No puppet master over US politics
The sharper version of the problem, and the one that needs no wrongdoing by anybody to be true.
The lever
A member of Congress votes on matters whose facts are classified. An agency decides what that member learns, when they learn it, and what they may repeat outside the room. That is a lever over the vote that no constituent has and no election can reach.
State it as the general principle this whole site runs on:
Where control over a decision runs through the information available to the decider, the party controlling the information is a party to the decision.
The same test appears in Congress Working For Citizens applied to money, and in Foreign Intelligence applied to an outside state. Here it is applied to our own agencies, which is the hardest place to apply it and the most necessary.
What makes it different from ordinary expertise
Every legislature depends on people who know more than it does. That is not capture. The difference is interest: an expert who has no stake in the outcome informs a decision; a party with a stake who also controls the inputs decides it while appearing to inform it.
So the question asked of any specific case is not did they brief the member but did the briefer have a position on the vote, and could the member check the briefing anywhere else?
How a claim here gets established
The same discipline as everywhere: which vote, which briefing, what was withheld, when it was released, and who was better off for the timing. Filed as named problems with sources attached and gaps marked as gaps — Problems, cloneable from Open Data.
Where a member's vote is at issue, the vote itself is public and feeds the voting-record awards — Monkey and Llama. What an agency told them is context, and context never enters an award. See The Wall.
Also in this area
- No removing democracy at home — the three testable concerns.
- Whistleblowers — the only route by which this becomes visible.