Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY’s hedged repair bill

> It was my impression lobbyists usually write the bills themselves

Here's a fairly recent example:

> When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it.

What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider

...as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well."

To add insult to injury, the same lobbyist was later put in charge of drawing up the rules to implement the law.

>More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . . Liz Fowler.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/obamac...

Once the implementation rules were set, she returned to lobbying for the health care industry, this time at Johnson and Johnson.

Liberal icon Bill Moyers did a segment on this for his PBS show and it was as close to being openly pissed off on air as I'd ever seen him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ5tj4cN9Jk

Laws are written in the US by the people who have time to write them: interns or lobbyists. Being a legislator is a crappy job where you have little time between fundraising and voting to read the laws you vote on, let alone write them.

If you want to make a change, show up and meet in person with state and federal legislators. And if you think, "there outght to be a law" get one written with the help of a few lawyers (who will do this usually for fun and for free) and give it to the the legislator's legislative director.

This sort of thing accelerated in the 80s[0] as businesses in the 70s saught to make lobbying gains as they have seen public interest groups achieve in the 60s an 70s.

Another shift, is that it was culturally considered bad practice to become a lobbyist[1] quote:

>In 1975 the rare hiring of a former member of Congress as a lobbyist made eyebrows rise

When you combine the two, along with the ever decreasing capacity of being a congress member, lobbying effectively supplants the duty of "law making" to a large degree, and thats how we end up with bills that are almost entirely written by lobbyists in the first place. Of course, this opens up the revolving door practice by lobbyist firms to retain their advantage by hiring former congress people, which deepens the entrenched nature of the power of lobbying.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150805124750/https://www.theat...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120524031659/http://blog.washi...

I mean it’s really about identifying rules that are anti majoritarian.

On the federal level, the filibuster is an obvious example of a an anti majoritarian rule that creates perverse incentives.

Going deeper, the way that the individual houses are structured gives significant power to committee chairs who gain power through seniority and fundraising for their parties, which creates centralized points of leverage for lobbyists.

What we’ve seen over time is that fewer and fewer bills get passed, and individual bills themselves get larger. This is a result of rules and customs changing within the house and senate themselves that have made it harder and harder to pass small bills, so everything gets rolled into monster packages and the process get more obscured to people who are on the outside.

The thing is that all of these rules get set by majority vote. Leadership elections happen by majority vote. Changing rules can happen without consent of the other house. The issue is that there’s very little understanding or focus on why they are important.

Bread and circuses[0] keep the population fed and entertained, and people will put up with a lot of bullshit from their government when those basic needs are met.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses