The real issue is that politicians are shooting themselves in the foot career-wise if they try to close these loopholes. We need to reduce the incentives politicians get from action or inaction depending on chummy relationships with big business. A good start would be more rules around lobbyist relationships, and figuring out how to close the revolving door where politicians are given lucrative jobs/consultancies/speaking-fees/etc by these businesses after leaving office.
Pick something you’re knowledgeable about. Uniquely knowledgeable. Now imagine the Congress is writing legislation on it. Would you think your views might be helpful?
Let’s say you and a few other people are in the same position. Travelling to D.C. isn’t free, so you decide to--as a group--reimburse the expenses of the person who travels. Would this be unfair?
Scale that up to a full-time job, as an explainer of specific things to lawmakers, and lobbying makes sense. Barring lobbying would mean barring people knowledgeable about specific topics from organising to inform lawmakers. That applies to large companies as much as to the Sierra Club.
The trouble is in campaign contributions, post-service jobs and e.g. fancy dinners. These are closer to, or overtly, bribery. Democracy can’t exist without organisation and education of lawmakers, and that means it requires lobbying. Democracy also cannot survive in the presence of chronic bribery. These aims aren't mutually exclusive.
Lobbying, for its many faults, helps lawmakers (who are understaffed and generally underresourced) filter and figure out which opinions are worth listening to. Even the most well-intentioned / good ideas have trouble being advocated by one smart person in this system. You need an organization to attach to that gives you credibility.
Not saying that this is the right way -- and certainly often the less privileged opinions get short shrift in this system. A good government/political structure would give lawmakers effective ways to not have to have to rely on lobbyists.
But it is the system that has arisen in the absence of that.
In fact, the law is so strict in the U.S. that you can't even bribe foreign leaders either (see the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act).
That's myopic though. It's true your "clean separation" would "solve" the problem of regulatory capture, but it would simultaneously re-introduce the problems that regulation has successfully solved [1]. Society is a dynamic system of tradeoffs; solutions to societal problems that are tidy, good, and stable are ever-tempting chimeras.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
Who is "they"? Plenty of people do want to reduce the amount of money in US politics, but they come up against the same money that's behind the lobbying in the first place.
1. https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2091... see q32
The legislators who have the ability to change the rules around lobbying are at the receiving end of millions of lobbying dollars, and they don't want the money firehose to stop.
SCOTUS stopped them in their tracks.
A constitutional amendment is absurdly politically expensive.
This doesn't follow. The argument above is that Amazon is a amoral corporation that seeks to make money to the extent that the law allows. Amazon is not considering what is in the best interest of the country. It is acting in the best interest of Amazon.