The Hill News

It is a story as old as the republic itself -- a debate that traces back to the very beginnings of representative government. And yet with periodic predictability, “public interest” groups find it newsworthy to sound the alarms about the supposed infiltration of our government by so-called “special interests.” To support these claims, the Center for Responsive Politics recently released a tally of at least 130 current congressional chiefs of staff and legislative directors who are former lobbyists. Meanwhile, a front-page Washington Post analysis placed the headcount of lobbyists-turned-senior staffers at 150. But the real story here, if there is one, is not that these numbers are too high; in fact, I would submit they’re relatively low.

For starters, let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that there exists such a thing as an impartial “public interest” in the abstract. James Madison should have put to bed this myth more than 200 years ago. Ma! dison posited in Federalist No. 10 that the only ways to eliminate special interests were by “destroying the liberty which is essential to [their] existence,” or by “giving every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” To the extent we would countenance neither of these options, we had best resign ourselves to the reality that the “public interest” is nothing more than an aggregate of “special interests.”

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