Senators vote to keep themselves dependent on lobbyists

Lee Drutman writes for Vox about the Senate votes to keep staffers salaries low, effectively also keeping them dependent on lobbyist: 

The Senate Appropriations Committee voted this week to keep senators and their staff dependent on the expertise and information that lobbyists provide.

Okay, let me be fair. The committee didn't do this explicitly. But by ignoring the need for a long-overdue increase in staff salaries and instead "holding the line" on the legislative branch spending bill, the senators effectively voted to further empower private lobbyists.

Keeping staff budgets at their low levels pretty much ensures that staff turnover will remain high, and that the staffers who inform and advise the senators on policy will remain younger and more inexperienced than private lobbyists, and will be stretched far too thin to do much of their own research.

This means that the staffers will remain heavily dependent on lobbyists to explain policy to them, to give them ideas for legislation, to write bills for them and get co-sponsors for those bills, and to draft talking points for senators' letters, op-eds, and speeches.

This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.