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Why Lobbying Matters
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This text of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America may be one of the most known pieces of law in history. Most people think of it as protecting free speech, the press, and religion. However, if you look at the text, there are not three rights protected, but five. The other two are the right to assemble in peace, and the last one, “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” If you asked most people what that meant, it would give them pause. Do people even do that? Yes, they do. Most of it falls under what we call “lobbying.”
Lobbying as a verb takes its roots from the days of Parliament in Britain, where business was conducted in the halls or lobbies outside the chambers. Any lobbyist today would agree that business still takes place in exactly those spaces. Lobbying is a dirty word to many, but it is through this activity that we as citizens are able to petition our governments for redress.
Now, I would argue that if the Government did not regulate so much, there would be less of a need for this. However, as things stand, lobby we must. Like Free Speech and Practice of Religion, it might not always be pretty, but it is our right.
Published in General
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
Microsoft learned this the hard way in the 1990s. They thought they didn’t need to mess with lobbying. Then the Clinton Administration decided to go after them and so they hired lobbyists to help protect them.
I remember some conservative pundits defending lobbying over the years. We are within our rights to go to our congressmen with complaints but it’s easier to band together in a group and have the group send someone representing thousands of people. The example I remember was the NRA. There’s one group representing thousands of members on one specific topic. As individuals, it’s hard to follow everything going on with Congress. Lobbyists can stay focused on a topic.
Lobbying is not all about stealing from each other.
For my own organization, it has been about staying in business. For instance, we had to add the word “diagnose” to our scope of practice in order to bill insurance.
Exactly. If you are in industry that the federal government wants to regulate (or eliminate, such as coal or oil) of course you are going to want someone to plead your case. If you aren’t under threat and you aren’t looking for a handout, there’s not much need to lobby anyone.
This is exactly correct, and I wish more people understood it. It’s also why those bills you see proposed that would ban Members of Congress from lobbying after they leave office are obviously unconstitutional. Leaving aside that Congress is not allowed to add more qualifications for eligibility for office than are in the Constitution, the activity in question is explicitly protected by the First Amendment. It would be self-evident to most people that Congress could not pass a bill that prohibited former federal legislators from becoming priests or writing for magazines, but, for some reason, when the topic is lobbying, people don’t conceptualize the issue in that way.
That aside: As you note, the core issue is that the government is too big, and thereby too open to corruption. The problem isn’t lobbying, which is just another word for asking the government to respond to your wishes.
Less of a need but not none.
Unlike some libertarians, I am all for some regulation when it comes to licensing. Don’t think it is needed to interior decorate. I do think it is needed for Medical practices, and my own. I have seen too much damage done by “life coaches” for instance.
I only meant that in the sense of the government regulating too much as you noted. It’s too big.
Thank you.
I think lobbyists are a lot like lawyers: You like yours, it is the other ones who are up to no good!
Most lobbyists are playing defense for clients impacted by dumb regs.
The way our system works is that somebody proposes a sweeping, impractical measure to save the planet/end injustice etc. Congressmen endorse it in front of the cameras on the steps of the Capitol to declare their own personal wonderfulness. Then, they run back to the office and their AAs hang the Open for Business sign as lobbyists come pouring in. Do you have any idea what this will do to the widget industry in your district/state? Do you know how many jobs will be lost? Don’t you know that you got X dollars from execs in the widget-making/distributing/processing companies?
So does the Congressman pull support from the Omnibus Do Wonderful Things bill? No. Instead, he promises an amendment that exempts/protects/grandfathers the widget industry. However, to get that provision into the bill, he needs to make deals. Ideally, then, the widget lobbyist will direct campaign funds to more senior members and say that this member sent them. Or they will have to endorse other unrelated crap to garner support. The widget lobbyists will also ultimately have to endorse the larger sh*t sandwich of a bill to get their protection included and enacted. And in the ensuing years, they will need to stay involved and “supportive.” Nice little protective provision you got there in the U.S. Code …would be a shame if something were to happen to it.
So our Congress is largely a protection racket and the statutes and regulations are voluminous, complicated, and festooned with arcane provisions because of the need to amend large-scale garbage bills with little fixes each of which was sold on a retail basis.
And then some moron liberal will complain that corporate Special Interests are interfering with the process (in much the same way that shopkeepers keep disrupting and corrupting the Mafia by forcing acceptance of those protection payments).
A hedge fund guy told me on Twitter that the tax code was an auction that they force citizens into at gunpoint. lol
Yeah, I remember several years ago when we had a Democratic Congressman who said he would vote against any sort of cap and trade legislation. He ended up voting for it after all, but said it’s OK, because he got them to put in an exemption for Crystal Sugar Company so they would not be subject to the law (which didn’t pass anyway, thankfully).
If you’re quoting the punctuation accurately, I think use of commas and semi-colons is relevant. The right is to peacably assemble comma in order to petition for a redress of grievance. That’s one right, not two.
I have always heard that these were regarded as two separate rights, not a description of one.
But see how the commas vs semi-colons are used elsewhere? Also the uses of “or” and “and.”
Unless you want to claim that using “and” vs “or,” comma vs semi-colon, are irrelevant. Why would you do that?
It makes it like a list:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I think the semi-colons separate those to whom the rights belong:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
These rights belong to/affect religious institutions.
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
These rights belong to/affect those who publicly speak or write/publish.
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
These rights belong to/affect the people as individuals/groups.
Yes they’re divided into groups, kinda, hence the list, there’s also the “or” vs “and.”
As in, the people have the right to peaceably assemble, and then to petition the Government for redress of grievances.
Otherwise, if it’s just peaceably assembling… what then?
Well, it prevents the government form prohibiting gatherings/events of which they don’t approve, regardless of whether the people are protesting or whatever. Heck, people don’t have to be protesting the government. They could just be protesting, say, Drag Queen Story Hour as such. Not asking the government to ban DQSH, but just protesting the event. The government can’t ban those protests as long as they remain peaceful.
The grammatical argument to one side, the Founders were certainly interested in protecting the right to peaceable assembly per se, because they were aware that, historically, tyrannies had limited that right to ensure that angry citizens/subjects could not demonstrate against them. At the Boston Massacre trial in 1770, the question of whether the crowd had been a lawful assembly or unlawful assembly was key. As Adams noted in his defense, under the rules of the era, “in case of an unlawful assembly, all and every one of the assembly is guilty of all and every unlawful act, committed by any one of that assembly, in prosecution of the unlawful design they set out upon.” In that case, Adams argued that the assembly had been unlawful—which it had. As a rule, though, the colonists were suspicious that this idea of collective guilt would be used to silence any crowd, so they made sure that “peaceable assembly” was explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights.
Then, since they showed no aversion to using semi-colons, I think they would have used a semi-colon rather than a comma. You know, like they did everywhere else a semi-colon would have different meaning than a comma.
Well, while they were very careful with their words, they were unfortunately pretty lax with their syntax. It’s not consistent across the Constitution, or even across the Bill of Rights. And it’s caused all manner of problems in making the meaning of the Second Amendment plain to laymen in the modern era.
Well there were several authors. But considering they used both commas and semi-colons in the First Amendment, I’m thinking it was for a reason.
More Charles Cooke please!
It is five rights not four.
Playing semantics with punctuation is silly. It is quite clear what was intended.
I guess I’ve lobbied Congress before. I wandered around Capitol Hill meeting with the 20-something year old staffers of Senators and House members from my state. Never again. Definitely not my thing.
Yes, and peaceful assembly itself must be protected. How can you corporately identify your grievances, form the language to communicate your grievances, agree upon your grievances, and write them down, and then discuss the possibility of and agree to petition the government, if only the right to assemble and petition the government is protected?
For example, people might gather together and identify grievances (vent) but decide to not petition the government after all, and then in this case the assembly would not be protected.
Punctuation is a big part of how we understand things, and what makes them “quite clear.”
Given the structure of the rest of the Amendment, if those were intended to be identified separately, there would have been a semi-colon instead of a comma. As well as perhaps using “or” rather than “and.”
Actually using words rather than punctuation is far better. Use “and possibly also”.
Yes, but they didn’t. So we have to look at the punctuation they used, and why they used commas in some places and semi-colons in others.
Word on the street is that some of those semi-colons were just stains of ink. And some people wanted them scraped out, but others wanted to ensure the integrity of the parchment.