No, 100% is not written, but yes some bills are written by lobbyists.

A good story my professor told me is when he took a trip to Congress, met his Congressperson, suggested a law that would help entrepreneurs, then sat down with him and they both drafted it in about 2 hours, then he took it to Congress to table it for a vote. It didn't pass, but that's how laws get written.

But then again, is lobbying bad? I mean, it's not stacks of money passed under a table, it's literally arguing your case. I mean isn't that what Congresspeople are there for? To hear their constituents concerns and desires?

Would anyone on HN argue that EFF shouldn't be allowed to spend donations they receive to do work that helps them lobby congress for say, privacy laws?

That's a good thing to me.

This is categorically false. If you want an understanding of what life in Congress is like, I highly recommend Mark Strand's "Surviving Inside Congress"

It's not categorically false, just false. Some phrases written by lobbyists survive in some bills.

But then wouldn't the phrase I was referring to, "100% of it is written by lobbyists" be categorically false because it specifically emphasizes the percentage and therefore the claim is false? If they had said that sometimes phrases or even whole bills from lobbyists get introduced I wouldn't have quibbled with it.

While the phrase has become used more loosely, I believe (could be wrong, of course) that it is best used to explain that the cause of being false is a category error. It's like the distinction between a type error and a value error. In this case, I'd say it's a value error. The value 100 is false, not the type, because we know that a nonzero amount of prose in legislation is indeed written by lobbyists.

Ah okay, this was really helpful, thanks! Not quite as bad of a language faux pas as when I was a kid and thought 'per se' was persay but I'm glad to know the difference

We need WHICH congress-person approved it getting into the bill. We have to VOTE OUT the congress-person linked to the evil riders to bills (Budget bills, Defence bills, etc.)