Lobbyists writing legislation
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Having argued that members of Congress vote as their leadership tells them and that the leadership listens to lobbyists, John Kiriakou added a story from his own time as a Senate staffer to show what the second half of that sentence looks like from the inside.

The assignment

When he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, he says, the chairman was then-Senator John Kerry. Kerry came in one day and told them they were going to start taking part in the debate on carbon offsets. It was only tangentially a foreign affairs issue, Kiriakou notes, but Kerry was the chairman and also sat on the Finance Committee, which was handling carbon offsets, so they had to do what he told them. 

Kiriakou went to his boss, the staff director, and said he did not know anything about carbon offsets: he was happy to talk about Yemen or Afghanistan, but not this. The answer was: oh, don't worry about it. The lobbyists are going to do all the work. 

The next day

The very next day, he says, these strangers started coming into the office. They took over most of the desks, and they would just sit there, log on to the system and start writing. Kiriakou asked who they were. His boss said: oh, these are the lobbyists, they're writing the carbon offset bill for us. 

That, Kiriakou concluded, is the way Capitol Hill works. 

The voting behaviour it produces

He attached the story to a description of how votes are actually allocated, which his interviewer had supplied from his own experience in a congressional office: staff sitting around a whip count deciding who could afford to vote which way based on who was up for re-election, who needed to stay friends with whom, and which interest groups were applying pressure at home. Kiriakou confirmed it, you are generally told how to vote, and it is based on when you are coming up for re-election and how much money you took from lobbyists. That is how they calculate these things.  

When senators announce their retirement and say the system is broken, he adds, this is what they are talking about: they are not free to vote their consciences, or on what is best for the country or even for their own state. 

The financing of the arguments those lobbyists deploy is treated in think tank financing, and the leadership chokepoint in the Speaker's office as gatekeeper.

See also

- The Speaker's office as gatekeeper
- Think Tank Financing
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- John Kerry
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Permanent wartime economy
