George Will wants to burnish his old-line conservative credentials by taking down a few liberal candidates for President, but I think he may have stumbled in his rush to nail Senator Warren:
Warren, a policy polymath, has a plan for everything, including for taxing speech that annoys her. The pesky First Amendment (in 2014, 54 Democratic senators voted to amend it to empower Congress to regulate spending that disseminates political speech about Congress) says “Congress shall make no law” abridging the right of the people “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” One name for such petitioning is lobbying. Warren proposes steep taxes (up to 75 percent) on “excessive” lobbying expenditures, as though the amendment says Congress can forbid “excessive” petitioning. Lobbyists are unpopular, and her entire agenda depends on what the amendment was written to prevent: arousing majority passions against an unpopular minority (the wealthy).
I’m certainly not a legal scholar, so perhaps there’s a ruling already in place against me, but a little old-fashioned common-sense will tell us that this is a bit of sleight of hand. When we talk about the people petitioning the government, we need to keep in mind that this is supposed to be an equally distributed right.
Now, let’s be a little nuanced here. I don’t think I’ll disagree[1] with the assertion that groups of people may come together to petition the government as a group. But characterizing these groups is important: they feel they have a grievance, they come together to address that grievance, and that’s the function of the group.
Most lobbyists, however, are corporate, and that, in fact, is the key differentiator. First, the members of a corporation did not come together to address a common grievance with the government, but to engage in private sector activities. Second, because of the first, those employees may not agree with their company’s lobbyists’ goals, particularly when those goals have to do with politics, and that is almost certainly part of every lobbyist effort. Objections to this statement are easily refuted through references to the fact that, no, information concerning corporate activities is not immediately, or even ever, available to the employees, and for most employees, quitting out of principle is not a practical option. Not when there are mouths to feed at home.
And, third, and most important, corporate lobbyists have, by definition, corporate money behind them, and that pushes the already-faux corporate citizens‘ voices well above those of their fellow … citizens. If common citizens cannot find the time or resources to make that trip to Washington, but are limited to their local constituents’ meetings – if those meetings are even being held, which some politicians haven’t been doing of late – will they be heard? Or will the lobbyists’ voices, more insistently brought to the fore by spokesmen replete with the resources to stay on the job all year long, have disproportionately more influence?
Not because of the quality of their argument, or the smoothness of their rhetoric, but simply because they have the staying power that money can buy, they have the megaphones upon megaphones that dollars can bring them.
And it makes for a very unfair “right.”
Now, whether Warren has the right solution to the disparity, I can’t say. The problem of unforeseen consequences could raise its ugly head, and it’s possible that this will exacerbate the problem of Very Rich Corporations dominating and even destroying the merely Rich Corporation, as the former will be able to get the rich government contracts simply by outstaying their smaller rivals.
And, perhaps, we should really point the finger at the members of Congress who have proven to be vulnerable to lobbying. Although how anyone would approach that problem, given the difficulty of the public detecting such undue vulnerabilities, is a tough question.
But I think Will, in partisan pursuit of points, makes light of a real problem, and accepts the ridiculous assertion that corporations are somehow citizens which should have their voices heard even more strongly than real people.
And I think that’s a damn shame.
1 Although it’s the sort of subject that deserves a re-think from time to time.
