The Grassroots Lobbying Fraud - Shutting America Up
By Brad Smith Posted in FEC | Spotlight Blogs — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Included as part of the lobbying reform bill incoming Speaker Pelosi has promised to deliver within 100 hours is a provision which is simply not getting enough attention.
The lobbying bill seeks to, among other things, require groups to account for and disclose their efforts at grassroots "lobbying." This is a very dangerous development and should be opposed with all the white heat one could muster to attack McCain-Feingold a few years back.
Grassroots "lobbying" isn't "lobbying" at all, in the conventional sense. There is no "lobbyist" waiting to buttonhole members. Rather, grassroots lobbying means efforts by citizens, citizen organizations, and other groups to contact other citizens, and urge those citizens to contact their senators and representatives on an issue.
Read on . . .
There can be no corruption here - the ultimate result is citizen to officeholder contact. If that pressures office holders, it is the result of citizen concerns. If those citizen concerns are shaped by a "grassroots lobbying" campaign, that is exactly what the First Amendment is all about - the right to speak to fellow citizens.
Why do officeholders want to know who is funding opinion shaping efforts in their districts? Simple - they want to know who to pressure, who to retaliate against. There are a limited number of consultants, pollsters, and ad firms with the capability to run a full scale campaign, and they are acutely subject to political pressure. Many citizens have legitimate reasons for not wanting their support made known - think of it as why we have a secret ballot at voting time.
Moreover, you can bet your bottom that "disclosure" will not be the end of this. Disclosure is almost always the entry drug to outright prohibition. After all, it is disclosure that demonstrates the extent of "the problem" (whatever that is - here it is apparently citizens talking to citizens behind the backs of members of congress).
This is a fight that needs to be joined, and fast. The Center for Competitive Politics has a short entry today available here and a longer briefing paper here . Also see this editorial from NRO.
The effort to block this atrocious legislation is being led by the Free Speech Coalition (Not to be confused with the "adult entertainment" trade group of the same name, which is at .com rather than .org.). See also Lobbysense which successfully led the fight last year against the same effort but seems disappointingly quiet about the current threat.
I agree that "grassroots lobbying" needs to be protected, but I would appreciate a few more technical details on the proposal(s) at issue. For example, when you say that the lobbying bill "require[s] groups to account for and disclose their efforts at grassroots 'lobbying'," what groups are we talking about? What is the standard for constituting a "group" that needs to make these disclosures? Are there exemptions to the disclosure requirements?
I guess what I'm getting at is that I wonder exactly how many legitimately grassroots organizations will be affected. Any further information would be helpful, as I didn't really see anything of this nature in the briefing paper you linked to.
If you limit any group's ability to talk to the public, then you are stomping on the 1st Ammendment. If you at first only limit say, the Young Republicans and require that they disclose all their mailings and telephone calls to the government, then what is to stop a similar limit on any other group?
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
I stand with you 100% that the First Amendment does not allow regulation of this activity, and it should not be regulated. However, I cannot agree with your defense of "grassroots lobbying" as a good, decent, honorable technique. Sometimes it is, of course, but a great deal of really nasty, unpleasant tactics take place under that rubric, as well.
Having been in a government job on the receiving end of automated connection calls orchestrated by a now-disgraced lobbyist, I can tell you there was nothing "grassroots" and decent about it. A computer would make phone calls to local area residents on this particular issue. The recorded voice would give a highly misleading (occassionally outright false) summary of the issue, and ask the local resident if they wanted to complain to their elected official about the claimed horrible travesty of justice. If they pushed '1' for yes, they were immediately forwarded to our office.
I was able to speak personally to a handful of callers, and once I explained the entire story to them, they generally were accepting of what our office was doing, and apologized for the angry tone they had originally adopted. But I could only take the time to do that with a small handful of callers. Most left angry, incoherent messages with the receptionist (several hundred over a couple or three days).
Whether you call this "corruption" or not, it is not a healthy political practice, designed to actually help the public understand what's going on. In that instance, the funding came from a highly monied interest, but they were being funneled through a very moral-sounding organization to make it seem like this wasn't simply a paid campaign to protect a major profit-generating operation.
The public was not being informed, they were being lied to. The other side had a First Amendment right to lie to the public, but don't dress it up and call it an unmitigated good, incapable of being corrupted. It's not.
Would those people have even been aware of the issue if they hadn't been incited to call you? Aren't those same people more likely to distrust the info they've been spoon fed in the future and actually check the facts?
Even when this tool is used in an improper manner, it gives an oportunity for good to come from it. True, it can be a hassle for the people handling the incoming calls, but that's what you're there for.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
One should always make the best of a bad situation, of course, but that doesn't make the bad situation you are able to salvage is a good one.
*I* was able to explain the real facts to the callers, but our receptionist couldn't, and there were several hundred calls a day clogging up the switchboard. Your tax dollars were being used to explain governmental policy at a very retail level. This was hardly the only important thing going on in the office at the time; we had a lot of work to do. Why should the taxpayer have to foot the bill for extra staff to counteract unscrupulous liars?
As for people being less gullible in the future after going through this? My experience both on the internet and in real life is that gullibility is an incurable disease. To the extent that it would change their behavior, the likely result, even for those whom I talked personally to, was probably a greater distrust of everything said to them by anybody. While a nation of skeptics is good, we don't need any more cynics.
at a very young age. Basically they lied to me, I saw that the lies I had believed were in fact untrue, I became VERY skeptical of the lies they've been spouting since and I now check everything they say before believing anything they say. (Once in a while, they actually tell the truth.)
Also, tax dollars or no, supressing the right of people to contact others about political issues is a VERY quick way into totalitairanism. Of course that is often a tool used by the left and so I'm not surprised that Nancy would propose such...
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
I would at least be willing to think about it.
I am very tired of people who deceive, and who push a position on this and other blogs without disclosing that they are under a retainer to push that position. (BTW - I'm assuming that none of your clients are paying you or any firm you are associated with to oppose this provision; in the spirit of collegiality within this forum, I trust you would explicitly tell us all if I were wrong). I'm also so very tired of "citizen" groups that consist of a couple of PR specialists being very careful not to let anyone know who is paying their paycheck.
I'm not in favor of government regulation, and even less in favor of it when it comes to speech, and still less in favor of it when it comes to political speech. All the same, while any cure to fake citizen groups may be worse than the disease, the fake and deceptive astroturf campaigns undertaken by many large corporations and PR firms are still corrosive to the body politic, and are a very bad thing. While it may not be possible to outlaw them, any person of honor and integrity (are there any of those left in Washington?) would refuse to participate in them.