We are going to drain the swamp. It is undermining American democracy. Lobbying is arguably the American government's oldest profession. It's an industry worth over three and a half billion dollars, with around twelve thousand professionals and hundreds of firms, unions, trade associations and interest groups in the field. It's one of the main drivers of policymaking in the U.S., but people still don't know much about it. I think one of the misconceptions about lobbyists is that, you know, we walk around with bags of money and say, vote our way or support this or oppose this, that it's not even close to the truth. We want ultimately our policies to be based on the merits and we want as much information as possible as long as it is truthful and relevant and meaningful. Almost everyone agrees with that premise, but consensus pretty much ends there. Who gets the tax breaks and who gets the subsidies and who gets the bailouts and who gets the regulatory rollbacks that increase profits? Well, obviously, it's the biggest corporations and the wealthiest people at the top. We've got to get big money out of politics. There's no real oversight of the lobbying industry. I understand the complaints. I think they're unjustified. In ninety nine point nine percent of time. the pandemic has spurred record spending on lobbying in the first quarter in 2020. But public perception of the profession remains low. So how does this elusive industry work and is it as corrupt as it appears? My name Marci McSwain and I work as a lobbyist. Marcy started her own firm in early 2019. Before that, she worked nearly a decade for former Congressman Ray McGrath. Lobbyists need to be the most trustworthy people. You can't have a job in this town very long if you're trying to trick. If you don't equip the member of Congress with information that's going to be helpful to his or her district. Lobbying is an age old profession that dates back to when the Constitution was created. Experts claim the framers included the practice intentionally to make sure no one interest group became too powerful. The ability of individuals, groups and corporations to lobby the government was therefore protected by the right to petition in the First Amendment. But there's a sense that, you know, we're a large and diverse country with a lot of different people who have a lot of different interests. And there should be a way for people to speak directly to their elected officials and say, hey, you should support this policy or, hey, you should oppose this policy. In 2019, 12,170 bills, resolutions and amendments were taken up by Congress. Many more thousand were killed. With about twelve thousand professionals at trade associations in House unions or private firms. Lobbyists play a major role in American policymaking. I think there's a popular perception that lobbyists come in and do all this sweet talking, lay down piles of cash, lavish dinners and get what they want. And in reality, lobbying is much more boring. It's making the same argument over and over again, and it's slowly building coalitions. It's talking to lots of different people and then trying to build a case for your client or your perspective. You get to a breakfast fundraiser in the morning, then you go to work, you do your job and you go to lunch fundraiser. Then you come back and you have another committee hearing or a markup or you go start calling on your offices and then you'd go to a cocktail fundraiser and then you go to a dinner fundraiser and then you rinse and repeat. Jimmy Williams lives on a 50 acre farm in rural South Carolina. But before moving back here, he spent nearly 20 years in Washington, DC's political scene. Anyone that ever tells you that the idea of the money the lure of money is not there, then they're lying to you because it's absolutely there. Between 2000 and 2002, Jimmy was the economic policy adviser to Illinois Democratic State Senator Dick Durbin. He says with a degree in literature, he needed the information that lobbyists shared with him. I did everything from trade to taxes to budgets. If it had money signs on it, I did it. And I learned a lot from those guys then I learned over time that lobbyists will only tell you what they want you to know that I would say, OK, great. Who's Against you and I start writing it down. So who's against you? No no one is against you. This should never be a problem to get this passed because nobody's against you. And they would look at me like, well, we may have like, OK, so who's against you? Say it's part teacher, educator and a park lawyer is defending or protecting or trying to implement something people will say, we don't want lobbyists writing bills. you'd rather have us writing them than you would a member of Congress who has zero experience in the issues that you're dealing with? The problem is that there are only twenty four hours in the day. And these representatives, these senators, they may not have time or make time to seek alternative perspectives, and especially when those alternative perspectives are coming from groups or individuals that do not have the ability to make campaign donations. There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. I think America responded to somebody who goes to Washington owing no one anything. The more money you spend on members of Congress, the more times you get meetings. It's not about Democrats or Republicans. It's about the reality of money and politics. In 2019, about three and a half billion dollars was spent on lobbying nearly twice the combined budgets of the Senate and the House. But it's not only a large industry. Corporations are spending the most of the top 100 entities, lobbying 95 percent of corporations. Businesses are part of the American public. They're good for economies. I think it's OK to want a business to be successful. That's why you do it. Discussing those things is important to take to the Hill. It's important for elected officials to know how it will impact businesses, even if it is individually. The shift to corporate lobbying is relatively new. Up until the 1970s, corporations largely stayed out of Washington. Labor unions were much more important and special interest groups bigger actors than they are today. There was a growth of regulatory agencies that were created in the 1960s, in the 1970s. And so corporations began to feel that politics actually did threaten their business a lot more. And there was just a sense that the public opinion was moving in a more socialist direction and businesses needed to stand up for free enterprise with little oversight. The next few decades were a free for all for lobbying. When I was a staffer, I had lobbyists from every industry and this is back before the rules are changed. Big, huge dinners, thousands of dollars, expensive wines. I mean, seafood towers, you name it. It was all legal. And I would just laugh, giggle to myself, thinking do you think that my boss is going to be with you because you just bought me a two hundred fifty dollar bottle of wine? You're full of ---. The rule changes that Jimmy is referring to are laws that were passed in the aftermath of one of the biggest lobbying scandals in American history. In 2006, the Lobbying, Transparency and Accountability Act was passed and a year later, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. They tightened the disclosure, information and reporting requirements from an earlier law and set ethical guidelines regarding gifts and bribes. One of the laws also made some restrictions on who and when former congressional employees could lobby once transitioning to the private sector. Still, opponents say it's not enough. There's no real oversight of the lobbying industry. The disclosures are voluntary. The enforcement is basically nonexistent. The number of lobbyists who have been punished, you can probably count on one hand, if a senator tells you that they don't know how much money a lobbyist has given their campaign, they're lying to. The symbiotic relationship between campaign finance and lobbying is often contested. Following a 2014 Supreme Court decision, there is no longer a limit on how much an individual can give in total. The biggest one, they're all making PAC donations and even direct individual donations. So sending an army of lobbyists up to work Capitol Hill, To follow that donation is kind of the one two punch, you first give a donation and you next have your lobbyist pay a call. Looking through public records, almost every major entity who spends on lobbying also donates to campaigns. Wall Street, for example, spent over a record two billion dollars on the 2016 presidential election. I for one, if you said that every everybody in this country could not make a political donation, I would jump up and down for joy For that. And I think ninety nine point nine percent of my colleagues would as well. It's not us you have to turn to. It's the House, the Senate and the White House and anybody else who asked for a campaign donation. After spending five years with trade associations, Jimmy moved to the for profit firms. That's when things changed. It was very rewarding financially because I got paid a lot more. But at the same time, I was then beginning to figure out that people didn't give a damn about my knowledge of banking or of the real estate industry is all about checks. No one gave a damn about anything other than who I knew. And how much would it cost for us to write checks to get into those offices, i.e. campaign donation? And that was a big turnoff and I wasn't happy with that. Studies are divided about the impact of campaign donations on the corporation's bottom line. For example, a 2017 study found that the victory of the company's preferred candidate only increases the firm's value by 0.05 percent. But that study didn't consider lobbying. The Sunlight Foundation examined 14 million records from 2007 to 2012, including on campaign contributions and lobbying expenditure, and found that for every dollar spent, the corporation received seven hundred and sixty dollars from the government. The estimates are all over the place, but it's clear that lobbying works enough of the time. It's sort of like the old saw about the executive who who says, well, half the money I spent on advertising is wasted. Problem is, I just don't know which half. Big tech Facebook, Google or whatever are underestimating the furious anger of Capitol Hill. So it may also come as no surprise that those same companies are pouring a lot of money into lobbying those very lawmakers. One group that recently started appreciating the power of lobbying is the tech industry, dogged by their handling of consumer data, misinformation and harmful content. After the 2016 election, the tech giants entered Washington full force. In 2019, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple spent over 50 million dollars on lobbying. In the 80s, Microsoft was kind of the big dog and they were losing in antitrust issues and finally kind of decided, if you can't beat em, join em and set up shop in Washington. And that has been true for protection. When it comes to advertising and investment in R&D and all those things, lobbying is just as important as everybody else. You don't believe me? Ask Google. You're about to get slapped the -- out of them by the Department of Justice, aren't they? Google is hired up. Smart move. Very smart. Much of lobbyists successes are attributed to their deep understanding of the regulatory process and personal connections to Capitol Hill. That's something called the revolving door in politics. One study found that nearly 60 percent of retired or defeated lawmakers of the 15th Congress found jobs in lobbying. When I went to work for Durbin, I could have gone to work for any of those Democratic senators. But I chose him because I knew he's going places that put me in a very good place as a lobbyist because I knew the people would pick me up because I would have influence in those offices. So if I'm a corporation, I'm hiring Jimmy Wales. Are there rules in place to prohibit them from having the special treatment, things like that? Absolutely. Are they broken? Absolutely. It is an honor system type of rules and regulations that we we adhere to. Twenty twenty has been a busy year for lobbyists so far. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lobbying spent for this year's first quarter is the highest on record. Some of the biggest spenders also saw considerable help from the relief package. I don't care if you're a small business or a medium sized business or large business. If you're a trade association, a union, if you don't have a government affair strategy, you are going to be left behind. I will continue to point to the pandemic is a perfect example that if you didn't have somebody here with the relationships of speaking for you, well, then you don't you likely didn't get what you wanted or needed to help yourself. Lobbying is often criticized for its ability to tilt policymaking in the favor of those with unlimited resources. At the end of the day, though, lobbying is a profession protected by the Constitution, and unlikely going anywhere. Without a chemical company, How do you think you're going to get a single fruit and vegetable in this country? And whether or not someone on the left or the right likes it, that is irrelevant to me. I can go to sleep at night knowing that I have fed millions of children in this country through legislation that I have helped passed. Not all corporate America is bad, But my work that I did, I wouldn't change any of it for the world. Not a single bit of it. The most important thing is to get big money out of politics. One way is to provide public financing of elections and get a Supreme Court that really understands that money is is really distorting speech. It's not speech. It's actually drowning the speech of most people. Everyone always says you know drain the swamp and all these lobbyists who've been up there and for so long and the worst and I tell sometimes my friends and family, I'm like, that's me. Like, no, not you. You're great. We're glad you're up there. But I am the swamp. We're not working against anyone We're hoping to work for and improve the lives of people here in the state. Important role. And we generally try to do our jobs well and responsibly.