Item — HN Reader

I used to work on the Hill. This is bullshit. Lobbyist input is taken into account, but "writing an entire law" is more of an exception to the rule.

What's with the conspiratorial cynicism of the American political system on this board?

@Dang - most of the commentators are also new to HN. I feel like I've brought up this issue before.

edit: removing unconstructive snark from post

3 comments

My ex used to work at several congress committees during the drafting of Obamacare and then later financial regulation after the 2008 crash. The lobbyists maybe didn’t write the laws from scratch but they certainly rewrote important sections of Obamacare that dealt with cost reduction and the bank lobbyists also got to remove a lot of provisions the banks didn’t like. A lot of smaller bills that are brought up in the House are almost verbatim from what lobbyists submitted to a representative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_act

> Many American special interest groups draft model acts which they lobby lawmakers to pass. In particular, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has successfully gotten hundreds of model acts passed since 2010.

Model Acts exist, but they are an exception to the rule, also they are aimed at State Legislatures, not Federal. In addition, they serve a valid purpose to harmonize laws. For example, the CDC's state level emergency acts are all Model Acts, as well as a lot of other Federal-Local legislation.

The practice absolutely occurs federally. https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/11/11/24397...

No offense, but I worked on the Hill as a Staffer and activiely worked on helping draft legislation. Having a front-end developer with no legislative experience trying to explain my former job to me and how we actively wrote legislation is a bit jarring.

Also, I never said it didn't exist - I said it's more common at the state level than the federal level

"I worked as an individual staffer in 1/538 offices" isn't a great refutation for reputable news reporting; I certainly wouldn't be surprised by lobbyists targeting specific receptive legislators for the tactic. We've got plenty of incontrovertible evidence of lobbyists getting their precise language into bills; a staffer is quoted in the NPR article with a very different opinion than the one you're espousing.

(I'm not a front-end dev, incidentally. That's my absolute least favorite part of the web.)

I know Lee. I also have close friends and ex-colleagues of mine who work at the New America Foundation. Ironically, they also lobby and help write legislation (by your definition).

For example, a lot of the current anti-trust bills coming in the House and separately being spearheaded by Lina Khan in the FTC are directly out of the work the New America Foundation did (I 100% support their cause btw - this statement isn't trying to tar and smear them).

There is stuff to complain about how lobbying is managed in the US, but the take in this entire thread is off and arguing something entirely tangential.

The sophomoric cynicism you describe is widespread in American society, but I notice it can be particularly bad among engineers, who seem to have a real arrogance in thinking they know more about how other domains operate than they actually do.

Amen to that. I've seen a lot of bad takes by people on here who support politicians on either side of the aisle.

Most commentators here on HN honestly suck at anything social sciences related and it 100% is Reddit level discourse - which is not something a board should aspire to be.

I think being cynical about what's going on in DC is a way to show respect for the intelligence of the lawmakers. I don't think any of them really believe a lot of their own statements but just say and do what's tactically best to appease donors and get reelected.