2887

Dude, step back and realize how totally nonsensical you’re being right now.

Why would they need outside experts to draft viable bills? It’s not rocket science. Lobbyists don’t provide essential services in drafting legislation.

The reason that lobbyists are so heavily involved isn’t because the legislators NEED them. It’s because they are providing those laws to the legislators, and then they give them money in exchange for pushing those bills forward.

2888

The place to tackle the problem is to try to offset the natural advantage of incumbency, so that there is a higher chance of turnover as a result of elections. And that means getting at the money in politics, through public funding of election campaigns and/or campaign spending restrictions. And that, IMO, can be accomplished by winning elections and appointing Justices who don’t buy the argument that money is speech and all restrictions are therefore unconstitutional.

2889

This, by the way, is illegal. Lobbyists do assist reps in raising money for election campaigns, and they might tempt a rep with a lucrative post-Congress job offer, but they can’t dump a sack of cash on a rep’s desk.

2890

Have you seen modern bills? Obamacare? They are super long, technical, and complicated. Someone needs to draft them - its either staff or outsiders.

2891

The idea of Louie Gohmert drafting a bill boggles the mind.

2892

It certainly can be rocket science. I cover financial services regulation. It gets pretty arcane. No legislator is going to draft meaningful detailed regulation without some sort of assistance, whether it’s from lobbyists as we traditionally understand the term or special interest groups. Dodd Frank is over 2,000 pages.

2893

Yeah, but we all know that it’s how it works.

Two things here:

  1. Most laws are not broad, over-arching restructuring of the entire healthcare system. Certainly the ACA was a massive law, but that’s not the norm. Indeed, most laws SHOULD be far more focused.
  2. In the case of a giant law like the ACA, the fact that you have lobbyists driving such a law isn’t what you want anyway.

And the reality is… you’re saying that this happens already, so the idea that “it would be worse” is baseless.

Again, the process by which laws are passed is not rocket science. We had legislators making laws before we had powerful lobbying groups driving everything.

2894

This is generally why legislators have a staff of people to help them put this stuff together.

And, again, not all laws are gigantic mega laws. A bunch of the complexity of those laws is actually injected by lobbyists, in order to create mechanisms by which to exploit the system.

2895

Maybe the real answer is to have Congress set goals and guidelines and empower independent commissions to oversee the details.

2896

No, but the ones where lobbyists tend to have the most drafting influence — to a certain degree independent of money — are the complex ones. And the staffers are, for the most part, not experts either.

They don’t have to be mega laws, they just have to cover something technical that your average Congressperson doesn’t understand, certainly not in detail.

2897

It’s what we’ve seen in CA with term limits.

The only way term limits work will be with 100% publicly funded elections and probably bans on PAC advertising (which won’t work with the 1st amendment).

2898

I’m not sure how close you guys have been to how these complicated bills are actually drafted.

  1. Each individual rep/senator has a staff of people ranging from people who answer phones (Staff Assistants) to Legislative Directors (people who work on these kinds of bills and also research and brief other bills).

  2. Committees get even more staff. For instance, the Senate Banking Commitee has full time lawyers specializing in finance regulation, writing legislation, reviewing legislation, etc. You have lead counsel, associate counsel, etc.

  3. Outside help is NOT required to draft bills. At all. What lobbyists do is trickily approach reps and say something like "Hey, we drafted this bill for you! Just champion it an sign it! Oh by the way here is a campaign contribution. It’s up to the rep to handle this.

For instance, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a pretty complicated bit of legislation that had wide ranging implications for the finance and public accounting industries. Ask anyone in those industries, it was a big change. There was NO lobbyist input into this, though they reached out to several agencies and experts for input and direction. The entire thing was drafted in house. Source: A good friend drafted most of it.

Lobbyists are not needed AT ALL to draft legislation, sorry.

2899

Wise words from Bork.

2900

More people support the impeachment inquiry than oppose it …

… in Texas.

2901

I mean, I get it, I do, but I kind of hate the formulation that nothing is true unless a Republican says it. Kind of like how investigations of politicians are only legitimate if done by Republicans (no matter whether the politician is a Democrat or Republican).

Also, I’m sure if you asked Bork today (you can’t, he’s dead), he’d say that to current investigation is a witch hunt (just like Lindsey Graham), because Republicans are party over country, always.

2902

Maybe we need to elect folks to congress who actually understand this stuff. And that’s not something that just comes about from being in Congress for a long ass time. The stuff that they get better at over time in Congress, is how to be a politician… not what makes good policy.

And again, a big part of what makes a lot of these laws super complex, is that they are:

  1. Too broad
    and
  2. have a ton of little loopholes built in to appease various lobbying groups

Like, take the tax code… the tax code is super complex, because it’s got a million pages of exceptions built in designed to appease some rich dude.

2903

Citation needed. I would be willing to bet that legislators do get better at legislation with time.

2904

They should create nonpartisan organizations formed from experts. Didn’t they have that for tech, before Gingrich killed it?

2905

Is being a better politician not an important skill for politicians? It doesn’t matter how much of an expert someone is in the energy industry if they can’t get their bill to the floor or figure out how to garner enough support to push it through despite opposition. Not to mention crafting legislation in such a way to not run afoul of the courts or leave loopholes, etc.

Trump, for example, would be far more scary and effective if he was a skilled politician.

2906

Wondering how long this stays operative: