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Melissa Harris-Perry: As with every single piece of legislation that's inched its way through D.C. this year, it's the Senate that wields decisive power. These days, it's two senators in particular. I bet you can guess which ones. That's right. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Raphael Warnock of Georgia. [banging sound] [coughs] Just kidding, making sure you're paying attention. No, of course we're talking about senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

These two nominal Democrats are significant stumbling blocks on the road to realizing the president's Build Back Better vision. Now, sometimes it feels like Manchin and Sinema are just being stubborn for the sake of it, but you know what? Maybe there is method to what sometimes feels like madness. Here to pull back the curtain on the big influencers that you won't find on TikTok is Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow at New America and author of The Business of America is Lobbying. Welcome, Lee.

Lee Drutman: Great to be with you, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm just going to hypothesize here that part of what is going on with Manchin and Sinema is lobbying pressure. Is that a reasonable hypothesis or way off the map?

Lee Drutman: Oh, that's a great hypothesis. There's some circumstantial evidence to your guess that both Manchin and Sinema have been taking a lot of money from some big industries with big stakes in this. Bill Manchin has been getting a lot of money from some energy companies that are a little concerned about the whole green energy thing and what that means for their business.

Sinema's been taking some money from the pharmaceutical companies who don't really love the idea of government being able to negotiate down prices for drugs. So, their positions seem to reflect that. Maybe, just maybe, these industry lobbyists are spending a lot of time with them and convincing them why we should go slow on green energy or why we should let the pharmaceutical companies charge whatever they want.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I want to take a listen to a little bit of that circumstantial evidence. This is Exxon's senior director of federal relations, Keith McCoy. He was speaking in a video that was leaked about Joe Manchin. Let's listen.

Keith McCoy: Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week. He is the king-maker on this because he's a Democrat from West Virginia, which is a very conservative state. He's not shy about staking his claim early and completely changing the debate. On the Democrat side, we look for the moderates on these issues. It's the Manchins, it's the Sinemas, it's the testers.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. So, I can see why people might think that's a smoking gun, but it also just sounds like good lobbying strategy. If you have a business interest you're representing, go talk to the folks who you think you can move.

Lee Drutman: Yes, well that's most of what lobbying is. It's not trying to convince the Elizabeth Warrens and Raphael Warnocks to suddenly change their position. It's finding the folks who might be your allies already. Manchin is from a coal state. He's never been a particular environmental advocate. So, yes, work with the folks who are already likely to support your view and give them all the resources they need, arm them with the arguments, arm them with the legislative language, give them the talking points and show that you are their best friends by helping them to raise money.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Why is that a problem for democracy?

Lee Drutman: Well, I think the real problem is that not everybody has the ability to spend $10 million a quarter on lobbying. I don't have that kind of money to throw around. Maybe this radio broadcasting thing is more lucrative than I think it is.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Us public radio hosts, for sure, 10 million, sitting around to get our interests addressed.

Lee Drutman: Right. Well, there's the problem, is that the corporations and industry groups throw around a ton of money and they hire every lobbyist they can, who might have any way of getting at Manchin or Sinema or anyone else, and they surround them with arguments. They shape the debate and fundamentally it's a resource game. There's just not a ton of lobbyists on the public interest side and there's a ton of lobbyists on the corporate interest side. Things get pulled in one particular direction often.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me a bit about that, because we were chatting a bit before we got started and thinking about like graduate school lobbying class 101. It's this idea that in part you're going to have this asymmetry of the capacity to collectively organize around interests for lobbying, that's going to benefit corporations, it's going to benefit those with the most resources, but what the voters have is the vote. I might not be able to get, me and my friends together, $10 million, but we might be able to get together 10,000 votes by organizing in that way. Does that not just all balance out in the work of representative government?

Lee Drutman: Well, certainly it would be nice if it did, but there's a couple obstacles there. One is that, given that we have just two parties and almost all voting is partisan, there's just not a lot of leverage that most voters have against the incumbents that they generally support, because most elections, most districts are lopsided for one party or the other. There's really just not that many options for most voters who are, again, mostly going to support Democrats or Republicans. Voters just don't have that much leverage in our voting system.

The second thing that makes it difficult is that most policy-making is somewhat opaque to a lot of voters, and that we read about a big social spending bill and we get the headline number, but we are often don't really go deep in what's actually in that bill, and who's supporting what, and what are the consequences of that. A lot of this is done through regulatory agencies or in very technical language that is generally the province of these very specialized in-the-know lobbyists.

It's also an issue where, frankly, a lot of staff are above their heads. They're trying to get above their heads on that, and they don't have the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge to really push back against the lobbyists. In many cases, it's the lobbyists who are writing the legislative language. In many cases, it's the lobbyists who are really shaping the way in which staffers and members understand the issues. That's because it's the lobbyists who are everywhere and it's the companies who are able to hire that expertise, many of which comes from people who used to serve in Congress and then decided that they wanted to make a little bit more money and not work all the time, although they do work hard, but not the way that staffers work hard.

That creates two additional problems, which is that voters don't really have a ton of leverage in a system in which most elections are not competitive and there's only two choices. Staffers have a challenge in really going toe-to-toe with lobbyists in terms of expertise and resources, even if they might want to do policy that's a little bit more broadly in what they think of as the public interest.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I want you to go down two quick rabbit holes with me. The first is you said lobbyists are often writing the language, actually writing the legislative language itself. For folks who haven't been working on The Hill in recent years and may not know exactly what that means, can you help us understand what you mean? They're actually showing up with language already written and handing them to our elected officials?

Lee Drutman: Yes, they are writing draft language that they hand to congressional offices. Writing legislation is complicated because you have to write stuff in a very legal way that works with the code. Most staffers don't write legislative language themselves. There's an office of legislative counsel that turns ideas into language that will work with the US Code, but the lobbyists are happy to provide that. Yes, staffers and members are not policy experts. They depend on others for that expertise, and most lobbyists have someone who they work with or themselves who can draft that language for them. That's very helpful to congressional offices because congressional offices don't have those internal resources.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Then, the last thing here, how is this whole process as you've been describing it, how is it likely impacting the reconciliation work on the Build Back Better plan that we've just been discussing on the show?

Lee Drutman: Well, this is boom time for the Washington lobbying industry. It's been one of the best quarters in a long time for lobbyists. When you do a major social spending bill, there's a lot of interests that have a stake in policy and are trying to shape it. You look at any major bill, the tax bill that Republicans put together a few years ago, that was a lobbying bonanza. You look at all the pandemic spending, that's a lobbying bonanza, and anywhere of the government is doing big policy, you're going to find lobbyists and lobbying interests behind almost every provision.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Final. I realized I need one more, though. Is there a solution to this?

Lee Drutman: The solution that I've proposed is for Congress to invest a lot more in its own expertise and its own capacity. Congress has fewer staff than it did 40 years ago, especially on the committees which used to be places where there was real expertise, people spent a long time really getting to know the issues. Congress doesn't pay its staffers enough. Work in the public sector is often just a stepping stone to lobbying. If Congress is serious about fighting back against the influence of lobbyists, Congress should double or triple the money that it spends on its own staff.

Right now, there's a lot more money that companies spend to hire lobbyists than Congress spends to pay staffers to develop policy expertise, particularly in the committees that could really go toe-to-toe with a lot of the expertise that is in the private sector right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Whoo. Lee Drutman, that is a tough sell politically. I absolutely get the policy relevance of that, but yes, we should spend more on ourselves. That is a rough one to pass at home. Lee Drutman is the senior fellow at New America and author of The Business of America is Lobbying. He's also got a new book out called Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. Lee, thanks for joining us.

Lee Drutman: Thank you, Melissa.

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