Pressure politics 117staff and research facilities to enable them to do this. They must be capable
of producing draft legislation that a sympathetic Congressman or Senator
will be prepared to introduce into the legislature and to sponsor its passage.
Much legislation of importance on the statute books of the United States
today originated in the offices of interest groups.
The importance of lobbying activities, and some past scandals, led Con-
gress in 1946 to pass the Regulation of Lobbying Act (superseded by the
Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995); a large number of state legislatures also
have regulatory legislation on their books. The federal Act requires persons
or organisations who engage in paid lobbying activities to register and to file
reports upon money spent in pursuance of attempts to influence the pas-
sage or defeat of legislation in Congress. Inevitably, the activities of interest
groups who wish to influence the legislature will shade off from the purely
laudable functions of providing valuable information for Congressmen and
channelling opinions to the legislature, to the outright use of bribery and
inducements. In 2004 the whole question of the role of lobbyists was height-
ened by disclosures about the activities of a prominent lobbyist in Washing-
ton, Jack Abramoff, who was accused of making payments of various kinds
to a number of Senators and Congressmen in order to get support for the
legislative aims of his clients. In January 2006 Abramoff pleaded guilty to a
number of charges, including conspiracy to bribe public officials, and investi-
gations into the behaviour of a number of legislators were begun. A group of
Senators and Congressmen, both Republican and Democrat, proposed new
legislation including a ban on gifts, free meals and privately financed travel
for members of Congress.
The importance to interest groups of making a direct impact on the deci-
sions of the legislature follows from the fact that, as will become clear later
on, the Congress of the United States exercises more effective decision-mak-
ing power than any other Western legislature. But the concern of interest
groups with government decisions does not end with the legislature. Admin-
istrative agencies, and particularly the independent regulatory commissions,
daily make decisions of great importance, in some cases involving the fate of
commercial activities amounting to millions of dollars. On the decision of a
government agency depends the granting of a licence for a television station
or to operate an airline, the prices to be charged by companies producing
electric power or running a railroad, or the authority to make a large issue
of securities. Inevitably, the groups interested in such decisions attempt to
ensure that their interest is represented to the authority concerned. Equally
inevitable is the feeling that these agencies, set up to regulate an industry, in
practice become too closely associated with it and too responsive to its needs
rather than to those of the general public. Charges have been made of exces-
sive entertaining of members of government commissions by companies with
an interest in the decisions to be made by these members, of the provision of
free transport by airline companies, of gifts of television sets by broadcasting
companies, and in one case at least of the payment of an outright bribe.