The Swarming Lobbyists

Tax law reform. Killed.

Labor law reform. Dispatched to die in committee.

Consumer protection agency. Killed.

Hospital cost containment. Gutted.

The crude-oil tax in the energy bill. Stalled.

There is normally a complex of reasons for the failure of a major piece of legislation to emerge from Congress, and sometimes it is simply that there is no clear national consensus behind it. But in these five instances, and others like them, the force that proved decisive in blocking passage this year arose out of a dramatic new development in Washington: the startling increase in the influence of special-interest lobbyists. Partly because of this influence, President Carter has encountered serious difficulty in getting legislation through Congress; partly because of this influence, Congress itself is becoming increasingly balky and unmanageable.

The lobbyists have grown so able and strong that last week a mere handful of them was able to kill another bill, one of particular significance to them. It would have required the lobbyists to reveal who pays them, who they represent and what issues they have sought to shape.

The bill, which finally passed the House in April, came up last week before Senator Abraham Ribicoff's Governmental Affairs Committee--and was promptly consigned to either imminent death or limbo by the lobbyists. Leading the assault against it were such diverse persuaders as William Timmons, the former Capitol Hill liaison man for the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Freelancers Maurice Rosenblatt and William Bonsib, and Diane Rennert of the Association of American Publishers. In a multiple assault, they first threw their weight behind a much milder version of the bill, which was substituted for Ribicoff's stiff version. Despite telephone calls from the President, even the soft bill was then stalled indefinitely in committee, since no sponsor was willing to lead a drive to get it approved by the full Senate. Declared triumphant Lobbyist Rennert: "It's dead, dead, dead."

There was irony in the spectacle of some of the most sophisticated generals of the vast new army of lobbyists, so skilled at casting the special interests of their clients in terms of the broader national good, now pleading so persuasively to keep their own operations secret. It was evidence of the extent to which the increasingly independent members of Congress have let the clashing voices of a multitude of special interests obscure their own sense of the broader national good.

Lobbying as such is scarcely a sin. Quite the contrary. "Without lobbying," declared three Senators (Democrats Edward Kennedy and Dick Clark, Republican Robert Stafford) in a joint statement on the lobby disclosure bill, "Government could not function. The flow of information to Congress and to every federal agency is a vital part of our democratic system. But there is a darker side to lobbying. It derives from the secrecy of lobbying and the widespread suspicion, even when totally unjustified, that secrecy breeds undue influence and corruption." Chairman Ribicoff observes that "lobbying has reached a new dimension and is more effective than ever in history. It has become a big computerized operation in which the Congress and the public are being bombarded by single-issue groups." He adds: "The Congress and the public should be aware of who's trying to influence whom and why and for what."

The Connecticut Senator's concern is justified. Lobbyists approach their jobs with more intelligence, hard work and persuasive argument than ever before. While fewer than 2,000 lobbyists are registered with Congress under a largely ignored 1946 law, their actual number has soared from about 8,000 to 15,000 over the past five years. Their mass arrival has transformed Washington's downtown K Street into a virtual hall of lobbies. New office buildings springing up west of the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue fill up with lobbyists as soon as the painters walk out. It is estimated that lobbyists now spend $1 billion a year to influence Washington opinion, plus another $1 billion to orchestrate public opinion across the nation.

There is probably not a single major corporation that does not now employ Washington lobbyists. Ford Motor Co., which kept three representatives in the capital in the early 1960s, today maintains a full-time staff of 40 people. Among the airlines alone, 77 have their separate lobbying staffs in Washington. More than 500 corporations, including some quite small firms, operate Washington lobbies, if only for the sake of what they consider prestige. (Only 100 corporations were represented ten years ago.) Of the roughly 6,000 national trade and professional associations in the U.S., 27% are now headquartered for lobbying effect in Washington, which has overtaken New York City as a center for such groups.

Apart from business and industry, 50 labor unions maintain their separate offices in Washington, often working independently from A.F.L.-C.I.O. Chief George Meany's 300-member staff, which occupies an impressive stone and marble headquarters near the White House. Politically aware action groups also have their lobbyists in Washington, including 14 that pursue the special interests of the elderly and six that deal with air pollution. Even the Virgin Islands Gift Fashion Shop Association has a lobbyist. Large staffs are maintained by such broader public interest groups as Common Cause and the Ralph Nader organization. Grumbles House Speaker Tip O'Neill: "Everybody in America has a lobby."

Why? One major reason is obvious and ominous: the ever increasing influence of federal law and regulation over the lives of all Americans, as well as over the businesses they operate and the groups they join. The Federal Government now has rules ranging from the establishment of whisky tax rates to the placement of toilets on construction sites, from the design of atomic power plants to the milk content of ice cream, from foreign arms sales to childproof tops on aspirin bottles. A single clause tucked away in the Federal Register of regulations (this year's version has already grown to a mountainous 32,000 pages) can put a small-town manufacturer out of business or rejuvenate an industry that was on the brink of bankruptcy. The lobbyist who gets the clause removed, or puts it in, can be worth his salary for 100 lifetimes. The very magnitude of federal spending--about $565 billion this year--reflects the stakes involved as competing groups try to get what they consider their fair share, or more.

As power has been centralizing in Washington, life in this technological age has grown increasingly complex. There is no way for each member of Congress, or even each specialized federal bureaucrat, to be sure of the precise impact of his decisions. Sometimes the consequences are far from what was originally intended. The ever watchful lobbyists are eager to point out such hazards, and they serve a vital function when they do.

Yet fundamental changes in the nature of Congress have not only brought more lobbyists to Washington but have also transformed the way in which they do their work. In its rebellion against the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon, Congress has reasserted itself as at least the equal of the White House in resolving basic issues of national policy. Congress now has its own budget committees with powerful influence over spending priorities. The lawmakers have decreed that when they pass an appropriations bill, the money must be spent; it is not an option, as Nixon and other Presidents often regarded it. In the aftermath of Viet Nam, Congress asserted its control over the authority to make war and insisted on a larger role in foreign policy. And as influence flowed toward Capitol Hill, the lobbyists followed.

At the same time, Congress has also reformed its procedures. It has stripped its once autocratic committee chairmen of their almost singlehanded ability to ram through a bill--or kill it. Power has been diffused to subcommittees, where even freshman Senators and Congressmen can wield considerable influence. As the seniority system has broken down, all members have found their jobs more demanding--and many of the oldtimers have quit, complaining that Congress is "no fun any more." This, in turn, has produced a remarkable turnover in membership (more than half the Representatives have been in office fewer than six years), attracting young, aggressive lawmakers determined to make up their own minds on all issues. Often elected from districts with no strong party preference, they listen a lot to what the folks back home are telling them, and what their constituents are saying is increasingly inspired by lobbying campaigns initiated in Washington.

While all those changes offer today's lobbyist golden opportunities, they also vastly complicate the lobbyist's job. Instead of cozying up to a few key chairmen or a powerful Speaker, the lobbyist must do tedious homework on the whims and leanings of all the legislators; he can never be certain when some relatively obscure member may prove to be the key to passing, killing or amending a bill. Lobbying now demands, as never before, highly sophisticated techniques, a mastery of both the technicalities of legislation and the complexities of the legislators' backgrounds, and painstaking effort. It is thus understandable that contemporary lobbyists relish tales of the simpler, if splashier, days in their trade.

A century ago, lobbyists could swing votes in the relatively sleepy town of Washington by applying what Congressional Correspondent Edward Winslow Martin in the 1870s called "levers of lust." Seductive "lobbyesses" were often more effective than bribes in courting key legislators. Asked Washington Journalist Ben Perley Poore: "Who could blame the Congressman for leaving the bad cooking of his hotel or boardinghouse, with an absence of all home comforts, to walk into the parlor web which the adroit spider lobbyist has cunningly woven for him?" But bribes were not ignored. By one estimate, at least $200,000 of the $7.2 million spent by the U.S. to buy Alaska in 1867 ended up in the pockets of Congressmen. Pennsylvania Republican Boss Simon Cameron, who served briefly and profitably as Lincoln's Secretary of War, summed up the financial ethics of the period: "An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought."

There may always be some members of Congress who can be seduced to trade their votes for bribes or women. The Korea lobby scandal is evidence of the corruption that may always endanger the delicate relationship between the lobbyist and the lobbied. Yet until the recent reforms in Congress, the modern lobbyist's most effective tactic was to concentrate on the committees where the vital decisions were made. A few decades ago, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Lobbyist Walter Mason helped labor's cause by getting Pennsylvania Republican Carroll Kearns so drunk on the nights before key meetings of the House Education and Labor Committee that he was unable to cast his usual antilabor vote.

More recently, Railroad Lobbyist Pat Matthews cultivated a rewarding friendship with former House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills. Matthews had a network of railroad men who knew their home Congressmen intimately. Whenever the secretive Mills wanted a quick head count of the House on any issue, he flashed the word to Matthews. Within a single afternoon, back would come a surprisingly accurate count, and Mills could plot his strategy. In exchange, clauses benefiting railroads readily found their way into legislation from Mills' committee.

You can't grease it like that any more," observes Michael Cole, chief lobbyist for Common Cause. "You don't have Ways and Means wired because you're a friend of Wilbur Mills." Or, more currently, Chairman Al Ullman, whose control over Ways and Means is greatly diminished. A decade ago, the A.F.L.-C.l.O.'s skilled lobbyist Andrew Biemiller would figure that any clear labor issue had roughly 180 votes for it and the same number against it. He and his aides had only to work on about 75 Congressmen, whom they rated as "leaners," for or against them or so uncertain as to be considered "wobblies," "shaky legs" or even "bed wetters." Now Biemiller figures that only about 135 Congressmen can reliably be counted on to aid or oppose labor's position, and some 300 have to be individually assessed.

If that fuzzing of ideological lines has complicated the lobbyist's life, it has also given him fertile ground in which to cultivate votes. So too has the decrease in White House leverage on Congress. This is partly due to the relative ineffectiveness of Carter's own lobbyists on the Hill. "I like Frank Moore," says one labor lobbyist about the President's chief congressional liaison, "but he's a greenhorn. He's lost in Congress." Carter's own mild approach to Congress is also at fault. Some veterans on the Hill vividly recall Lyndon Johnson's brutal lobbying as President. "What do you do when the President gets you on the phone and eats your consummate ass out?" asks Ribicoff about L.B.J. "He told me what a low-life bastard I was and how I'd better get right with God." When L.B.J. promised Tip O'Neill to keep the Boston Naval Shipyard open in return for a favorable vote, the Massachusetts Congressman was pleased. Yet when Carter implied similar home-state favors to a few Senators on the Panama Canal treaties, they complained loudly about unfair presidential arm twisting.

The new lobbyists in Washington have eagerly charged into the openings created by a weakened presidency and a more independent and less rigidly organized Congress. One of the most striking aspects of this new lobbying is the willingness of Big Business to join in. While corporations still somewhat squeamishly call their lobbyists "Government affairs specialists" or "Washington representatives," the fact that the heads of multi-billion-dollar firms are now willing to plead their causes personally shows their awareness that Government is not going to retreat from its intrusion into their corporate lives. "Fifteen years ago, the businessman was told that politics is dirty, you shouldn't get involved," observes Albert Abrahams, chief lobbyist for the influential National Association of Realtors. "Now they know if you want to have a say, you've got to get in the pit."

The most visible symbol of the business world's new willingness to get into the trenches is the Business Roundtable, composed of nearly 200 top officers of the nation's most powerful corporations (among them: AT&T, Boeing, DuPont, General Motors, Mobil Oil, General Electric). The group's policy committee convenes monthly in New York to stake out positions on pending legislation and plot strategies to influence the outcome. Often invited to the White House, the executives get their views across to the President. While in Washington, some stay on to buttonhole legislators. Says one lobbyist: "A Congressman is impressed by the head of a corporation coming in to see him. Before, it was below a businessman's dignity to do that."

Yet some of the more aggressive new business lobbyists scoff at the Roundtable, contending that the corporate bosses flinch from a real fight out of fear of union retaliation. "The Business Roundtable is the most ineffectual lobby in Washington," contends Paul Weyrich, who heads a conservative lobby named the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. "They want to compromise before compromise is warranted. They never want to play hard ball." James McKevitt, a former Colorado Congressman who is the Washington counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, is similarly scornful. Says he of the top executives: "Too many of them suck eggs with the President."

The most broadly respected business lobby is the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has far surpassed the once influential National Association of Manufacturers as a pragmatic power in Washington. As long as a decade ago, the N.A.M. was dismissed by one expert on capital powerbrokers as being lost in "a faintly fusty aura of dignity, lavender and the Union League." By contrast, the Chamber, operating out of a stately marble and limestone headquarters facing Lafayette Park, has come on strong. Embracing 2,500 local affiliates, 1,300 professional and trade associations and 68,000 corporations, it threw its weight behind 61 legislative issues last year, among them labor law reform, a consumer protection agency and public financing of congressional campaigns. It won 63% of the battles it joined--an impressive record in a Democratic Congress.

The Chamber's chief weapon, as is the case with all successful lobbies today, is the mobilizing of support at the grassroots level. "We've never felt that we as individuals could cut much mustard at this," says Hilton ("Dixie") Davis, the Chamber's effective chief lobbyist. "It's the folks back home."

The local pressure is skillfully organized by the Chamber. Four of its lobbyists in Congress watch the progress of each bill that is worrying businessmen, then send an alert when a key legislative action is approaching. The word goes quickly to 1,200 local Congressional Action Committees with some 100,000 members. Through the Chamber's various publications, the alert soon reaches 7 million people. Thus when Washington headquarters signals an "action call"--the time for besieging members of Congress with letters, telegrams and phone calls--the membership is ready to move. The Carter bill that would have created a consumer protection agency was buried under just such an avalanche of Chamber-inspired mail early this year.

The Chamber also mans six regional offices in which some 50 operatives study the quirks and pressure points of Senators and Congressmen from their area. They pinpoint what the Chamber calls "Key Resource People," who have special local influence with a legislator. It might be a big campaign contributor, college classmate or law partner. At a critical moment, these regional staffs are told: "Get the K.R.P.s into the act." The regional offices also clip local editorials for pro-Chamber viewpoints and dispatch them to Washington. Two volumes of newspaper clippings were dumped on congressional desks with heavy impact in the Chamber's successful drive to stall passage of the labor reform bill.

Though political conservatives and Republicans are a minority in both the nation and the Congress, conservative lobbyists have lately created highly effective links with like-minded members of Congress. Liberals have long maintained such inside-outside combinations under Democratic Presidents, and still do. Labor lobbyists meet weekly with Carter's congressional aides. During the labor reform law battle, the A.F.L.-C.l.O.'s Biemiller worked out of Vice President Walter Mondale's office just off the Senate floor. But conservatives had neglected such possibilities, tending to vote their nays, accept the anticipated defeat, then share a congenial drink with their victorious opponents. That is changing. "The belief that we can win--that's so vital," declares Chamber of Commerce President Richard Lesher. "If we stick to it, we can do it."

The key inside operator in the new conservative coalition has been Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt. Elected in 1974, he sensed that such conservative lobbies as the Right to Work Committee, with its large computerized mailing list, and a rejuvenated Senate Republican Steering Committee--unofficial counterpart to the liberals' Democratic Study Group--could combine to block passage of liberal legislation. He put that theory to work in 1975 in a coordinated conservative attack on labor's common situs picketing bill. To the astonishment of the labor lobbyists, the new combination stimulated enough grass-roots pressure to persuade President Ford to veto the bill--with a certainty that the Senate would sustain the veto. Since then, similar conservative cooperation has helped kill Carter's consumer protection agency, election day registration of voters and public financing of congressional election campaigns.

By far the most spectacular of the outside conservative lobbyists at the grassroots level is Richard Viguerie, 44, a Houston-born specialist in mass marketing, who has compiled a detailed list of some 4 million conservative activists. Operating out of a handsome office building in McLean, Va., Viguerie and his 300 employees man two IBM computers that can break out lists of likely contributors with details of how they stand on particular issues and what they have given to which candidates or legislative drives in the past. He considers his magnetic tapes of lists so valuable that they are guarded 24 hours a day--and duplicates are kept in a secret mountain hideaway. Indeed they are valuable. His company grossed an estimated $3 million last year from the use of his tapes to stimulate mass mailings.

Viguerie figures he will send out 100 million letters this year at a cost to his clients of about 22-c- a letter. His company nets at least three of those 22 pennies. More carefully targeted mailings go first-class and include a stamped return envelope for contributions; the postage alone costs 30-c- a letter. The purpose of most Viguerie letters is to ask the recipients to send their own pleas (postcards and wording provided) to their local members of Congress to act for or against a bill--and to send a donation to cover the cost of Viguerie's mailing. Says Viguerie: "It's a self-financing lobbying system. If you can make a mailing of 3 million and break even, what a success!"

Although he lost the fight, Viguerie takes pride in having dispatched more than 2.5 million letters against the Panama Canal treaties. He estimates that he was responsible for Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker alone receiving more than 100,000 letters urging him to vote against the treaties. Baker suspected the mail did not represent sentiment in Tennessee, ordered a private poll of his state--and found that 60% of the voters favored the treaties. He not only voted for them but worked hard to enlist other Republican Senators to do the same. Viguerie concedes that many legislators pay more attention to self-generated appeals than to a flood of obviously lobbyist-inspired mail. Nonetheless, insists Viguerie, "when a Congressman gets 40,000 letters on a single issue, he ignores that at his folly."

Labor and liberal lobbyists have no similarly sophisticated computer mailing lists, although they believe they nearly matched the conservatives in inspiring mail on the labor reform law--millions of letters flowed from each side, probably the largest total outpouring of mail on any legislative issue in U.S. history. Labor drew on its decreasingly effective but still formidable network of union activists, especially retired members who have the time and zeal to respond to calls for action from the A.F.L.-C.l.O.'s headquarters. The federation has 51 state organizations and 740 local units it can muster into political action; in all, it has some 105 separate unions and 14 million members. Yet it takes at least two weeks to energize its political pressure, unlike the almost instantaneous capability of Viguerie's operation. Says Labor Lobbyist Biemiller about Viguerie's computerized propaganda, "It's a goddam scary thing."

The A.F.L.-C.I.O. produced a film about the Viguerie system, with a narrator intoning: "This is a horror film, not the usual kind featuring haunted houses, creepy creatures, ghosts or ghouls. It's going on right now--and you are the target." Viguerie loves the film, has got a copy of his own--and sends it out to conservative groups to drum up more business for himself. When opposing lobbyists argue that Viguerie's letters distort issues in an emotional way--the Panama Canal treaties were "a surrender" and "a giveaway"--he does not apologize. His view: "You have to grab an issue by the scruff of the neck."

While the conservatives are gaining in the ideological war among the lobbyists, the once influential public interest lobbies are losing ground. By arguing too self-righteously for too long on too wide a range of issues, Ralph Nader has lost his formerly considerable effectiveness on Capitol Hill. Perhaps his biggest mistake was to rush out a series of profiles of the members of Congress--sketches so full of errors and misconceptions that he lost credibility on other issues. Indiana Democratic Congressman Andy Jacobs ridicules Nader. In a formal report Jacobs filed this year on contributions, he listed among his assets: "Name-calling attacks by Ralph Nader." He rated their value as "priceless." Contends Jacobs: "Nader has become a legend in his own mind."

Common Cause still has influence, largely because its retired founder, John Gardner, retains much public respect. Its current chief lobbyist, Fred Wertheimer, has offended many Congressmen with his public scoldings when they failed to vote as he wished, but another Common Cause lobbyist, Michael Cole, 34, maintains solid connections in Congress.

It is the new breed of bright and aggressive hired guns who typify the proliferation of lobbyists in Washington. Their approach to their jobs is individualistic and shrewd, their fields of specialization varied, and their specific results often difficult to document. Yet their ubiquitous presence has transformed the city. Speaker O'Neill, who does battle with many of these independent operators, does not resent them. Says he: "Give me a guy who has the smarts. That's what lobbyists are; they're smarts."

One of the brightest newcomers is Thomas Boggs, 37, whose clients include Mars, Inc., the candy manufacturer. Since Mars advertises to children on TV, Boggs was interested to hear that the Federal Trade Commission was considering a proposal to ban all television advertising aimed at children on the ground that it is inherently deceptive. Boggs met with a group of lawyers to plan a lawsuit against the FTC regulation. Then he had a different idea: "Why don't we simply go to Congress and stop this silly law?"

Boggs went to the House Appropriations Committee, where he persuaded a few Congressmen who were already angry at what they considered bureaucratic distortions of congressional intent, to add an amendment to a pending bill to finance the FTC for the next year. It stipulated that none of the money could be used to pay the salary of any FTC employee who spent his time investigating advertising aimed at children. The amendment was approved in subcommittee by a 5-to-4 vote and by the full committee, 33 to 14. When the bill reached the House floor, the amendment was deleted--but the whole FTC appropriations bill was killed too. Boggs is confident that both the bill--and his amendment--will return.

Dean Burch, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has switched sides and is now a lawyer-lobbyist specializing in issues that come before his former agency. His expertise enabled him to spot a seemingly harmless bill deceptively titled the Consumers Communications Reform Act as special legislation sponsored by AT&T, which would have effectively frozen out attempts by smaller telephone companies to give AT&T more competition. AT&T had proposed the bill under the aegis of a trade group called the U.S. Independent Telephone Association and had lined up 235 House sponsors, most of them unaware of how much it favored AT&T. Burch and a few colleagues, representing small communications companies, painstakingly sought out each of the 235 sponsors and explained what the bill actually would do. AT&T's proposal died in committee. What turned it around? "We started walking the halls," said Burch.

The American Medical Association's John Zap, a onetime official at HEW, is similarly shrewd in using the practical impact of a bill to switch a vote. When Florida Democrat Paul Rogers, who heads a House subcommittee on health and the environment, proposed a tough bill to control hospital costs, Zap quickly secured statistics on just how hard the proposal would hit hospitals in Rogers' district. Rogers then modified his own bill. Contends Zap: "That was a service to him as well as ourselves. He had not realized what would happen in his district if the bill became law."

Realtor Lobbyist Abrahams found a quick way to stymie overzealous interpreters of congressional intent within the Army Corps of Engineers. Congress had decided that any project causing the diversion of navigable waters should require a federal permit. The aim was to protect wetlands, and the statute was validly used to block a jet airport in the Florida Everglades. But Abrahams discovered that the Army engineers had defined navigable as any stream that discharges water at more than 5 cu. ft. per sec. That actually meant that thousands of small ponds built in tiny streams by farmers needed a permit. Abrahams only had to point out to key Congressmen that any creek "about 3 ft. wide and 2 ft. deep" came under the law, and corrective language was passed.

Contrary to alert lobbyists who make such useful clarifications of law, the National Rifle Association is an example of a very strong lobby that can aim concentrated pressure on a single issue so as to thwart majority public opinion. Despite polls showing broad support for gun controls, N.R.A.'s regular barrages of emotional mail have persuaded nervous members of Congress to reject gun-control bills 14 times in the past ten years. When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms proposed on its own to have all new guns marked with a 14-digit identifying number--without recording the owner's name--N.R.A. Executive Director Neal Knox alerted his lobby's sharpshooters. Result: the Senate compliantly decreed that none of the bureau's 1979 appropriations could be used on any such gun regulations.

Does Congress bow too meekly to the wizardry of the direct-mail lobbyists and their magical magnetic drums of computerized lists? Too often it does. It takes a self-confident Congressman to rely on his own assessment of whether the mail truly reflects the sentiment of the voters he represents. And while it is a cardinal rule of Washington lobbyists never to mislead a member of Congress in face-to-face argument, no such niceties limit the distortions many of the lobbyists deliberately stimulate at the local level.

There are other abuses in special pleading. Some Senators have willingly lent their names and their office letterheads to big mail campaigns, conveying the false impression that the pleas are endorsed by the Senate. A House subcommittee headed by New York Congressman Benjamin Rosenthal has discovered that hundreds of corporations have been deducting their grass-roots lobbying efforts as a business expense despite clear congressional and IRS declarations that they may not do so. A few lobbyists seem to be in an unreasonable rush to cash in on the money available in the business. Two former aides of Senator Ribicoff tried to start their lobbying careers by advertising their services to help Americans working abroad lessen their tax burdens --for a fee of $200,000. Ribicoff has denounced them, and their fellow lobbyists say they violated a rule of the trade: they were not discreet.

In turn, lawmakers are at fault in their dealings with lobbyists. Many of them hold annual fund-raising cocktail parties in Washington and pressure the lobbyists to buy tickets at $50 to $500 each. Congressional stars like Howard Baker and Warren Magnuson can easily raise $50,000 through these affairs. Democrat Lud Ashley, chairman of the House Energy Committee, held a bash in July and netted about $30,000. Lesser lawmakers barely break even, but can't seem to shake the habit of staging such parties anyway. "It's one of the seamy sides left in lobbying," protests one of the ticket-buying victims.

There may be more serious abuses in backroom dealings between lobbyist and lawmaker, as past scandals and the Korean bribery affair suggest. Yet on balance the relationship between the governors and the governed, even when the lobbyist does represent one of the nation's many special-interest groups, is often mutually beneficial, and perhaps indispensable, to the fullest workings of democracy. The increasingly knowledgeable and competent Washington lobbyist supplies a practical knowledge vital to the writing of workable laws. He does it at no public expense--and at only the cost of being sure his own interests get the fullest of hearings. All in all, that may not be a bad bargain, but it does represent a major change in the way the Government goes about the difficult task of trying to balance competing interests against the Constitution's demand to "promote the general Welfare." qed

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