While I recognize that lobbying is a legitimate part of the democratic process, I also recognize that it provides an avenue by which various interests can exert undue influence in politics, often to the detriment of the general good.
I am not so foolish as to advocate banning lobbying. As I have noted, it does have a legitimate place in the process. Also it would almost certainly be all but impossible to get rid of the lobbying machinery. However, I do contend that the harmful aspects of lobbying can be reduced.
One serious problem with lobbying and its associated influence (such as corporations and other interests literally writing legislation) is that the lobbying activities are not transparent and made readily available to the public. As might be imagined, if lobbying activities were made readily available to the public, then this would have some influence on the nature of lobbying. At the very least we would know the prices at which our government is being bought and sold.
To this end I would propose that all lobbying activities involving public officials be made a matter of public record. This would include emails, meetings, letters, phone conversations, texts and so on. With today’s technology, it would be a simple matter to record meetings on video, to record phone conversations and so on. This information would the be posted on a site called lobbyist.gov. The main page for the site would have a link to individual pages for each member of congress. Each individual page would have a list of all the lobbyists who have lobbied the congressperson as well as links to records of all the lobbying. It would be mandated that the site be designed to be clearly and easily navigable so that the records could not be obscured or hidden. There would also be a large money counter for each congressperson which would track the amount of monetary value received from lobbyists and the interests they represent.
It might be objected that lobbyists have a right to secrecy. The obvious reply is that lobbyists might, but public officials do not. They are, after all, public officials. Hence, the interaction between the lobbyists and the public officials in their professional capacity would thus seem to be something that the people have a right to know about.
It might also be objected that some matters might fall under areas of legitimate secrecy, such as national security. Thus, any lobbyist who can claim this would have the right to lobby in secret. The obvious reply is that while dealings between congresspeople and certain interests (such as defense contractors) might legitimately involve secrecy, this would clearly not cover lobbying attempts. After all, while a defense contractor describing a top secret weapon would be a legitimate matter for secrecy, the process of lobbying congress to spend billions in public money on that contractor would not be a legitimate matter of secrecy.
I imagine that lobbyists would, of course, try to stuff as much secret lobbying as they could under the cloak of national security. However, this would still limit the illegitimate secrecy in substantial ways and the lobbying report should still include a report of secret lobbying that lists the name of the company and the fact that the lobbying activities were made secret for “national security” or whatever. This secrecy should also be subject to independent review to try to reduce (however slightly) the inevitable abuse of the national security loophole.
The requirement for transparent lobbying would need to be backed up with penalties that would be sufficient to motivate lobbyists and congresspeople to follow the laws. After all, if the penalty was an ethical censure or a small fine, most congresspeople would simple break the rules relentlessly. One reasonable penalty is that violation of the transparency rules would result in the interest being served by the lobbyist(s) in question being banned from lobbying for an extended period of time and that the offending congressperson would also not be allowed to interact with lobbyists for a set amount of time per violation.
As might be imagined, opposing this sort of transparency is something both parties can agree on.
