Hey, I'm just a billionaire taking a supreme court justice on an all expense paid trip to a private island and hunting trip. I hope your letter begging for scraps from the political elite finds you well.
Even Supreme Court judges appear to be unable to distinguish between lobbying and bribery, so I'm not sure what your two simple Wikipedia links (without further explanation) are supposed to show?
The difference is pretty clear. Lobbying is trying to influence the representative, and bribery is giving money in exchange for some of action. You could argue that the latter is a subset of the former, but that doesn't mean the reverse holds. All the professional lawyers writing amicus curiae briefs are very obviously trying to influence the justices. Do you think that should be banned?
The problem with lobbying is that it's too easy to use it to hide bribery. Portraying it as "just talking with your representative" is disingenuous when there's an entire industry established to influence legislatures on behalf of corporations.
>Portraying it as "just talking with your representative" is disingenuous when there's an entire industry established to influence legislatures on behalf of corporations.
I'm not claiming that an individual voter lobbying his representative by writing a letter or whatever is equivalent to some corporation hiring a lobbyist, but at the fundemental level they're the same: trying to influence the representative. The original proposes that we "forbid [...] lobbying", but it's unclear what that would mean. Taken literally, that would mean banning any attempts at influencing the representative. Is that what we want here?
We could try to forbid corporate lobbying being turned into an industry, but it's unclear how to effectively do that without unintended consequences. Since corporations have managed to weasel their way into the rights afforded to citizens, they would argue that they should also have the right to lobby the government. We need to somehow disenfranchise for-profit corporations without harming citizens' ability to organize civically.
