interest group became too powerful.
The ability of individuals, groups and
corporations to lobby the government was
therefore protected by the right to petition in
the First Amendment.
But there's a sense that, you know, we're a large
and diverse country with a lot of different
people who have a lot of different interests.
And there should be a way for people to speak
directly to their elected officials and say, hey,
you should support this policy or, hey, you
should oppose this policy.
In 2019, 12,170 bills, resolutions and amendments
were taken up by Congress.
Many more thousand were killed.
With about twelve thousand professionals at trade
associations in House unions or private firms.
Lobbyists play a major role in American
policymaking. I think there's a popular
perception that lobbyists come in and do all this
sweet talking, lay down piles of cash, lavish
dinners and get what they want.
And in reality, lobbying is much more boring.
It's making the same argument over and over
again, and it's slowly building coalitions.
It's talking to lots of different people and then
trying to build a case for your client or your
perspective. You get to a breakfast fundraiser in
the morning, then you go to work, you do your job
and you go to lunch fundraiser.
Then you come back and you have another committee
hearing or a markup or you go start calling on
your offices and then you'd go to a cocktail
fundraiser and then you go to a dinner fundraiser
and then you rinse and repeat.
Jimmy Williams lives on a 50 acre farm in rural
South Carolina. But before moving back here, he
spent nearly 20 years in Washington, DC's
political scene. Anyone that ever tells you that
the idea of the money the lure of money is not
there, then they're lying to you because it's
absolutely there.
Between 2000 and 2002, Jimmy was the economic
policy adviser to Illinois Democratic State
Senator Dick Durbin.
He says with a degree in literature, he needed
the information that lobbyists shared with him.
I did everything from trade to taxes to budgets.
If it had money signs on it, I did it.
And I learned a lot from those guys then I
learned over time that lobbyists will only tell
you what they want you to know that I would say,
OK, great. Who's Against you and I start writing
it down. So who's against you?
No no one is against you.
This should never be a problem to get this passed
because nobody's against you.
And they would look at me like, well, we may have
like, OK, so who's against you?
Say it's part teacher, educator and a park lawyer
is defending or protecting or trying to implement
something people will say, we don't want
lobbyists writing bills. you'd rather have us
writing them than you would a member of Congress
who has zero experience in the issues that you're
dealing with? The problem is that there are only
twenty four hours in the day.
And these representatives, these senators, they
may not have time or make time to seek
alternative perspectives, and especially when
those alternative perspectives are coming from
groups or individuals that do not have the
ability to make campaign donations.
There is a reason why these people are putting
huge amounts of money into our political system.
I think America responded to somebody who goes to
Washington owing no one anything.
The more money you spend on members of Congress,
the more times you get meetings.
It's not about Democrats or Republicans.
It's about the reality of money and politics.
In 2019, about three and a half billion dollars
was spent on lobbying nearly twice the combined
budgets of the Senate and the House.
But it's not only a large industry.
Corporations are spending the most of the top 100
entities, lobbying 95 percent of corporations.
Businesses are part of the American public.
They're good for economies.
I think it's OK to want a business to be
successful. That's why you do it.
Discussing those things is important to take to
the Hill. It's important for elected officials to
know how it will impact businesses, even if it is
individually. The shift to corporate lobbying is
relatively new.
Up until the 1970s, corporations largely stayed
out of Washington.
Labor unions were much more important and special
interest groups bigger actors than they are
today. There was a growth of regulatory agencies
that were created in the 1960s, in the 1970s.
And so corporations began to feel that politics
actually did threaten their business a lot more.
And there was just a sense that the public
opinion was moving in a more socialist direction
and businesses needed to stand up for free
enterprise with little oversight.
The next few decades were a free for all for
lobbying. When I was a staffer, I had lobbyists
from every industry and this is back before the
rules are changed. Big, huge dinners, thousands
of dollars, expensive wines.
I mean, seafood towers, you name it.
It was all legal.
And I would just laugh, giggle to myself,
thinking do you think that my boss is going to be
with you because you just bought me a two hundred
fifty dollar bottle of wine? You're full of ---.
The rule changes that Jimmy is referring to are
laws that were passed in the aftermath of one of
the biggest lobbying scandals in American
history. In 2006, the Lobbying, Transparency and
Accountability Act was passed and a year later,
the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.
They tightened the disclosure, information and
reporting requirements from an earlier law and
set ethical guidelines regarding gifts and
bribes. One of the laws also made some
restrictions on who and when former congressional
employees could lobby once transitioning to the
private sector. Still, opponents say it's not
enough. There's no real oversight of the lobbying
industry. The disclosures are voluntary.
The enforcement is basically nonexistent.
The number of lobbyists who have been punished,
you can probably count on one hand, if a senator
tells you that they don't know how much money a
lobbyist has given their campaign, they're lying
to. The symbiotic relationship between campaign
finance and lobbying is often contested.
Following a 2014 Supreme Court decision, there is
no longer a limit on how much an individual can
give in total. The biggest one, they're all
making PAC donations and even direct individual
donations. So sending an army of lobbyists up to
work Capitol Hill, To follow that donation is
kind of the one two punch, you first give a
donation and you next have your lobbyist pay a
call. Looking through public records, almost every
major entity who spends on lobbying also donates
to campaigns. Wall Street, for example, spent
over a record two billion dollars on the 2016
presidential election.
I for one, if you said that every everybody in
this country could not make a political donation,
I would jump up and down for joy For that.
And I think ninety nine point nine percent of my
colleagues would as well. It's not us you have to
turn to. It's the House, the Senate and the White
House and anybody else who asked for a campaign
donation. After spending five years with trade
associations, Jimmy moved to the for profit
firms. That's when things changed.
It was very rewarding financially because I got
paid a lot more. But at the same time, I was then
beginning to figure out that people didn't give a
damn about my knowledge of banking or of the real
estate industry is all about checks.
No one gave a damn about anything other than who
I knew. And how much would it cost for us to
write checks to get into those offices, i.e.
campaign donation? And that was a big turnoff and
I wasn't happy with that.
Studies are divided about the impact of campaign
donations on the corporation's bottom line.
For example, a 2017 study found that the victory
of the company's preferred candidate only
increases the firm's value by 0.05 percent.
But that study didn't consider lobbying.
The Sunlight Foundation examined 14 million
records from 2007 to 2012, including on campaign
contributions and lobbying expenditure, and found
that for every dollar spent, the corporation
received seven hundred and sixty dollars from the
government. The estimates are all over the place,
but it's clear that lobbying works enough of the
time. It's sort of like the old saw about the
executive who who says, well, half the money I
spent on advertising is wasted.
Problem is, I just don't know which half.
Big tech Facebook, Google or whatever are
underestimating the furious anger of Capitol
Hill. So it may also come as no surprise that
those same companies are pouring a lot of money
into lobbying those very lawmakers.
One group that recently started appreciating the
power of lobbying is the tech industry, dogged by
their handling of consumer data, misinformation
and harmful content.
After the 2016 election, the tech giants entered
Washington full force.
In 2019, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple spent
over 50 million dollars on lobbying.
In the 80s, Microsoft was kind of the big dog and
they were losing in antitrust issues and finally
kind of decided, if you can't beat em, join em
and set up shop in Washington.
And that has been true for protection.
When it comes to advertising and investment in R&D
and all those things, lobbying is just as
important as everybody else.
You don't believe me? Ask Google.
You're about to get slapped the -- out of them by
the Department of Justice, aren't they?
Google is hired up.
Smart move. Very smart.
Much of lobbyists successes are attributed to
their deep understanding of the regulatory
process and personal connections to Capitol Hill.
That's something called the revolving door in
politics. One study found that nearly 60 percent
of retired or defeated lawmakers of the 15th
Congress found jobs in lobbying.
When I went to work for Durbin, I could have gone
to work for any of those Democratic senators.
But I chose him because I knew he's going places
that put me in a very good place as a lobbyist
because I knew the people would pick me up
because I would have influence in those offices.
So if I'm a corporation, I'm hiring Jimmy Wales.
Are there rules in place to prohibit them from
having the special treatment, things like that?
Absolutely. Are they broken?
Absolutely. It is an honor system type of rules
and regulations that we we adhere to.
Twenty twenty has been a busy year for lobbyists
so far. According to the Center for Responsive
Politics, lobbying spent for this year's first
quarter is the highest on record.
Some of the biggest spenders also saw
considerable help from the relief package.
I don't care if you're a small business or a
medium sized business or large business.
If you're a trade association, a union, if you
don't have a government affair strategy, you are
going to be left behind.
I will continue to point to the pandemic is a
perfect example that if you didn't have somebody
here with the relationships of speaking for you,
well, then you don't you likely didn't get what
you wanted or needed to help yourself.
Lobbying is often criticized for its ability to
tilt policymaking in the favor of those with
unlimited resources.
At the end of the day, though, lobbying is a
profession protected by the Constitution, and
unlikely going anywhere.
Without a chemical company, How do you think
you're going to get a single fruit and vegetable
in this country? And whether or not someone on
the left or the right likes it, that is
irrelevant to me.
I can go to sleep at night knowing that I have
fed millions of children in this country through
legislation that I have helped passed.
Not all corporate America is bad, But my work that
I did, I wouldn't change any of it for the world.
Not a single bit of it. The most important thing
is to get big money out of politics.
One way is to provide public financing of
elections and get a Supreme Court that really
understands that money is is really distorting
speech. It's not speech.
It's actually drowning the speech of most people.
Everyone always says you know drain the swamp and
all these lobbyists who've been up there and for
so long and the worst and I tell sometimes my
friends and family, I'm like, that's me.
Like, no, not you. You're great.
We're glad you're up there. But I am the swamp.
We're not working against anyone We're hoping to
work for and improve the lives of people here in
the state. Important role.
And we generally try to do our jobs well and
responsibly.