Lobbying Reform: A (Mostly) Pointless Ballet

Japanese Kabuki was widely used as a metaphor for the Alito confirmation hearings. It is even more aptly applied to the current efforts to "reform" Congressional relations with lobbyists.

Courtesy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kabuki is a:

Popular Japanese entertainment that combines music, dance, and mime in highly stylized performances. . . . The lyrical but fast-moving and acrobatic plays, noted for their spectacular staging, elaborate costumes, and striking makeup in place of masks, are vehicles in which the actors demonstrate a wide range of skills.

Is that not an apt description of what is going on in Washington now regarding lobbyists?

It is very hard to believe that these efforts will actually make a difference. Will there be new rules? Sure. Will some sort of reporting and oversight functions be added? Probably. Will any of these "reforms" make any substantive difference? Not likely.

This effort seems remarkably similar to the periodic debate around campaign finance reform. Every decade or so we have a paroxysm of national angst of over the role money plays in election campaigns. This leads to editorials, press conferences, hand-wringing, righteous indignation, hearings and ultimately legislation. But it takes the political parties about a week after the new rules are established to find and implement new ways of doing the exact same things. And they inevitably succeed.

The same phenomenon occurs -- for the same reasons -- in our periodic crusades against Congressional influence peddling.

The incentives involved applying money to politics are enormous: money begets power, which begets more money, which begets more power, and so on. Laws are bad mechanisms for dealing with such incentives. They are, literally, sitting ducks. As soon as a given requirement is written down, armies of very smart people set about finding the loopholes or oversights or omissions (both intentional and inadvertent) that provide new routes to doing the same old things. The law is no more capable of protecting us from the influence money has on politics than the Maginot Line was capable of protecting France from Germany.

I do not mean to suggest that the periodic indignation and breast beating on these issues is totally useless. But their utility is entirely normative. Do not expect new rules to eliminate the problem. They won't. But the public angst does tend to remind the politicians that people care about this type of thing. And those periodic reminders do tend to keep the politicians -- well, at least most of them -- from going too far off the rails.

We cannot hope to legislate integrity any more than we can hope to legislate morality. In the end, we have to rely on the consciences of the people we elect, and punish at the polls (and in court in those rare cases in which prosecution becomes possible) those who betray that trust. Beyond that, the most we can do is provide the politicians with periodic reminders that we do care about honesty in government.