Lobbying is Un-American

There is no right to lobby in the Constitution. Lobbying is not petitioning.

Petitioning was a public process where someone would ask for something from Congress in a public session. No money changed hands. Or they'd submit a public document to all of Congress signed by the petitioners. (See "Lobbying and the Petition Clause" by Maggie McKinley at the U. Penn. Carey Law School, 2016., also published in The Stanford Law Review.))

Petitioning did not include talking to members of Congress in private. Nor would it ever involve money. The founders considered paying a member of Congress to be bribery. It was even considered taboo to have a well-dressed lawyer, or worse, an ex-judge or ex-congressman, make the request. That was blatant misrepresentation.

Lobbying is trying to persuade someone to change their mind or adopt a position. It's a much broader category. It includes petitioning as well as other forms of persuasion, including exchanging money for influence in private, and being represented by someone prestigious or with a relationship to the public official. It was rare till after the civil war.

There is no right to lobby in the U.S. Constitution.

But pro-corporate forces have done a great job of infiltrating America.

On the site Constitution.Congress.gov with an "annotated" constitution, there's a page about lobbying that erroneously says:

To lobby means generally to try to persuade a government official... lobbying is a form of petitioning the government(2)

This is exactly wrong. It is saying that the large category is petitioning and lobbying is a sub-category. That's not true. The large category is lobbying and petitioning is the sub-category. Lobbying might be done in a conversation or over the phone, or even by writing an op-ed or putting up an advertisement. None of those are petitioning.

To petition is to ask. Threatening is not petitioning. Suggesting or arguing for are not petitioning. But those are all forms of lobbying.

The "2" footnote in the quote above goes to a page that talks about petitioning. This page also shows that it is much more specific than lobbying. While there are many web pages that make the same erroneous claim that the petition clause protects lobbying, this assertion in the Congressional site is unsupported.

This push to confuse the public and equate lobbying and petitioning is part of a long history of corporations trying to have more power than America's founders ever wanted them to have. See my essay Corporations are Un-American.