"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session."
-- J. Gideon Tucker
I spent a good part of my April reading the book "The Third House:Lobbyists, Money, and Power in Sacramento" written by Jay Michael and Dan Walters with Dan Weintraub. (It's listed on Amazon but there's no ISBN number for it.) Both Walters and Weintraub work at the Sacramento Bee and know their stuff.
The authors explain the rise, methods, and effects of lobbyists in California's capitol, Sacramento. There's plenty of history, along with juicy modern day anecdotes. Michael was a Sacramento lobbyist, and Walters' daughter is now one. (One wonders how that happened given Walters' consistent skewering of the state legislature in his Sacramento Bee columns.)
The last chapter of the book is a reprint of a series of articles Weintraub wrote when he worked for the Orange County Register. It details the saga of one "good government" lobbyist's attempt to have the California Legislature pass a recycling bill. This chapter brings to life the principles that Michael and Walters discussed in the earlier chapters.
This book is fabulous, albeit a bit depressing. From it, I've drawn the conclusion that regardless of how much reformers might be interested in "returning government to the people," special interests and their hired guns are highly adaptive species (think bacteria which mutate in response to antibiotics).
As the old saying goes, the two things you never want to watch being made are laws and sausages.
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