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The Elephant in the Room: Donald Trump and the Future of the Republican Party. Edited by Andrew E. Busch and William G. Mayer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. 183p. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

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implementation of the House Leadership and Open Government Act that banned personal gifts from lobbyists but before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Hence, during the act’s development, legislators could… Click to show full abstract

implementation of the House Leadership and Open Government Act that banned personal gifts from lobbyists but before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Hence, during the act’s development, legislators could not rely on soft money, and lobbyists had to rely only on direct contributions and fundraisers to show support or build relationships. By painstakingly piecing together lobby and donation records, McKay builds a dataset consisting of contributions from both lobbyists and the PACs they control and, to avoid selection bias, the senators to whom they might have given contributions. The resulting dataset is the first to quantify how lobbyists direct PAC donations, including their timing and size. The related analyses, which all are based on multiple hundreds of thousands of observations, show that health care lobbyists gave or authorized more donations than other lobbyists in general during the drafting of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and that these donations were disproportionately channeled to members of the Senate Finance and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committees. The final two empirical chapters of Stealth Lobbying contain some of the most compelling evidence of lobby influence presented in the book. McKay argues persuasively that introducing amendments is a low-cost activity for members of Congress. She also argues that amendments often provide organized interests with private or particularistic benefits. Hence, given the tremendous pressure for legislators to raise funds, the institutional context encourages rent-seeking (a term McKay does not use). Ultimately “members of Congress are skilled at framing their amendments in a defensible way... [but lobby groups] know they are the result of the lobbyists’ efforts” (p. 105). McKay calls these amendments “microlegislation” (p. 9). Fortunately for McKay, who was working as a congressional fellow during the ACA’s development, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee sought comments from the public about various options for reform. As a result, McKay was able to garner the requests or positions of nearly 900 lobby groups. Using software designed to detect plagiarism, she identified more than 200 instances in which a member of the Finance Committee introduced an amendment that was advocated expressly by a lobby group. Analyses reveal that “when a lobby group hosts a fundraising event for a senator, that senator is more likely to offer an amendment requested by that same group” (p. 126). But did any of these amendments appear in the Finance Committee’s final version of the law? Yes: in fact, campaign contributions from lobbyists or PACs were positively associated with amendments appearing in the committee’s final version of ACA. This effect is masked by the overall lobbying activity of amendment supporters, which helps explain why studies that examined only lobbying activities failed to find evidence of influence. In general, Stealth Lobbying is a work of tremendous scholarly value. McKay delves into the details of congressional lobbying to a greater extent than nearly any other study except for, perhaps, her previous publications on microlegislation. “Stealth lobbying” and “microlegislation” are original concepts that belong in courses and textbooks on lobbying and interest groups. Although articulating these concepts are themselves valuable contributions, McKay’s book is particularly noteworthy because of the consistent statistical evidence it presents for the influence of money over policy. She is correct to highlight the inconsistent findings of previous studies on influence and argues persuasively that finding such evidence requires delving into the details of legislation. (Nearly all the datasets are presented for the first time.) Fortunately, the most powerful legislators appear to be less moved by lobby groups. This “inverse pull” narrative can provide insight into institutional reforms but is the least developed of the theoretical narratives and is tested less often. Still, questions remain. In the final chapter, McKay does not sufficiently address the generalizability of her findings nor possible confounders. Surely, although she provides evidence that the content of the ACA was influenced by lobby groups, she presents her results as if they may apply to microlegislation of all types. At present, McKay assumes that all microlegislation is equally nonsalient. (This is likely a fair assumption in the context of the ACA, but is microlegislation ever salient at all?) It especially remains to be seen how the emergence of “super PACs” in a post–Citizens United world affects the efficacy of stealth lobbying. Lobbyists no longer control funds as exclusively as they used to, so their individual influence on legislators might have weakened. Finally, it is worth considering how lobbyists’ use of outsider tactics may have affected the trends McKay finds. In an article that examines group activity on the Medicare reforms of 2003, Richard Hall andMolly Reynolds find that lobby groups targeted the constituencies of specific legislators with advertisements and timed their efforts strategically. It remains to be seenwhether the insider techniques that McKay documents are affected by any outsider techniques that occurred during the ACA’s development. Nevertheless, the book’s merits far outweigh any of these issues, and that is why the book is likely to be cited by scholars of lobbying for decades to come.

Keywords: lobby; finance; evidence; lobby groups; microlegislation; mckay

Journal Title: Perspectives on Politics
Year Published: 2023

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