[specialist]

Legislators are basically doing triage, responding to perceived consensus. Kinda like a product manager. Think attention economy. There's 10,000s of bills filed every year. No one has the resources or bandwidth to handle that.

Any given legislator has 1 maybe 2 issues that they care about, for which they will advocate an agenda. The rest, they rely on what they're hearing.

Intuit's lobbying effectively drowns out alternative view points. Assuming that anyone anywhere is consistently advocating for something like free auto-filing.

Source: Have lobbied. Know legislators and their staff. Also read many books about legislation. Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents; will bounce out pro lobbyists to give their own people an audience.

[refurb]

Source: Have lobbied.

Ahh... that makes sense why this is one of the more reasonable descriptions of how lobbying works. HN seems to think it works by guys in $3,000 suits handing over bags of cash to Congressmen.

Your point about legislators loving to hear from constituents is true - one reason why lobbyists are so effective is because there is often few or no other voices in the room. If voters actually organized around some of these topics they'd be surprised how much power they have.

[Dirlewanger]

>Most legislators would LOVE to hear from their constituents

Yeah, I'm sure that desire to hear from them is only up to a point, at which they love the lobbying dollars more.