Glenn Fellows visit SCOTUS

Yesterday the Glenn Fellows visited the Supreme Court of the United States. Afterwards, they had a conversation with a reporter who covers the Court, Lawrence Hurley of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Here is a link to Lawrence's blog, Washington Briefs: http://washingtonbriefs.com/

During the seminar, we talked about Mann and Ornstein's indictment of Congress, The Broken Branch. And we welcomed Stacy Rastauskas, OSU's Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations, who aregued that lobbying is a noble profession. (Last quarter's speaker on this subject, Jane Hoover, formerly of Proctor & Gamble, said that she always thought of herself as being in the "education" business.) Coincidentally, Roll Call ran a piece today about lobbying that included a table listing the twenty biggest spenders during the first half of 2010. The listing reveals, not surprisingly, that intense lobbying activity, much as Madison anticipated, is a largely defensive maneuver on the part of threatened minority interests. The American Beverage Association, for example, is in ninth place on Roll Call's 2010 list. A year ago, before there was much talk about taxing sugary drinks, the American Beverage Association ranked 212th.