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mrguyoramatoday at 6:23 PM0 repliesview on HN

> A revolving door of congresspeople would decrease the influence of lobbying

Make an argument that actually supports this rather than asserting it.

Most people who study this kind of thing outright disagree.

Lobbying in the US doesn't happen because we let people work in government for a long time, plenty of other countries do that, it happens because we are one of the only places that legally empower rich people to pay for the campaigns of elected officials and have one of the most expensive political campaigning systems in the world and we openly claim lobbying to be a right of rich people.

Political parties in the US yet again come back to just how absurdly expensive running a campaign is in the US, largely because we refuse to regulate it. Other countries don't allow candidates to run advertisements a full year in advance because that's wasteful and stupid. Candidates are beholden to the political parties for campaign funding. Even Bernie suckles the political party teat to maintain his seat.

If you don't fix that but you limit the ability of a politician to gain mindshare simply by doing a good job in congress (because you only give them two terms) all you have done is make it easier for rich people to control who can get elected.

Indeed, even the US system used to be better! The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan, with meaningful republican support, because there used to be socially progressive republicans! There used to be racist asshole democrats! When the Clinton government was cutting programs, prominent republican representatives from Texas were actively working with prominent Democrat representatives to maintain funding to the particle collider project there. But as America continued to enshrine the right of the rich to fund politicians, and continued to let campaign costs balloon to the point that only a rich person's super PAC or the literal party establishments could afford to run one, what did you expect to happen?

Trumps power over the republican party is fascinating because it largely isn't money based. He's just so populist among republican voters that he can unilaterally control who gets elected regardless of funding. This is generally a fucking bad thing, because trump sucks, but it's just a more direct version of what the Democrat and Republican parties have done for a few decades now.

Are you aware that both democrat and republican lawmakers spend most of their time on the phone calling and begging rich people to fund their next election campaign, even right after an election?

None of this goes away with term limits. All you are doing is giving the people who hold the purse more power over elections.

How good would you be at your job if you had to spend a few million dollars every four years to keep it? How good would you be if your company's competitors were loudly offering to pay that burden?