Study shows you are 231% more likely to meet your Congressman if you bring them big wads of cash

Thinking about taking the kids to Washington D.C. this summer to meet your Congressman and see democracy in action?

Well, you better bring a duffle bag full of $100 bills if you want to meet your Congressman. No, its not for the outlandishly overpriced hotel rooms and restaurants in our nation’s capital. Actually, you will need another duffle bag full of cash for that.  The duffle bag full of cash I’m talking about is the one you will need to get some face time with your member of congress.

That’s right, the days of having your family’s free photo op when you meet your Congressman or watching your dad call your Congressman a boob or a bum to his face are long gone. Members of congress are now using that time to whore themselves out to the highest bidder like the scantily clad women who used to work at the old Nexus Gold Club seven blocks from the Capitol. After all, time is money, money is time.

Money, and lots of it, is what gets your Congressman’s attention. So unless you have a big wad of $100 bills stuffed in your pocket you are not going to be able to meet with Congressman. A recent study by a pair of U.C. Berkeley political scientists published in the American Journal of Political Science proves it beyond a reasonable doubt that members of congress only make time for those who bring them money.

In their experiment, the pair of researchers teamed up with progressive activist group CREDO Action and attempted to schedule meetings with 191 members of Congress about an environmental bill. The two researchers, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman experimented to see if identifying the CREDO members requesting meetings as campaign donor rather than simply concerned constituents—had any effect on their ability to get meetings.

CREDO emailed messages to the 191 members of Congress that stated that about a dozen of the group’s members wanted to speak with the lawmaker, either in person or over the phone about the environmental legislation in question. The messages were split up as identifying the person making the request as either a “active political donors,” or a “concerned constituents.”

When congressional schedulers were told that meetings were with constituents, CREDO members were able to meet with members of Congress or their chiefs of staff a mere 2.4 percent of the time. When they were identified as donors or past donors, those meetings occurred 12.5 percent of the time.

The study shows,

“That is a 429 percent increase in someone’s ability to get face time with a lawmaker’s top staffers if they approached in the context of having giving money in the past. Put another way, members of Congress themselves were three times more likely to meet with people identified as donors than regular constituents. Similarly, people who want to meet with their representative in Congress have a 231% greater chance if they’ve donated.”