> It's insane enough letting Big Corps lobby your legislature
Well, it would be rather pointless to elect to hire a representative to represent you and then not take time to make your position known with them. They certainly are not mind readers.
And you can't realistically remove big businesses from citizenry as those who are stakeholders in big business are going to bias their position to what benefits their business. Business is people, after all. ByteDance certainly has stakeholders who are American citizens.
So we make a best effort to register those biases for the sake of transparency. The only real alternative, short of abandoning democracy entirely, is to leave it a mystery who talked to their representatives.
Isn't it the job of the representatives in a representational democracy to have working mechanisms to understand what their constituents' demands are? Shouldn't such mechanisms be equally accessible to all constituents irrespective of their ability to spend $$?
Also, don't the representatives have pre-election issues based manifesto when they are seeking votes to get elected? Shouldn't they stay true to the promises they made?
> Isn't it the job of the representatives in a representational democracy to have working mechanisms to understand what their constituents' demands are?
The advantage big business has is scale. Big business, by definition, has many more stakeholders. This means that big business will be disproportionately represented by the constituents. If those biases weren't made clear, and each constituent's position was taken at face value, then the unified front would appear stronger than it would actually be if each actor were acting without those biases.
> Shouldn't they stay true to the promises they made?
I'm not sure why you'd want them to. The state of the world is constantly changing and new information continues to flow in. You will be constantly reevaluating your position in the face of new information. A representative will respond to that.
Representatives know that some segment of the population honestly believe that they are mind readers and will offer up some examples of how they might try to read the minds of those who buy into that witchcraft to attract their vote, but marketing and reality are quite different.
I have a representative who I agree pretty much on all issues. The problem though is that he is one of 435 people in the House. He can just vote for, against, or propose changes. But then will have to fight against those who will easily accept money to ruin it.
I'm glad that Pelosi is using her position to impose some changes on the bill so maybe something good will come out of it, but I really can't stand that in US bribery is essentially legal.
Freedom of speech. All they do is pay people to speak for them. They have money to do that. Gifts and other tomfoolery is obviously no good but I'm not sure how you could gate this without running afoul of the first amendment.
