Matt Bai discusses lobbying and lawmaking in this Times Magazine piece this morning.

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.

. . .

Some amount of corrosive money will always leak into the system. But to borrow the old N.R.A. bumper sticker, lobbyists don’t kill legislation — legislators do.