Comment by andrewla
3 hours ago
> why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
Mostly because those things are directly illegal. Lobbying organizations (and PACs and SuperPACs etc.) are very limited in what they can provide either as direct monetary contributions or in-kind gifts to a candidate. The restrictions here are basically the same as those on an individual, but usually with more strict reporting requirements and lower limits.
The marketing aspect is the only thing that they can legally provide, and that's less a lobbying function than a PAC function, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign or the candidate on this.
Well a funding a PAC that supports a specific candidate/party who gets elected because of that effectively accomplishes the same thing. Of course the salary the company "buys" for them isn't exactly in the same magnitude as a direct bribe could potentially be (on the upper end at least).
> Mostly because those things are directly illegal
Ah yes, said politician will just host a $100,000 a head luncheon so nobody is “bribing” them. That would be dirty.
Yes, you're right, they could just do this, and then spend the rest of their term thrown out of Congress and rotting in prison.
That is, they can hold such a lunch, but they can't pocket the money personally or even have the money contributed towards their campaign. Pocketing the money personally is just bribery, having it contribute to their campaign would violate the contribution limits (typically ~$10,000 per election max, though less than that in reality because the limit is split between primary and general).
You're right to be slightly suspicious because these lunches do exist. But they don't go to the campaign or the candidate, they can go to PACs and SuperPACs or to the party. In tern, PACs and SuperPACs cannot give this money to the candidate or the campaign (same limits as above with higher reporting requirements) and cannot coordinate campaign messaging.
This is not to say that corruption doesn't exist -- just that this simplistic form of it does not exist. You'll have to dig deeper than looking at lobbying activities to find the actual corruption, and it's usually masked in revolving door arrangements, speaking fees, and bulk sales of vanity books. But none of that can go through the typical lobbying system because it's too tightly regulated and tracked.