But then you read a story about how Toyota spent $25 million on federal lobbying, or how companies like Microsoft and Dell are mobilizing to preserve a tax loophole that diverts $15.5 billion from the federal Treasury, and it’s hard to refute Professor Lessig’s central premise. The truth is that anyone who spends any ­significant time in the political world knows that corporate money, raised and leveraged by lobbyists, is perverting any notion of good policymaking, as surely as ice dancing perverts the idea of sport.

The problem with Lessig’s indictment and others like it isn’t that they are too hard on lobbyists who try to influence the system. It’s that they’re too easy on the politicians who cave to the pressure. Those who denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling and call for radical reform of the campaign-finance system tend to present a picture of Washington as a modern Gomorrah, in which irresistible temptation lurks around every marble column. If you vote the way some lobbyist wants you to vote on his obscure amendment, you will be rewarded with mountains of cash in your next campaign; if you don’t, that same money may be used to finance a barrage of negative ads against you. How can we expect mere legislators to resist such titanic forces, knowing that a vote against powerful interests might well cost them their seats? If you drain all the fetid money from the system, well-meaning reformers seem to think, then politicians will have no incentive to bow down before corporations, and suddenly they will all behave like the statesmen we would prefer them to be.

Image Credit... Illustration by Human Empire

The flaw here is that if our senators and congressmen really wanted to be ideal public servants, they wouldn’t need us to protect them from their corporate patrons. Rather, they would simply do what’s right and face the consequences. That is, after all, what most Americans do when our work requires us to choose between our principles and our personal gain. Most of us would sooner leave our jobs than follow orders to defraud clients or falsify records. The guy at the deli counter probably isn’t going to sell you contaminated meat just because his boss orders him to, any more than your electrician is going to risk burning down your house by installing faulty alarms.

Most of the 535 senators and members of Congress do not face moral dilemmas quite this stark (examples of cash changing hands in suitcases are, in fact, exceedingly rare), but they are forced to choose, constantly, between their constituents and their own self-preservation. Is it really so outside the bounds of human nature to expect congressmen to serve the interests of the voters, even when their own ­re-elections are in jeopardy?