Lee Fang | The Nation

House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton, right, has hired several former lobbyists to his staff. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite.)

In January shortly after being sworn into office, Congressman Rodney Davis, a freshman Republican who eked out a win with a margin of less than a thousand votes in Illinois last year, announced that he had received several plum committee assignments. His legislative portfolio includes subcommittees that oversee commodity regulations, nutritional programs, biotechnology, and, most importantly, the 2013 Farm Bill, which sets agriculture policy for the next five years.

One of his first steps in office? Davis hired Jen Daulby, the director of federal affairs for Land O’Lakes, one of the largest producers of milk and cheese in the country, to be his chief of staff. Disclosures show that just months ago, Daulby led a Land O’Lakes lobbying team that worked on the Farm Bill, genetically modified foods labeling, rules concerning pesticides and hazardous dust, and the new commodity regulations enacted by President Obama’s financial reform law, Dodd-Frank.

What a match.

In other words, Daulby’s past lobbying portfolio perfectly reflects the new responsibilities for Davis’ committee assignments, where he will have wide sway over policy. A former Monsanto lobbyist with previous experience on Capitol Hill for several other lawmakers, Daulby is one of many staffers who rotate back and forth between public service and influence peddling.

On Monday, The Nation posted an investigation of the “reverse revolving door” in Congress, by which lobbyists hired as senior-level congressional staffers receive substantial exit bonuses or other financial rewards from their employers shortly before they assume their new Congressional positions.

In Daulby’s case, Land O’Lakes provided a parting gift of a $35,772 bonus (in addition to her 2012 bonus) in the first few weeks of January. The Davis-Daulby story isn’t all that unusual.

The members of Congress who hire former lobbyists are often outspoken supporters of legislation also heartily endorsed by their new staffers’ previous employers.

Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the Homeland Security Committee, hired IBM lobbyist Alex Manning as his cybersecurity subcommittee staff director this year. On behalf of IBM last year, Manning worked to pass the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act (CISPA), legislation that provides broad powers to the government and to private corporations to gather private Internet user data. The ACLU—which has rallied against CISPA along with EFF, and many other civil liberties groups—called the bill a “flagrant violation of every American’s right to privacy.”

IBM, which sent nearly 200 executives to Washington to advocate on behalf of stronger cyber security laws like CISPA, has been one of the bill’s strongest supporters. CISPA passed the House in April. Representative Randy Hultgren (R-IL) recently hired Katherine McGuire, a CISPA-supporting lobbyist for the Business Software Alliance, as his chief of staff. Hultgren voted for the bill that passed last month.

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Representative Fred Upton (R-MI), who is in his second term as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has a long history of employing lobbyists to staff his committee. When he gained the gavel after the midterm elections, Upton hired Gary Andres, a lobbyist for UnitedHealth Group and other corporate interests, as his staff director. In 2012, Upton announced that America’s Natural Gas Alliance lobbyist Tom Hassenboehler would be his new chief counsel to a subcommittee that oversees environmental regulations. As DeSmogBlog’s Steve Horn noted, Hassenboehler is a climate change denier who worked in previous years to block cap and trade legislation. Disclosures show Hassenboehler was paid by his former employer, a trade group for fracking and natural gas companies, to lobby on a number of environmental regulations, including EPA rules concerning fracking.

This phenomenon isn’t new. In the beginning of the last Congress, at least thirteen freshman lawmakers hired lobbyists as their chiefs of staff. The chiefs of staff for Senators Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio even came from the same lobbying firm.

How, exactly, are these lobbyists-turned-staffers influencing policy? While it is difficult to discern what goes on behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, it is part of the job description of lobbyists-turned-staffers to help lawmakers draft legislation, and the bills they produce reliably include big giveaways to corporate interests. Representative Davis’ office did not respond to a request for comment about his new chief, former Land O’Lakes lobbyist Jen Daulby. But in March, Davis signed onto a bill currently pushed by Land O’Lakes to roll back federal oversight of pesticide use.

Read Lee Fang on the reverse revolving door of bonuses for executives headed to congressional positions.

Charles Koch in his office in Wichita, Kansas. (AP Photo/Topeka Capital-Journal, Mike Burley.)

If their bid is successful, the Koch brothers won’t just have a strong influence over the laws we all live under and the climate we pass on to the next generation, they’ll be publishing the news we read. The New York Times confirmed earlier reports that Charles and David Koch are pursuing a bid for the Tribune Company newspapers, which include the Los Angeles Times, the Orlando Sentinel, The Baltimore Sun and many others.

The Kochs, despite financing an unprecedented outside advertising and field campaign, failed to unseat President Barack Obama—a man Charles has referred to as “Saddam Hussein.” In a recent employee newsletter, Charles makes clear he’s not giving up. “As a company, we are committed to doing what is right in every aspect of our business,” wrote Charles. “That is why we will continue doing everything we can to persuade politicians to put what is good for the country first, before it is too late.”

If the Koch brothers treat the papers as they do their other philanthropic and political endeavors, the public will be at a great loss. Here are four reasons why:

1.) Koch Known for Peddling Politics Through Every Aspect of Business, Philanthropy: One way the Kochs have influenced policy is through large grants to universities and students to pursue research relating to the Koch’s view of how society should operate. Unlike most other academic donors, Koch attaches strings to their grants, dictating how faculty are hired and which research programs can be pursued, as was the case with the controversy at Florida State University. Notably, most Koch ‘philanthropic’ activity is coordinated by the Charles Koch Foundation, which is led by Kevin Gentry and Richard Fink, two Koch Industries executives who double as leaders of the Koch corporate lobbying office, known as Koch Public Sector. As Mike Elk reported, Koch took the extraordinary step of encouraging their employees to vote for Republicans in the last two elections. Even during the fight last year over control of the Cato Institute, Koch attempted a takeover by nominating company lobbyists and loyal neoconservatives to the board of the famously libertarian nonprofit. If Charles Koch is to be believed when he said this year that he would do “everything” he can to persuade politicians, how will the Tribune Company papers maintain independence?

2.) Koch Distorts Science for Profit: Some of Koch Industries’ core businesses—fertilizer, chemical plants, coal shipping, fracking, heavy crude oil refining, cement and petroleum coke—contribute millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and are the reason that Koch is the fifth-biggest air polluter in the country. Though this pollution will ruin the lives and property of many Americans, Koch avoids responsibility by funding a large array of propaganda outlets and think tanks dedicated to distorting the science related to Koch pollution in a bid to stave off regulation. Back in the day, this meant funding efforts to claim acid rain (caused in part by Koch pollution) was a “hoax.” Now, Koch sponsors carnivalesque moon bounces for children to encourage their parents to oppose the EPA’s power to enforce the Clean Air Act, a pledge signed by most GOP lawmakers to avoid action on global warming, as well as many think tanks to provide an ideological or academic veneer for their lies about climate science. “If we win the science argument, it’s game, set, and match,” said Tim Phillips, the political operative hired by David Koch to fight efforts to curb carbon pollution, among other goals. How will Tribune Company newspapers continue their award-winning environmental journalism?

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3.) Will the Tribune Reporters Continue to Investigate Koch Influence?: Tribune Company reporters have led in the way in uncovering Koch Industries’ influence in politics and policy. In February of 2011, the Los Angeles Times revealed that David Koch met personally with John Boehner on the first day of the new Congress in the speaker’s chambers, and that Koch’s political spending during the midterm elections helped shape the Boehner’s policy agenda. Last year, the paper reported on a Koch-connected nonprofit that skirted California campaign disclosure laws to funnel $11 million to back two major statewide propositions. Will the papers continue to investigate Koch Industries’ outsized influence in society if the Koch brothers purchase the Tribune Company?

4.) Koch Finances Hate: Koch’s premiere grassroots organizing group, Americans for Prosperity, has funded rallies where health reform has been compared to the Holocaust. The group routinely invites speakers who are known for spreading hatred and conspiracy theories, including anti-immigrant zealot Russell Pearce (who was given an award by AFP) and leading “birther” Jerome Corsi. AFP was exposed by Politico for helping sponsor shock jocks like Mark Levin. Moreover, Koch has been highly involved in the anti-gay Council for National Policy, a group devoted to promoting the homophobic activism of Focus on the Family, Rev. John Hagee, and the Family Research Council. The Tribune Company papers have served as a watchdog for hate in society; how will their reporters cope with being in league with such extremism? In fact, every September, Koch Industries’ employees celebrate “Founder’s Day,” a celebration of Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries and an early leader of the anti–civil rights John Birch Society. Will Tribune Company employees join the festivities honoring a man who warned: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.”

Remember when Wisconsin ended collective bargaining rights for public sector workers? Right-wing lobbies plan to do the same thing in Pennsylvania, Lee Fang reports.

Editors' Note: After a review, we've determined that this blog post overstates the role Blue Line Strategic Communications and its founders, Michael Meehan and David DiMartino, played in Clean Energy Works. A coalition comprised of dozens of NGOs, Clean Energy Works was founded in 2009 to campaign for the passage of climate change legislation. The organization was led by Democratic strategist Paul Tewes and a managing committee comprised of representatives from each of the participating groups, which collectively determined the coalition's priorities and strategies. Clean Energy Works subsequently hired several firms to work on the campaign, including Blue Line, which handled strategic communications. While Blue Line played a role in shaping the campaign's messaging, it neither managed Clean Energy Works nor was it in a position to unilaterally determine strategy, as the post suggests.

The post also leaves the impression that Michael Meehan worked for Clean Energy Works. While Meehan worked for groups that were part of the broader coalition, he did not work directly with Clean Energy Works. That account was handled by his partner David DiMartino. As Fang reported, Meehan was a vice president at Virilion, the digital media company that held a $19 million contract from American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Meehan maintains, however, that he never worked directly on the ACCCE account, which preceded his arrangement with Virilion, and had no financial stake in it. Both Meehan and DiMartino, who were not interviewed before publication, contacted The Nation to say that neither of them are registered lobbyists, as the post describes them, but rather communications professionals. They previously worked at BGR Public Relations, part of the BGR Group, which has lobbied on behalf of fossil fuel companies, although both Meehan and DiMartino maintain that they had no role in those efforts.

We stand by the post's contention that Meehan's work for Blue Line and Virilion—while Blue Line was coordinating communications strategy for Clean Energy Works in favor of climate legislation and Virilion was working to block the same bill—created an apparent conflict of interest. What is not supported by the evidence is that this conflict influenced Clean Energy Works' strategic decisions and ultimately contributed to the failure of the bill.  We apologize for the errors.

Despite holding the presidency and congressional majorities, Democratic leaders failed to pass a climate change bill. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File.)

On this Earth Day, we are three years out from the last window of opportunity to pass a climate bill in America. Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol has done the best job so far in diagnosing why, at the outset of the Obama administration with large Democratic majorities in Congress, progressives failed to enact a law regulating or pricing carbon pollution. Her conclusion is that reformers spent too much resources on an “inside game” of lobbyists and dealmakers and not enough on grassroots campaigning, and that reformers failed to make the case about the dangers of global warming.

She’s right, but here’s another reason: The guys who managed the campaign were also secretly working alongside the opposition.

Three years ago, reformers established a group called Clean Energy Works that would manage a coalition of more than sixty organization to develop advertising, field and lobbying to pass a climate bill. New disclosures not only show that Clean Energy Works and its affiliates spent about $37 million on advertising and less than $900,000 on grassroots organizing, but that the firm at the helm of the effort, then called Blue Line Strategic Communications, was in bed with the coal industry.

In the summer of 2009, a consulting firm called Blue Line Strategic Communications was picked to manage Clean Energy Works. The firm was run by David DiMartino and Michael Meehan, two former industry lobbyists and Democratic staffers.

It was Blue Line, according to discussions with those involved in the process, which decided to pass the bill without ever mentioning global warming or any of its effects. The firm ignored the science and the dramatic consequences of inaction and focused instead on stressing the secondary benefits of a clean energy economy, like energy independence and job creation.

It was a novel approach. In nearly every Western industrialized country that has implemented economy-wide carbon controls, reformers have talked about the effects of climate change—crop failures, extreme weather events, desertification and rising sea levels—to get the public on its side. In California, the only state to pass a mandatory cap and trade law, environmentalists aired ads with a narrator discussing the dangers posed by climate change over scenes of devastation and an hourglass, which gave the viewer a sense of urgency. “Warnings couldn’t be clearer: this is the hottest summer on record, forest fires in the west caused by global warming can be seen from outer space,” blared an ad that paved the way for AB 32, the landmark climate change law signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006.

The strategy from Blue Line and its partners to ignore climate change played into the hands of polluters, which sought to suppress support for the bill by spreading doubt about the consensus over the science. “If we win the science argument, it’s game, set, and match,” Tim Phillips, the political operative hired by David Koch to fight the bill, later told a meeting at the Heritage Foundation.

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The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a front group group financed by the biggest coal mining and coal-based utility companies in America, spent more than $92 million during the first two years of the Obama administration, much of it on lobbying and advertising against bills like Waxman Markey. The group gained infamy when one of its consulting firms was caught forging over a dozen letters from local NAACP groups and senior citizens to key lawmakers, asking them to oppose the bill.

One of the recipients of the ACCCE’s largesse was none other than one of Blue Line’s two partners, Michael Meehan. While Meehan led Blue Line’s pro-cap and trade effort, he also served as vice president to an online marketing firm called Virilion. Disclosures show that Virilion, which also rented office space to Blue Line, helped ACCCE manage its anti–cap and trade marketing budget in exchange for $19 million during the two years in which the legislation was debated.

The conflict was complicated by the fact that Meehan, and his partner, David DiMartino, had been employed by an infamous polluter lobbying firm only months prior to taking up the cap-and-trade job. The pair had worked for the BGR Group, a lobbying firm founded by former Republican National Committee chair Haley Barbour, up until the month they were hired by the coalition of environmental groups. While Blue Line worked closely with the Obama administration and its liberal allies, Blue Line maintained a “strategic partnership” with BGR, which at the time counted coal-fired utility giant Southern Company as a major client.

Of course, this conflict of interest was not the only reason Waxman Markey failed. Senator Harry Reid could have written reconciliation rules into the January 2009 budget in order to pass it with fifty-one votes. President Obama could have been more forceful. The lazy traditional media that failed to report on climate crisis, pervasive corruption in Congress, Citizens United providing polluters a greater bludgeon to defeat reform politicians, the USCAP coalition that saddled legislation with industry giveaways and poison pills, the unprecedented lobbying by polluters, the collapse of moderates within the GOP—there are many, many reasons why a climate bill did not pass. But let’s be clear: reformers had issues from the inside as well.

UPDATE: Someone close to the Waxman Markey reform efforts e-mailed to note that in addition to the coalition money spent on field, individual advocacy groups, including the Sierra Club and several other green groups, spent an undisclosed amount on their own grassroots organizing that would bring the total above the $900,000 referenced above. Still, disclosures show the coalition Clean Energy Works spent a disproportionate amount on advertising and media consultants.

UPDATE: Meehan contacted The Nation to say that he is not a lobbyist but instead works to influence the media on public policy issues. He presents two arguments about conflicts of interest raised by this blog post: Meehan told The Nation that he left BGR because of the company's fossil fuel clients. However, he says he did not leave Virilion because he did not work directly on the coal industry account. 

Read Lee Fang on the role deregulation played in the West, Texas chemical plant explosion.

John Boehner speaks next to Mitch McConnell and other Republican members of Congress. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh).

Next year, even if voters cast millions more votes for Democratic candidates, it's likely John Boehner will continue as Speaker of the House, and Republicans will still have a firm grip to determine policy in the waning years of the Obama presidency. In the last campaign for the House, Republicans maintained a comfortable hold on the lower chamber of Congress even though Democrats won at least 1.1 million more votes. That's because over the last few years, GOP state legislators—with help from corporate backers—radically redrew congressional district lines to disadvantage Democrats in over half a dozen states, making representative democracy impossible until the next census in 2020, essentially. (For more on this, see Sam Wang's "The Great Gerrymander of 2012.")

The dismantling of the 'People's House' into a fiefdom for big business-friendly Republicans isn't necessarily a new development. In the late 19th and early 20th century, oligarchs manipulated the voting districts to repress the will, and the votes, of the people -- much like the gerrymandering we see today. A century ago, it was the U.S. Senate, not the House, that fell victim to such sordid tricks.

The last time America experienced a vast decline in representative democracy was the Gilded Era, a period where both major parties became consumed by a small number of robber barons -- tycoons who monopolized entire industries, bought politicians like cattle, killed striking workers, and manipulated cabinet secretaries and judges alike through a system of graft and petty bribery. In the South, the end of Reconstruction brought a reign of terror against recently enfranchised black citizens, who lost the right to vote -- and in some cases, faced re-enslavement -- as railroad and timber industry-financed Redeemer Democrat politicians rewrote state constitutions and began Jim Crow voting restrictions.

Another, less well known aspect of this wave of undemocratic action was in the North concerning town-based state legislative districts. Before the 17th Amendment, state legislators elected U.S. Senators. And in northern states like Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, state legislative districts were drawn based on counties or towns, not people. As hundreds of thousands of European immigrants arrived in these states, Republicans party chiefs, in a bid to suppress the votes of these new Americans, ruthlessly fought to ensure that legislative districts stayed the same, regardless of population. The immigrants could vote, but their votes wouldn't matter much.

In this era, towns of 565 Republican 'native' voters had the same representation of immigrant towns of 53,230. Despite numerous elections where a majority of voters attempted to send populist Democrats to state legislative office, who in turn would have selected populist U.S. Senators, a rigged system allowed a tiny population of largely wealthy, Protestant Republicans to dominate. This wasn't the exact same as gerrymandering per se, but it had a similar design and effect.

Author Jack Beatty, in his brilliantly researched book, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, documents this type of voter suppression by way of unfair legislative districts:

Under a Colonial-era system of town-based as opposed to population based voting districts, 14 percent of Connecticut voters could elect a majority of the House of Representatives. Between 1818, when the Connecticut state constitution adopted the town-based standard, and 1910, Hartford's population grew from 6,000 to 98,000, Waterbury's from 2,000 to 73,000, New Haven's from 8,000 to 132,000 -- without additional representation. In 1890 New Haven, population 86,000, sent the same number of representatives to the state legislature as Union, population 431. New Haven's voters were immigrants and Democrats; Union's "native" and Republican. [...] The national Republican Party depended on its Connecticut "rotten borough." Between the 1870s and the 1890s it sent six Republicans senators to Washington, where they cast key votes on the tariff and the currency and enabled the GOP to control four different Congresses. Republican-appointed judges on the state Supreme Court rejected attempts to change the formula of Connecticut's anti-democracy, which in weakened strength lasted until ended by one-man, one-vote court rulings of the early 1960s.

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In Rhode Island, the GOP party boss who enforced a similar "anti-democracy" of warped state legislative districts was also the chief counsel for the New Haven Railroad and held stock in the Providence Electric Company, both of which pumped money into the party's vote-buying and immigrant vote-suppressing machinery. Senator Nelson Aldrich, the infamously corrupt Rhode Island senator and powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee during much of the Gilded Era, was elected through this political system and elevated himself from wealthy New England merchant to robber baron status through lucrative investments in companies he bestowed with generous subsidies and tax loopholes.

During this era, there were other ploys to maintain control of the U.S. Senate. As Beatty notes, the GOP maintained control of Congress by admitting a large number of Republican-leaning territories that did not meet the historical criteria for statehood (West Virginia, Kansas, and Nevada during the war; followed by Nebraska, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington) in a bid to add additional GOP senators. "Excluding West Virginia, of the eleven states admitted between 1861 and 1869 only six equaled 'the size of an average congressional district (including Colorado), two were roughly half that size, and Nevada was one-sixth the normal size,'" writes Beatty, quoting from a study by Charles Stewart and Barry R. Weingast.

In the modern age, gerrymandering has made a mockery out of representative democracy, creating congressional districts that twist and turn to ensure partisan domination. Pennsylvania, a state that voted for Obama by 5 percentage points in the last election, elected only 5 Democrats out of 18 congressional districts because of the district lines drawn by Governor Tom Corbett and his allies in the legislature. Ohio, Virginia, Michigan, and Florida are other examples of dramatically undemocratic lines crafted to allow Republicans to capture more seats than they ordinarily could. According to ThinkProgress, Democrats would have to win 7 percent of the popular vote in order to win a slim majority in the House of Representatives under the current gerrymandered system.

And who can we thank for casting a shadow over the legitimacy of our Congress? Devon Energy, Altria Group, Wynn Resorts, ETC Capital, Wal-Mart Stories, Citigroup, Koch Industries, AT&T, Comcast, ExxonMobil, Eli Lilly, and other large firms that helped finance the Republican State Leadership Committee, the GOP committee that masterminded the current gerrymander.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell's former plan to smear Ashley Judd's mental health and religion has been exposed, prompting the senator to make a bizarre Watergate analogy.