Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Lobbying Works

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Lobbying is an entrenched part of American politics and one that many people think is breaking government. But petitioning the government is protected in the Constitution. How can this system be fixed? join Josh and Chuck as they explore the topic in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi folks, Chuck here with your Saturday Select, because it's election season. I thought we'd dig back into the archives from October 6th, 2015, and find out how lobbying works. You may think lobbying is awful,

and it certainly can be, but it also serves a purpose. You know, I'll let you make your own mind up about it. But here we go with how lobbying works right now. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Crickets.

So weird. Yeah, we're doing this ghost style. Yeah, so what happened was, and I didn't, you'd explain to me, but I don't know, maybe my mind was elsewhere, and I didn't fully understand, but what happened is, guest producer Noel got the record.

He put the mouse on the hamster wheel, got the computer running, and left. Yeah, and now you're a little freaked out, aren't you? Well, this is out of close to 800 shows. This is literally the first time it's ever just been you and me in a room. Yeah. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, it really is, isn't it? I feel like, I don't know, I feel like with no one in here, even though no one ever guides us, that we should just, I don't know, that we're gonna cut up and curse, and it's like when the teacher has left the room. It feels like there's a vast field,

a portal to another dimension to my right, where Jerry usually says so. I had no idea what that extra, silent human three feet from this myth. Now this means that we've been put out to pasture. Wow, this is disconcerting. All right, calm down. I feel like you're gonna knife me or something.

I could right now, I'm knowing whatever now, until we publish the episode. Nope, no one would ever know. Wow. Man, that's gruesome. All right, this is just weird. Let's do it. You ready?

Yeah, good choice, by the way. Yeah, I don't remember what episode we picked this in. We were talking about something, and lobbying came up, and we're like, we should just do one on lobbying. Well, here it is. Yeah, I'm glad we're doing this, because we'll clear up some misconceptions.

It's not always evil. Just 75% of the time. Maybe more. Yeah, I remember when we said we were gonna do a lobbying one, we got a lot of emails from lobbyists who were like, please, please, please don't just trash our profession, like we ever would. They were like, lobbying's actually,

it can be a really good thing, and here's why. So we got a lot of feedback before this thing even came out, which hopefully will help us. Well, they're understandably a very defensive group, because everyone thinks it's just rotten and corrupt across all channels. And again, and that's not true.

75% is rotten to the core. And the reason I and just about everyone else walking the planet thinks that lobbyists are rotten is because of some very high profile cases, like member Jack Abramoff. Who can forget what a, and I usually don't publicly trash people, but that guy was a pile of garbage, you know?

There's really no, I was trying to find some other way around it. I was like, no, he was awful. And just ripped people off unabashedly, ripped off Indian tribes. Bribed officials. Bribed people, pocketed money. And he was a highly, highly successful lobbyist.

Turned on people he was working for. Yeah. He was, he's not a good fella. No, but again, he was a successful lobbyist. He was at the top of his field for many years, actually. And it wasn't until 2006 when he was convicted of, I believe, like bribery and corruption and all sorts of stuff.

Tax evasion, all kinds of stuff, yeah. And I ended up serving three years, I think. He did three years in the pokey. Yeah. And supposedly he had to pay a lot of restitution and tax fines. Yeah. But who knows how that stuff works out.

No one ever follows up to see, you know, we'd say, oh, he's supposed to pay all these people back. Sure it happened. Yeah. Who knows? He probably found a loophole to work on. He's probably working on a lawsuit against us right this moment, Chuck.

Oh, can you not publicly call someone garbage? I think you can. Okay. Yeah. We'll find out. Can we read this opening statement from 1869? Yeah, because I think it makes a pretty good point that Jack Abramoff wasn't the first despised lobbyist.

No, this is written by Emily Edson Briggs, who was a Washington D.C. newspaper correspondent, at a time where there weren't a lot of women doing that, which is kind of cool. No, I think she was the first to loud into the congressional press room. Yeah, they said let her in. She'll never say anything bad.

Because we gave her this job. And she's like, you fell for my baked cookies plan. So she wrote a column called The Dragons of the Lobby, so you probably know where this is headed. And the opening line of the column said, winding in and out through the long, devious basement passage, crawling through the corridors,

trailing its slimy link from gallery to committee room. At last, it lies, stretched at full length on the floor of the Congress. This dazzling reptile, this huge, scaly serpent of the lobby. That could have been our Halloween episode. It really could have. Maybe we should gussie that up.

I think we should. With horror effects. A little bit of sound effects, yeah. That was in 1869. Yeah, not very flattering. And it was actually, it did come at a time when lobbying and lobbyists were really getting a chokehold on Congress, on legislation,

on sweetheart deals from the federal government. But lobbying goes further back than that. And lobbyists have been despised even further back than that, as a matter of fact. Yeah, and it's, again, it's something this article makes, I thought this was a really well-written article, actually. Yeah, this was Dave Ruz's article, and he did a good job. He points out that the knee-jerk reaction

for your average person might be to say, just make it all illegal, get rid of the lobby, because it's awful. But he makes a good point that it is necessary, the First Amendment in our own constitution says, the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances is necessary, and constitutional, and mandatory.

Yeah, and that's what lobbyists do, is it's not always a huge corporation. A lot of times they'll speak for the Girl Scouts, or the Boy Scouts, or all kinds of special interest groups, and we all have them. So you, me, everyone listening in America, has a constitutional right to go and petition Congress to say, hey guys, you guys aren't paying enough attention

to government waste, or NASA deserves way more funding than you're giving it. Whatever, you can go do that. That's lobbying, technically, but unfortunately, almost from the beginning, corporate and big business special interest groups figured out a way to basically exploit that to their own benefit. Yeah, and it's, Ru's also points out,

and we'll get to this later, which is one of the big problems. It's necessary because Congress and their staff don't have time to, that's, well, again, we'll get to that later. Okay, yeah. I don't wanna spoil it. We don't have time to go through the myriad requests

and information, deluge of information, that's necessary to make an educated decision. Right. And so much so that Senator John F. Kennedy, in 1956 said that we are, in many cases, expert technicians capable of, not we are, I'm sorry, lobbyists. He wasn't a lobbyist.

Are, in many cases, I'm sorry, Ara, in many cases, expert technicians capable of examining complex and difficult subjects in a clear, understandable fashion. So that's the reason we need them, in many cases, is to literally explain stuff to Congress people and staff strapped for time and resources. It should be said, though, that when Kennedy wrote that

in the mid-50s, lobbying was not much of a thing. It had, like, it was established, it had been established for a couple hundred years. People hated lobbyists. There were huge lobbyist scandals in the Gilded Age from the Civil War to the 19th century. But in the mid-50s, lobbying was not a huge thing. It wasn't.

So what he said, though, was accurate, and it still is accurate today. If you are an incoming Congress person, you make your name, both to your constituency and in your party, by getting bills passed, by coming up with bills and passing them, right? Yeah, look at all the work I accomplished. Right, and then if you get enough,

you may end up on a nice committee, maybe even a committee chair, and then eventually a party leader, and all that is because you introduced legislation that was favored and got passed. The thing is, you don't have the time or the staff to research and write legislation. So you have to turn to lobbyists, lobbying groups,

and say, hey, you guys are literally experts on this topic. I need your help, educate me, help me write this, and then we'll be friends. The problem is, is there's not a special interest group, like you said, whether it's the Girl Scouts or whether it's the Chamber of Commerce that doesn't have a slant that isn't going to try

to slant that legislation in their favor. So that means that the laws that are written in this country today are the legislative equivalents of advertorials, kind of thin on actual content, and really heavy on stuff that benefits the corporations running the show. You know who would make the lobbyists? Who?

They're in this room right now. Oh, you think so? I was just thinking like, generally unbiased research presented so someone can make a decision. That's kind of what we do. Except we're not paid like lobbyists. No, lobbyists make a lot of dough.

No. In fact, in 2014, lobbyists, and these are people that are officially registered as lobbyists, which we'll get to. There are a lot more people doing lobby-esque work that aren't officially registered, but official registered lobbyists were paid up $3.24 billion in 2014,

and that is only divided among, how many people was it? About 10,600 people. What? Are you kidding? That's how many registered lobbyists there were. Right. And this year. And that's, but again, just the registered ones.

From a high of about 14 in change, and when was that, 2006 or seven? Yeah, and then the 2007 changes came along. And it's not because they're fewer lobbyists. They're, that just gave rise to people or gave people the ability to be like, oh, I'm not a lobbyist anymore. Because here's the thing.

If you are a registered lobbyist, you are subject to some very strict ethical guidelines, legal guidelines, scrutiny of your business practices. And there's a lot of stuff you can't do. You're just completely outlawed from doing certain things. If, if you can just skirt the definition of a lobbyist, it's like open season, man. It's the Wild West on Capitol Hill for you.

And you can make as much money as you possibly can while doing the same things, just not having to register as a lobbyist. All right, but that's a lot of teasing. This is like, but this is the current state of the American legislative process. Our legislators rely on special interest groups almost entirely to tell them what they need to know

from their slant. And then actually writing the legislation for them to go take the Congress and be like, look what I got. I'm gonna make my name with this. All right. There's one other thing too that we should say. Yeah. And this is one reason why lobbying is so pernicious.

Lobbyists also serve as major fundraisers for the very politicians that they're lobbying. Yeah, like I didn't give them money. I just held a fundraiser that raised $4.5 million at $3,000 a plate. But hey, they don't. They gave them the money. Right, they don't owe me anything.

I'm just doing this because I'm a patriotic citizen of the United States and I'll see you Monday, Senator. And I like to overcharge for salmon. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So that's the current state, everybody. Let's go back to the beginning

because lobbyists have been around basically as long as America has. Yeah, let's take a little break and then we'll get to the tease stuff and start off with a little bit of history. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, there's some misconceptions about the history of the word itself. Yes. Lore says that it was invented in the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC in that lobby when Ulysses Grant would kick back and have a drink like he so liked to do and would get disgusted by what he called those damn lobbyists

that were hanging out there. Yeah, asking them for stuff. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Yeah, and while that may have given rise to the term popularity-wise here, but you can trace it back to England in the 1640s when they talked about the lobby in the House of Commons where you could go right up to your representatives

and your cute little wig and say, here's what I think you should do. And here's some good old-fashioned English pounds in your pocket. Yeah, I mean, that's always just gone with it, part and parcel. If not outright bribery, at least favors or quid pro quo or tit for tat or the Jekyll and Hyde. Beyoncé tickets.

All sorts of stuff. Yeah, first class, no one flies first class. Talking about the Learjet, the true first class, the private jet. Didn't they do a first class announcement called business class because of class resentment in the United States? Yeah, and now they've, well, it depends on the airline.

There's all sorts of new rules and special things you can pay for. All right, so in the United States, from the very first session of Congress, there were lobbying efforts in people treating Congress, I'm going to say congressmen for this one, because this was in 1789. Yes.

We're going to say congressperson for later on. Right. The women were at home brewing beer in their households. But they were applying congressmen with treats and dinners. And that was a direct quote from Pennsylvania Senator William MacLay from the very first session of Congress. He was saying, yeah, there are lobbyists here. They're basically trying to bribe people.

They're trying to stall the tariff act of 1789, which established Congress's ability to basically extract duties and taxes on goods in the United States in order to support the government. Let's go out to dinner instead. And the New York merchants were like, do you want to do that? Let me get you hammered three ways from Sunday.

Yeah. What are you doing later? Yeah. I'll tell you what you're doing. You're going to finish a casque of rum in one sitting. Then, apparently, the Bank of the United States was one of the first big corrupt organizations, as far as literally having politicians in their pocket

paying the money. Yeah, the United States used to have things like an actual centralized bank. And Andrew Jackson came along. He was like, this thing is just way too corrupt. We need to get rid of it. And put me on your money. Yeah, but the scandals associated with it

were things like the national bank had on its board. As board members who were being paid by the bank, sitting congressmen who were writing legislation in favor of the bank. Yeah, this quote is the best. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster sent a letter to the Bank of the United States that said this, among other things.

Since I arrived here, I have had an application to be concerned professionally against the bank, which I've declined, of course, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainer. In other words, I've noticed that you're not paying me now.

People are telling me to write legislation against you. I'm turning them down for now. You may want to send that money again if you would like this. Love, Daniel. You know, like he flat out said, the bribes have sort of dried up. I've noticed. So why don't you start sending those again? Yeah.

Unbelievable. Yeah. History. So you talked about the Gilded Age, post-Civil War until the close of the 19th century. We like to think that America's railroads were built on grit and determination. But in fact, it was rife with insider deals and scandal.

What was it called, the credit-mobiliar scandal? Yeah, I'd like to know this a little bit. It's mind-boggling. Basically, Union Pacific Railroad. It's mind-boggling how overt it was. Yeah, but even just like, it was not just crooked in one way. It was crooked in a number of ways. It formed one big, huge, crooked thing

that Congress was involved in. The Union Pacific Railroad started a company that served as the sole agent of building and managing the Union Pacific Railroad. Yeah. And then they issued stock in this stuff. And they used credit-mobilier and Union Pacific itself to basically overcharge and overpay one another

so that the value of the stock went through the roof. So it was a stock massaging scheme to begin with. It was like an insider deal with yourself. Right, to raise the value artificially of your stock. And then they took these shares in this company and started handing them out to Congress at a discounted price. So all Congress had to do was go sell them on the market

for their face value, which was, again, artificially inflated. And they made a bunch of cash. And they were taking these as bribes for giving land grants or breaking treaties with Native Americans so that the Union Pacific Railroad could build their railroad across the Western states. Yeah, and they did this because, believe it or not, at the time, there wasn't a lot of private investors

ponying up money for this railroad because it was sort of a new thing. It was risky. Yeah, although it was a great idea, they didn't know, like all investors, what they care about is getting their money back in quick fashion. And they just didn't know if that was going to be possible.

And I mean, there's definitely something to be said for the federal government to step in and be like, look, we think that this is really going to help things out. We really want to fund it. But does it have to be totally fraught with corruption while that happens, you know? No, is the answer, not yet.

And then there was the famous Gilded Age lobbyist, Sam Ward, who he basically invented the social lobby. So while he wouldn't, we'll get into direct lobby versus social lobby, but social lobby is basically, in Sam Ward's case, he was a great chef and he was like, I'm going to throw these great parties. I'm going to have great food and fine wine. I'm going to invite special interest groups and corporation

heads and politicians and get them in the same room. But we're not going to talk about that stuff directly. We're just all going to get hammered together and have a great time. Become friends. That was his job. Friends do things for one another. Right?

Yeah. Well, I don't think we ever even said what K Street was, by the way. K Street is literally K. The letter K Street, where just about every lobby in the country has an office. Yeah. So that explains that. If people are out there going, what the heck is K Street?

Yeah, you're right. But it's like saying Madison Avenue when you refer to advertising. Yeah, or Wall Street. So lobbying, just kind of after the Gilded Age, America was sick to death of lobbying and lobbyists and didn't want to have anything to do with it. So lobbying went, didn't go away, but it fell to the wayside a little bit.

It was still a thing. Throughout the 20th century, it just kind of waxed and waned. In the mid-40s, I believe, Congress was like, we actually kind of need these guys. So let's set up some rules for dealing with them. Because at this time already, what John Kennedy was writing about was true. You had a brain drain going on from Capitol Hill to K Street,

where people would go and become an aide to a senator or a congressperson and make contacts, get a little bit of experience. And then after a couple of years, they would move on over to K Street to a lobbying firm, make anywhere between five to 10 times what they were as the congressional aide. And K Street was sucking the talent away from Congress.

And so these Congress people in the 40s said, hey, we need to work with these people because we need them. So let's make up some rules. Even still, lobbying was nothing like you would recognize it today. It wasn't until the 70s and 80s when business did an about face of dealing with the government. Up to that point, it was like, government,

just stay out of our business. That's the lobbying we want to do, is to keep you off of our backs, keep you from regulating our stuff, just stay out of our business. And then at some point, and I'm not exactly sure who figured this out, but some lobbyists convince corporations like, hey, guys, you're doing this all wrong.

You guys could get mind-boggling amounts of money from the government in the form of subsidies or great contracts or sweetheart deals just by using our services. And lobbying exploded. Yeah, and we'll just take, comparatively, a tiny bit of that. Even though it's a ton of money for individual lobbyists, it's nothing to these corporations.

Right, exactly. And yeah, the Dave Ruse gave a really great example of Northrop Grumman in 2012 or something like that, I believe. Dunder Mifflin? Yeah. They spent $176 million in 14 years from 1998 to 2012, which that's nothing to them.

Because in that time, in 2012 itself, Northrop Grumman got $189 million contract for a cybersecurity system for the DOD. Yeah, that's nothing. That one contract paid for 14 years of lobbying expenses, right? Yeah, and then they got a $1.7 billion contract to build five drones.

Right, and that's just Northrop Grumman. Like, you can't really pick on them. The reason why we called them out is because during 1998, 2012, they were the ninth biggest spender on lobbying, not just corporations, but industry as well. General Electric was the single entity that spent the most as far as the corporation goes.

There's a great website if you want just good information and stats called OpenSecrets.org. In this past year, 2014, the top 10 spenders were the US Chamber of Commerce, which is always number one by a long shot, because they represent a lot of businesses. The National Association of Realtors was number two. Blue Cross Blue Shield was number three. American Hospital Association four.

American Medical Association five. I'm seeing a trend here. I wonder why. The National Association of Broadcasters, National Cable and Telecom, Comcast, again, you can literally look at the years where there's the most spending and what's going on in those industries. And then Google and Boeing round out the top 10

at just $16 million each. And I mean, the amount of money spent has, I believe, tripled in the last few years, right? Yeah, I think so. So this is fairly new, but it's not new. It's basically a return to the lobbying of the Gilded Age. The amount of money, attention, time, questionable stuff that's been going on is just a replay of what

happened 100-something years ago, right? And one of the reasons that it's become so rampant, it's been ratcheted up so much, you can actually lay it at the feet of Newt Gingrich. So Newt Gingrich, Chuckers, was Speaker of the House in the 90s when Clinton was president, if you'll remember. And he decided that Congress was doing too much. Right, oh yeah, I know what you're talking about.

So he cut staffs, which means that lawmakers that were able to, that did have enough of a staff or enough resources to write their own legislation, definitely could not any longer. He also cut staff at some resources that are dedicated to providing research for Congress, like the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, all of these things

that have been built up in response to dealing with lobbyists from like the 40s on were cut by Gingrich. And now all of a sudden, our lawmakers are relying strictly on lobbyists for money. Yeah, and there's a direct correlation. I know people, you hear about government spending, let's cut government spending, which in theory sounds great. Sure, let's cut government spending.

But what that means is now you don't have staff to do unbiased research and get the facts. Like you said, you've got lobbyists to do that. Right, exactly. And the idea behind that tactic by Gingrich, if it was just based on I'm cutting government spending by cutting jobs, or I think government's doing too much, there's actually a misstep.

Because another senator from Oklahoma, his name escapes me right now, he had the Congressional Budget Office do an annual report starting in 2011. And they found that the Congressional Budget Office found that for every dollar spent on the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Budget Office managed

to come up with $90 of recommended cuts to government waste. So for every dollar you spent, you saved $89 just from the Congressional Budget Office. So cutting their staff is the opposite of what you want to do. You're against bloated wasteful government. Yeah, it's pretty interesting how it works out. It's specifically as interesting as far as new Gingrich

goes too, because him cutting Congress's ability to not rely on lobbyists really left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths during the 2012 primaries. Because he refused to admit that he was a lobbyist. Well, yeah, and he's not registered as a lobbyist. What he has is a, well, one of the things he does, he has a health care consulting firm where you can pay $200,000 to become a member, quote unquote,

which you're not a client, you're a member. It's a membership group. So it's, and he's not the only one. I mean, I think they have in here, they call it the revolving door, basically, when you leave your position as a Congressperson or a Senator, you go directly to the lobby. The New York Times says there are more than 400 former legislators

who worked as lobbyists in the past decade. It's just like, let me go make some real money now. And that's just legislators either. Like there was very famously a guy who was running the Pentagon, I believe, Ed Aldridge. And he was a longtime critic of Boeing. And then Boeing hired him, and on his way out, he approved a $3 billion contract to Boeing.

That's the revolving door at work. There was a Massachusetts representative named William Delahunt. And he took a job lobbying for a wind project that he had just earmarked a bunch of money for right before he left. Yeah. So I mean, this revolving door, people say like,

well, let's just shut the revolving door. And it's a proposal, but at the same time, if you do that, then you're anti-job. And you can't even appear anti-job. So there's other solutions that I think are better for dealing with the lobbying crisis, I guess you could call it. Yeah, and well, we'll get to that later,

that great article you sent. You know what show actually does a really great job realistically with this, is Veep. I haven't seen a second of that. It's fantastic, man. I mean, it really shows you like. Did she win the Emmy for Best Actress? Yeah, she won, and Veep won,

and I think the writing team won. Good. I think it's the best written show on TV right now, but or the best written comedy. Oh, have you seen Narcos yet? No. I'm gonna check that out. Okay.

But Veep is really, even though it's a comedy, really like shows that everything in DC is just about deals being made. Right. Like, well, you do this for me, and I'll give you support on this bill. Right. And they're pulling that bill,

and what did that lobby say? Because they were my friend. Right. And it's all just, it's such an insider's game. Yeah. It's staggering. Yeah. And that's a comedy written by English people,

which is, that was weird. Is that right? Yeah, the producers got there, and they're all like from England. Wow. And that's, I don't know, for some reason I thought it's so interesting. And they even, in their Emmy speech said,

you know, it's kind of funny to be able to make fun of the American political system being English folks, but thank you for this award for that. All right, so let's talk a little bit about, we keep saying registered lobbyists. Since 1876, Congress has required that all professional lobbyists register with the office of the clerk of the house.

And since 1995, with the Lobbying Disclosure Act in 2007, Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, they'd narrowly defined a lobbyist as someone who was one, paid by client. Two, services include more than one, lobbying contact. And three, whose lobbying activities constitute 20% or more of their time on behalf of that client

during any three month period. So that's actually, it seems broad, that's actually a really narrow definition of a lobbyist. Yeah, and it's so narrow, as it turns out, that it's really easy to skirt those rules and not register because there are many ways. You can say, you can really budget your time and say, no, I worked 20.9% in this three month period

for this firm. Or I have so many people I work for, I only spend about 10 or 15% of my time or if you're like on any one group. Right, or if you're like Newt Gingrich, you're not working for a client, says client, I got members. So I'm doing all this, but it's for members, not clients.

Or if it's educational, it's not called lobbying. So, hey, let me just hire this former senator, paying a lot of money to go around and give speeches on education that are really trying to generate interest in legislation. Or to educate the government on why the $37.5 billion in fossil fuel subsidies that shelled out in 2014 is a good thing to redo

and then double. But that's just education, that's not lobbying. So those are just some of the ways you can skirt officially registering as a lobbyist. And actually, Chuck, so you said that that was from the 2007 act total. It was 95 in 2007, right? Yeah, two different acts.

And in 2007, when they added, I guess they added that third one, about the 20% the time measure. Yeah. Like 3,000 lobbyists deregistered. Yeah, it's so easy to skirt. Oh, there's a loophole, good. Yeah, they're like, oh, really?

Yeah. All I have to do is account for my time in this way. And all the rules don't apply to me. It's pretty amazing. And so, as a matter of fact, the American Bar Association said, if you just get rid of that third one, the time thing, that would help a lot.

Yeah. And actually, when Congress first started to deal with lobbying, well, I shouldn't say first, because it was the 19th century, but in 1945 or six, when they passed an act about lobbying rules, they said that a lobbyist, someone who had to register as a lobbyist was anyone who aids in the passage

or defeat of legislation. That's it. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure there's loopholes in there and ways around that too, but it was much, much more vague. Which in fact, would sound, it's counterintuitive, but that's actually better.

Right. To be more vague in the description. Yeah. I can't skirt it as easy. So, let's take a break and then we'll talk about all of the stuff that lobbyists do, including some good stuff too. ["The Nineties Call David Lasher and Christine Taylor"]

On the podcast, Hey Dude, The Nineties Called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, The Nineties Called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

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If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. Lobbyists, who are lobbyists?

What do they do? They are full-time, as Dave puts it, full-time advocates for their clients. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. There's no job description you're going to get, but you better be a people person. You better have great, you better have a stuffed roll of decks.

You better, you better be good at networking. Be super good at networking. Smooth talker. Yeah, you should throw a good party. Be good at fundraising. Yeah. And like we said, you got to know a lot of good people. You got to be a great communicator and persuasive.

One might say slick. Slick, I think, is probably right. But that, and that, I imagine that those are good qualities that haven't just about any, but I also have the impression that there are lobbyists who are just strictly grinding out research and stuff like that. Yeah, I think there's different types of lobbyists. Some are probably like.

There's the glad handers. Yeah, like the front person, maybe. And then there's like wonks, people who are literally like technical policy experts on a certain topic. Yeah. They know the ins and outs. They know both sides of it.

They know what senators care about it. They know what Congress people could be persuaded, maybe. They know everything about this particular issue. Yeah, and like up to the minute, they have to be really up on the very, very latest policies and laws. I mean, they have to be experts, like you said. Like inside and out, because they get paid a ton of money

to do that. Yeah. And there's typically three kinds of lobbying that people undertake. Again, whether it's the Girl Scouts or Greenpeace or the Chamber of Commerce or whoever, there's direct lobbying, indirect lobbying, and then grassroots lobbying.

And probably any lobbying group takes part in a combination of all these. Yeah, direct lobbying is when you can get a meeting with a Congressperson or Senator. Or their aides. Yeah, and you sit down with their staff or them and say, I'm experienced clearly because I'm in the room with you, and here's what we think

is a good piece of legislation. Right. It's good for the country. Yeah. Wink, wink. Yeah. So that's direct lobbying. Indirect is if you, well, what's the difference

between indirect and social? Aren't they kind of the same? Yeah, it's the same. All right, so that's, like we said, Sam Ward would throw parties. The king of lobbying. Yeah, he invented the social lobbying, and that's still true today. You throw a big swanky DC cocktail hour

and get people in the same room just connecting folks. That's indirect lobbying. Goosing them up with a little scotch, maybe. And all of a sudden, you're like, you just sit back and you're like, yeah, this is working. Look at them talking to each other. I love myself. And then there's grassroots lobbying, which is kind of

misleading, actually, because it can be employed by deeply entrenched, deep-pocketed interests. But it still appears grassroots and folksy, things like paying somebody who's an expert in a field or a recognized figure, maybe a former congressperson or whatever, to write an op-ed. And I mean, name recognition counts for just about anything. So even op-eds, and if somebody's saying,

if a former Treasury secretary is like, this is a really bad idea, we shouldn't pass this legislation, that's going to inform voters' minds. It also is a huge message to the legislators who are also reading it that Washington Post published this. So a lot of people just read it. You may want to listen to what I just said. Yeah, or grassroots, in the purest sense of the word,

in the more traditional sense, could be a small little NGO. That's all they can afford is grassroots campaigns. And sadly, the dog that barks the loudest is the one that's going to get the most attention. And you're barking the loudest if you have the resources to, I guess, get a bunch of dogs barking at once. Which is a really good point, Chuck, because in this article goes to great pains to make it clear that not all lobbying

is bad, that lobbying in and of itself isn't necessarily bad, and that there are plenty of public interest groups that are dedicated to serving the common good that engage in lobbying. So it shouldn't be outlawed. It shouldn't be cut off. We should figure out how to fix it. The thing is they found that for every dollar

that a union and public interest group combined spends, corporations or big business spend $34. Wow. 95 of the top 100 spenders were all corporate or corporate interests. So the field is very much skewed toward whoever has the most money or whoever is willing to spend the most. So to register as a lobbyist, which was required,

like I said, since 1876, and then a few years after that, they required that members of the press register because with the House and Senate, because they had lobbyists posing as journalists. So they had to take care of that pretty early on. But if you are registered, there are some things that you have to do according to the law. Well, first of all, you can't give gifts,

blatantly give gifts. Yeah, that's one of the things that got Abram off in trouble. All sorts of ways around this, of course, but you can't blatantly give gifts. You have to register. You have to file quarterly reports that detail the contacts you've made with elected officials. You have to disclose how much money you were paid.

You have to file semiannual reports that list contributions made to political campaigns. See, I have a question about that, because from what I understand, on the federal level, if you're a registered lobbyist, you cannot contribute to a political campaign. Yeah, maybe it has to do with like these $3,000 plate dinners or something, I don't know.

I wasn't sure about that either, actually. But you mentioned the American Bar Association. They, a lot of attorneys are lobbyists, often on during their career. My uncle was actually a lobbyist. Is that right? Yeah. Congressman, my Congressman uncle.

Really, he went through the revolving door, huh? Yeah, I don't know much about it, but um. Oh man, you've got to ask him. Yeah, I should. And I will say this, even though we're not on the same side of the political spectrum, which I won't even say who's who. Oh, he's a Democrat, huh?

But he's a good dude and an honest person. So even though we don't agree on things, I always felt like he's not taking kickbacks. He's not one of those guys. And I really believe that. Right. He's a man pure of heart. And so, in no way disparaging your uncle

for going through the revolving door. Right. One of the problems with that revolving door is not just that it causes this brain drain from Capitol Hill to the lobbying companies or the law firms. But it also makes Congress not really interested in passing any kind of lobbying reform or revolving door

reform, because pretty soon their term's going to be up and they can go get that job over there. Exactly. Yeah, because you don't, as a public servant, I mean, you don't make a lot of money. No, you don't. And especially, well, we'll get to this in a second. OK, all right.

But finishing on the ABA, the American Bar Association has a real interest in trying to keep lobbying as above board as possible, because a lot of them want to be lobbyists, and they don't want to be tarnished. And so, like you said earlier, they think the biggest thing you can do is to separate and have really strict lines drawn between fundraising and lobbying.

They think that's where it's the most corrupt. Yes. So get rid of the time requirement, the 20% of your time, to be a registered lobbyist. And just separate fundraising from lobbying. Yeah, I get the idea that that's where most of the hinky stuff is going on. So the thing is, that makes sense,

but it's also kind of like trying to remove a hornet's nest by picking the hornets out one by one. Yeah. Not the best idea. You need to smash it and set it on fire. Pretty much. And pee on the ashes. Actually, you should leave a hornet's nest.

You should never destroy a hornet's nest. So I know. Apex predators and all. I get you. So the other idea to just shut the revolving door or to just outlaw lobbying altogether, again, not only is that a bad idea, especially if you just did it wholesale out of the gate.

Yeah, you can't do that. But it's also unconstitutional, right? Yeah. So we read this really great article in Washington Monthly. So who wrote this thing? Lee Drutman or Drutman, probably Drutman, and Steven Tellis. They wrote it in Washington Monthly. It's called A New Agenda for Political Reform.

It was a great article, lengthy, but it just made a really good sense to me. Yeah. And it's too wonky. But I mean, these guys clearly know what they're talking about, these people. The long and short of it, and what they think is the problem, is what we touched on earlier, which

is staffing of congressional offices has been cut and slash so much, and there's so much more information now to ingest than there used to be. They just can't do it. There are not the resources to do it. So we have no choice but to turn to lobbyists to act as the experts and to write legislation. Right.

So they propose, and we have some stats in here, actually, that I thought were pretty striking, in the 80s. Around 1980 is when they started cutting everything. The Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Services, what they do is they provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers. There are 20% fewer now than in 1979.

And those are the very experts that were dedicated to serving Congress in a nonpartisan way so that they had all the information they needed to create legislation to actually make the government operate. 20% fewer than the 1970s. Yeah, so gone, gone, starting in the 80s. And then again, in the mid-'90s, Gingrich

cut congressional staff. Yeah, and while this is going on, it's a two-way street. Lobbying is increasing by it's staggering how much lobbying has increased in money and just human power. And then one of the things about lobbying is that lobbying begets lobbying. The more a lobbyist can get legislation pushed through,

the larger the federal register grows, the less ability any given congressperson has to read and ingest and understand federal law. So the more they need lobbyists who do understand it. Yeah, and so what you get is what we talked about, the revolving door. Well, actually that's politicians themselves going to lobby. Well, but there is a brain drink

because their aides are being sucked away by K Street as well. There's another cycle where there's no incentive to be a congressional staffer for very long because you're not going to make much money. I think they said the top 90th percentile of a congressional staff makes $100,000 a year. That's the top 90th percentile, which sounds like six figures. That's good.

DC is not cheap. No, and take out taxes and everything that the median income was $50,000. So you're making like $35,000 after taxes. You can't live on $35,000 in DC. And they found that the median income for a lobbyist in Washington DC median is $300,000. And that's pretty attractive, especially if you're in your

20s and all of a sudden can go double or triple your income like right out of the gate because it's the career path. Right, like it's laid out there for everyone. Here's what you do. Go work on a staff for a little while. Make contacts, which is invaluable. That's why you do it for a whole lot of money. And then, boom, you can get rich, make a lot of money

as a lobbyist. So Drutman and Tellis suggest first and foremost that the solution to the lobbying conundrum that we have now is basically equip Congress with the information, research, and policy experts that they need and that they can get the stuff that they're currently getting from lobbyists. And the way you do that start is just increase salaries.

And they make a really good point that you don't have to necessarily increase the salaries to be completely on par with what K Street's offering. No, of course not. Because K Street would probably just try to start to outspend and just raise salaries. But if you can do it so that a person could make a pretty decent living, they would possibly

choose congressional work over K Street because with congressional work, they're in there. They're like part of this machine that's really making decisions and policies and laws that are affecting the country rather than working for a law firm that's trying to get some legislation passed that will benefit this one corporate client.

So if you just factor in idealism along with a really good salary, these guys say you could attract the right talent that you need. So their recommendation simply, I mean it's multi-fold, but they say double committee staff, triple the money that they make, and you might be stepping in the right direction.

Yeah, and again, if you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a lot of taxpayer money. Well, again, if you look at what the CBO alone, spending a dollar on the CBO, comes up with $90 worth of places to cut government waste. These are good things to spend money on. Yeah, and you may have a cleaner, more legitimate government as a result too,

and that's priceless. Yeah, I mean they made some excellent case that in the 70s when the government had a lot of staff that was smart, that had a lot of institutional memory and knowledge, that they got things done, like the church committee and the pike committee, both of which revealed massive, horrible stuff that the CIA was doing, like dosing unsuspecting

Americans with LSD. That came out at congressional investigations that you do not see any longer. If you had committee staff that were well paid, they would hang around and you would have a lot more laws being passed, a lot more deliberations being passed. Right now, it's all fundraising going on.

That's what your legislators do. They get elected, they come to Washington, have their picture taken there, and then they go back out and start raising money for reelection, right? Yeah. And they're raising money from the very people who are working as lobbyists.

So yeah, all you have to do is create good jobs as congressional researchers. And you've got your lobbying problem largely licked. Yeah, I agree, man. I don't see any problem with this idea. It's sad whenever we dig into stuff like this, how, like I talked about the Insiders Club, how, I don't know, it just seems like

it's such a broken, messed up system. It is. There was another thing I read about something called rent seeking, which is where, through lobbyists, a corporation will go and just try to get a piece of the pie. Not for doing anything, not even necessarily a contract, but just say like a subsidy.

And like the fossil fuel subsidies are amounted to $37.5 billion in 2014. That was just stuff that the government gave, just money the government gave, oil and other fossil fuel companies, just for existing, right? And that's called rent seeking. It doesn't do anything.

They're not producing anything to generate that income. They're spending a bunch of income to go suck it out of the federal budget, right? And I mean, if you wanna talk about wealth redistribution, that's like the clearest version of it you can possibly imagine. Yeah. And that's through lobbying.

Yeah, and this is just lobbying. Like, don't get me started on things like campaign finance and all the other ways. That's another one we should do. Yeah, I actually wrote that article. Man, how was it? I'll bet it was depressing. It was depressing and tough

and it's probably way out of date. So we will update it. Yeah, it would need a lot of like updating. Let's do it. Campaign finance reform, big, big thing. Remember our presidential debates one? That was eye-opening. Remember there's like a whole commission

that like has a stranglehold on presidential debates and like they only serve, yeah. I have no record. You gotta go back on this too, it's a good one. Most of them I'll make, oh yeah, I remember that. I have no record. I'll be tweeted soon. All right.

Well, if you wanna know more about lobbying, you can type that word in the search bar, how stuff works and it will bring up this fine article. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this binge listening, colon, newest to oldest. Dudes and Jerry, by the way, I labored over that subject line like a publicist

and it's still awful. It's pretty bad. Is what Colin said. Pretty bad, Colin. Dudes and Jerry, I've been slowly making my way through the catalog of episodes and for any new listeners, I'd like to advocate for listening through them

from newest to oldest, in other words, reverse order rather than oldest to newest, which is how I assume most would listen. While the references to old episodes might be a little confusing, they also build a sense of anticipation once you get there. I could see that.

For example, I finally listened to the infamous episode on The Sun. You made so many references over the years to how bad that episode was, that by the time I got to it, I was literally laughing from beginning to end. So it becomes like a comedy episode at that point. Yeah, that's kinda cool.

You could almost hear Chuck's brain sizzling and melting as the episode went on. True. Mine did too. If I didn't have that sense of anticipation, your agony wouldn't have been as sweet. I like this idea. I think it makes a lot of sense.

It does. I dread the day that I run out of episodes and experience the withdrawals, the shakes, the Jimmy legs that will inevitably come when I'm jonesing for new stuff. That is Colin in Orlando. All right, Colin. Great email, terrible subject line,

but totally forgivable because of the body. I didn't think it was that bad. Yeah, it was poopy. Binge listening newest to oldest? Succinct? I guess. It's just like this, yeah, that's fine. All right.

Do better, Colin. But great email, Colin. Oh, but if he's listening... He hasn't made it all the way back. Well, if he's listening newest to oldest though, does he just make time each week to listen to the newest one and then go back to wherever he left off?

Oh, I don't know. Will he even hear this? We need to hear a follow-up. God knows when he'll hear this, Chuck. We need to contact him directly. I'm feeling a great sense of regret. I feel bad for him because he's just heading straight for disappointment land as he goes further and further

back in the cattle. Oh, man. There's some episodes I'd just like to just redo, which we have done. Some of them were like five minutes and they were cool topics, you know? We should just remove those from the internet. Let's do, I would like to redo the trolley problem one.

You and I didn't do, I did with Chris Palette. And it deserves like its own big, current, modern incarnation of stuff you should know episode. Maybe we should probably redo all the ones I wasn't on. How about that? That's fine with me. You know? Let's do it.

We'll call it the summer of Chuck. Yeah. If you want to be like Colin and get in touch with us and let us scrutinize your words, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web,

stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio

app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.