If there is one thing Tea Party supporters hate more than government, it’s government by special interests. Alas, the lawmakers borne aloft by the Tea Party wave are now drowning in a sea of lobbyists. Most of those lawmakers didn’t know there were as many lobbyists in the whole world as they’ve talked to since their inauguration.

Elected officials of a progressive bent can certainly commiserate. Take the case of Tesla, the luxury California electric sports-car maker. In many states, Tesla faces barriers to entry in the form of state dealership franchise laws that prohibit direct sales to consumers by car manufacturers. Tesla has hired armies of lobbyists to open up these laws.

From the typical legislator’s point of view, there are three major interest groups involved here—the dealers, the major car makers (who sell only through dealers), and Tesla.

The dealers have an overwhelming interest in maintaining the barriers created by the franchise laws. Not only do all car sales have to go through them, but in some states, existing car dealers can block potential competitors from setting up shop in their vicinity simply by formally objecting to their license applications. That creates something akin to a government-sponsored price-fixing cartel among dealers, with consumers unwittingly paying a substantial premium above market prices in order to pad corporate profits. The dealers have assembled a fearsome phalanx of lobbyists to maintain this system.

Major car manufacturers, like GM and Toyota, are more ambivalent about the franchise laws. They would probably sell mostly through dealers even without such laws, because experience has taught them to concentrate on their core business and leave the peripheral stuff to others. Besides, the car dealers’ padded profits partially flow through to them, so they don’t mind the dealers’ cartels as long as the cartels establish a level playing field on which the different manufacturers can compete.

Tesla hopes to sell perhaps 2,000 cars a year in Texas, at least initially—far too small a volume to make it profitable to sell through locally franchised dealers. It would like to sell directly to consumers, so theoretically, it would like to see a repeal of the franchise laws and the advent of open competition, as in the hyper-competitive personal computer market.

The pure free-market position would be to repeal the Texas franchise law altogether. But lawmakers who proposed that would bring down upon their heads the combined weight of the dealers’ and major manufacturers’ lobbies, and gain only the support of a green-energy firm from California. So Tesla’s army of lobbyists is asking not for a free market in car sales, but rather only for a tailor-made exception so that it—and for the moment only it—can get around the franchise laws and sell directly to consumers.