[kylecazar]

I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.

Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.

[paytonjjones]

The same could be said about the judicial system though, right? Both the prosecution and defense are paid to influence the judge, and will naturally provide a biased perspective. But that doesn't mean there's not high quality information within.

I don't think biased information is a total dead end, but the onus is just on judges and politicians to tease out information from more than one angle. And often they don't.

[qwytw]

It's up to the congressman to weight all evidence and data available and come to well informed conclusion. If they are incapable or unwilling to do that that's a different issue.

> Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance

They are inherently incapable of identify all these companies or measure the impact of their policies on their own, though (which is perfectly understandable, well I guess these days they can use an LLM to make this easier... /s)