No, they did not and no we would not.
If you have evidence of Apple or Google cutting a cheque to any lawmaker, personally, I'll commit here and now to paying you six figures for it, because it's worth ten times that much in the open.
https://www.opensecrets.org/search?order=desc&q=apple&sort=A...
$140,000 to a John Harris Whitmire. Apparently he's "an American attorney and politician who is the 63rd mayor of Houston, Texas" according to Wikipedia.
I'm not arguing it doesn't buy influence. It does, though not in the form popularly conceived. But it's not bribery. Cheapening bribery by conflating it with campaign finance, or worse, lobbying in general isn't intellectually honest.
A personal election campaign is presumably something in your personal interest, and money is fungible.
> I'm not arguing it doesn't buy influence. It does, though not in the form popularly conceived. But it's not bribery. Cheapening bribery by conflating it with campaign finance, or worse, lobbying in general isn't intellectually honest.
On the contrary, giving in to the sophistry that says that this particular system of organised and regulated bribery is somehow not bribery is intellectual dishonesty. Yes there are some relevant differences between this and other forms of bribery, but the similarities are stronger.
> If you have evidence of Apple or Google cutting a cheque to any lawmaker
And then
> That's a campaign donation
Use newspeak and call it whatever you want, it is VERY clear MONEY WAS PAID TO A LAWMAKER, which is EXACTLY what you wanted evidence of. This very clearly means you need to cut me a 6 figure cheque.
Again, other countries very clearly call this bribery, the US just invented a new word for it.
You absolutely can. You can loan money to your campaign and charge interest on that and then have donors donate to your campaign to repay your debt. Brought to you by the conservative wing of the supreme court in FEC v Cruz.