"Opinion: The Lobbyists Blocking Nancy Pelosi and Her New Majority She and her allies face some old, determined adversaries" From NYT

The article “Opinion: The Lobbyists Blocking Nancy Pelosi and Her New Majority She and her allies face some old, determined adversaries” by By Thomas B. Edsall 1-10-2019 from The New York Times is outstanding. Here are some excerpts

Lobbyists exercise this power across the course of a member’s career. “Whoever is elected is immediately met with a growing lobbying onslaught by the same big players,” write Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State and Tim LaPira, a political scientist at James Madison University, who have contributed a chapter to “Can America Govern Itself?” a book edited by Francis Lee and Nolan McCarty that is coming out in June.

Within the federal lobbying community — a $3.37 billion industry in 2017 — Drutman, Grossmann and LaPira write

a limited number of organizations at the very top of the resource distribution have escalated their political investments in ways that increasingly distinguish them from the rest of the pack.

This population of groups at the top of the distribution is becoming increasingly stable over the last two decades. This group of top organizations — which we call the top tier — is positioning itself as a distinct class.

Despite his right-wing populist campaign and his September 2017 promise — “Our framework includes our explicit commitment that tax reform will protect low-income and middle-income households, not the wealthy and well-connected” — Trump supported and signed into law the $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. This extraordinarily regressive legislation decisively favors the rich and corporate interests.

As the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has noted, as a result of the Trump tax bill higher income households will receive

larger average tax cuts as a percentage of after-tax income, with the largest cuts as a share of income going to taxpayers in the 95th to 99th percentiles of the income distribution. On average, in 2027 taxes would change little for lower- and middle-income groups.

The Trump administration’s drive to deregulate workplace safety rules and to undermine unions also reflects the impact of the Washington lobbying elite.

The top 100 lobbying groups represent 0.89 percent of the 11,272 registered lobbies, but they “consistently have at least one-third of the in-house lobbyists in Washington, and hire about one in five contract lobbyists from multi-client lobbying firms.” The way it plays out over time, according to Drutman, is that 90 to 95 percent of the top 100 associations and firms represent business interests, as opposed to labor, consumers, or environmentalists. The top 100 spent $1.047 billion in 2017, or a little less than a third of total lobbying dollars that year, according to data provided to The Times by the Center for Responsive Politics .

Raymond La Raja and Brian Schaffner, political scientists at the University of Massachusetts and Tufts, in their 2015 book, “Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail,” argue that legislative inaction inherently benefits the affluent and hurts the less advantaged: “A strong case has been made that policy gridlock exacerbates wealth inequality through a basic failure to adjust policies to new economic and demographic realities,” they write, like globalization and automation, which have disproportionately penalized unskilled and semiskilled labor.

La Raja and Schaffner add that

Partisan polarization tends to exacerbate problems of economic inequality because political stalemate makes government less responsive to the needs of poorer citizens.

In 2017, the most recent year with complete data, the top 10 lobbying associations — which include the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the Business Roundtable and the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America — spent a total of $291.2 million on lobbying, according to Open Secrets.

The stakes of this lobbying competition are substantially higher than those involved in picking individual candidates because ultimately they determine entire classes of winners and losers.

Instead of building solidarity, study after study shows that as the gulf between rich and poor widens, voters become increasingly mean spirited and hostile to the welfare state, progressive taxation and regulations designed to protect consumers, workers and the environment.

The stakes of this competition are substantially higher than those involved in picking individual candidates because ultimately they determine entire classes of winners and losers.

Instead of building solidarity, study after study shows that as the gulf between rich and poor widens, voters become increasingly mean spirited and hostile to the welfare state, progressive taxation and regulations designed to protect consumers, workers and the environment.

“People who have experienced higher inequality during their lives are less in favor of redistribution,” write Christopher Roth and Johannes Wohlfart, economists at the University of Warwick in Britain and Goethe University in Germany, in their November 2018 paper, “Experienced Inequality and Preferences for Redistribution.” They are “less likely to support left-wing parties and to consider the prevailing distribution of incomes to be unfair.”

In another essay from November 2018, “Inequality and Participative Democracy. A Self‐Reinforcing Mechanism,” Ioannis Theodossiou and Alexandros Zangelidis, economists at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, describe the way income inequality leads to political apathy and back again:

Greater income inequality alienates and discourages people from engaging with common affairs, thus leading to lower political participation. Yet, lower electoral participation leads towards a less equitable distribution of income. Hence, this study reveals a self‐reinforcing mechanism where the unequal distribution of income leads to political exclusion, which in turn leads to more inequality.

In other words, increasing inequality undermines support for a progressive agenda — the agenda most likely to improve the life chances and conditions of the least well off.

Online small donors have helped even the playing field for progressives somewhat. See The Class of 2018 Was Powered by Small Donors: But can they withstand the pressure to court special interests to fund their reelections? November 14, 2018 by Walter Shapiro from The Brennon Center For Justice.

La Raja of warned in an email that

A potentially larger challenge in any Democratic effort to reduce inequality is that allied interest groups and individual donors — as progressive as they are — focus on issues that are not necessarily about reducing inequality for the poor and working class. Instead, the emphasis is often on social issues such as abortion and civil rights, or protecting the environment.

Jesse Rhodes, also a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, questioned in an email whether Democratic donors support the goal of reducing economic inequality:

I think that, all things considered, there is probably more tension than alignment with this goal. To be sure, donors tend to be more ideological than non-donors, so donors to Democratic candidates and/or the Democratic Party are going to be fairly liberal on average. At the same time, donors, particularly significant donors, are likely to be fairly affluent, and therefore heavily invested in the status quo.

Democratic campaign contributors, Rhodes continued, would in all likelihood be

supportive of progressive policies that would reduce economic inequality at the margins — e.g. shoring up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, supporting increases in the minimum wage, and so forth — but I’m skeptical that they would be enthusiastic about more dramatic policy proposals that would require large tax increases on high incomes.

“Business groups are simply more numerous and better resourced than any other type of interest group,” Chen writes in “In the Private Interest? Business Influence and American Democracy,” which also appears as a chapter in “Can America Govern Itself?”

Corporations and trade groups are far more likely than citizen groups to employ hired lobbyists and former government officials, and the average spending of corporations and trade groups on lobbying and campaign contributions routinely exceeds that of citizen groups by several multiples.

Especially in the case of the finance industry, Chen writes,

there is rapidly accumulating evidence that campaign contributions deliver a definite and non-trivial improvement in the probability of obtaining a favorable vote.

According to Bloomberg, three major business groups — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Realtors — invested over $50 million in lobbying to win passage of the trillion dollar Trump tax cut.

The danger for Democrats is that intensifying public hostility to President Trump may hand them the White House in 2020 before they have fully cultivated a leadership cadre equipped to address the conflicts that have torn the party apart in the past — a cadre that must also be strong enough to do battle with the increasingly powerful moneyed class and its voracious lobbying elite.