At a time when the scale of corruption in Congress has risen to obscene heights, the fight to achieve a clean government has heated up–and the good Senator from Wisconsin, Russell Feingold, is admirably spearheading the campaign to usher in a new era.
Feingold, who with John McCain led the fight for passage of campaign finance reform, understands the importance of this fight better than anyone. So, this month, the tough-minded reformer introduced the Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act in the Senate (Martin Meehan has similar legislation pending in the House). Once again, Feingold is doing good service to his nation by pushing into the next frontier of reforming lobbying corruption in Washington.
The bill’s key provisions are designed to reduce the power of special interests by forcing lobbyists to file disclosure reports quarterly instead of twice a year, prohibiting lobbyists from taking trips with members of Congress and their staffs, and requiring former members of Congress and some senior executive branch officials to wait two years after leaving government service before working as a lobbyist. And, as Feingold told The Hill, the bill would prohibit “lobbyists from giving gifts to members” or staff and require “members and campaigns to reimburse the owners of corporate jets at the charter rate when they use those planes for their official or political travel.”
Such a law–and, sadly, in these political times, its chances of passage aren’t great–would arrive just barely in the nick of time. The Center for Public Integrity published a must-read study in April showing that lobbyists have spent almost $13 billion since 1998 seeking to influence federal legislation and federal regulations. “Our report reveals that each year since 1998 the amount spent to influence federal lawmakers is double the amount of money spent to elect them,” the Center’s executive director, Roberta Baskin, pointed out.
Other findings are equally heart-stopping. More than 2,000 lobbyists in Washington had previously held senior government jobs, and in the past six years, “49 out of the 50 top lobbying firms failed to file one or more required forms.” According to other reports that the Center recently put out, some 650 foreign companies are lobbying the federal government on issues important to them, and spent more than an estimated $3 billion to influence decision-making at the federal level in 2004.
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On the home front, pharmaceutical companies have made their corporate jets available to the likes of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert–and the entire industry has spent more than $750 million on lobbying since 1998, outpacing every other industry. According to USA Today, Big Pharma has 1,274 lobbyists, “more than two for every member of Congress.”
But we need to look beyond the numbers, and understand what happened in 1995 when the GOP launched its infamous K Street Project, to really understand why the corruption has metastasized with such velocity. That was the beginning of the push to put “conservative activist Republicans on K Street,” as Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist told journalist Elizabeth Drew–a concerted effort to install ideological comrades-in-arms who could steer money to the GOP, promote conservative causes in Washington and keep Republicans in power for years to come. (To learn more about the K Street Project, read my colleague Ari Berman’s good piece.)
By 2003, the Republicans had achieved the goal of seizing control of K Street. That year, the Washington Post reported that the GOP had seized “a significant number of the most influential positions at trade associations and government affairs offices and reap[ed] big financial rewards.” The Post added that “several top officials at trade associations and corporate offices said privately that Republicans have created a culture in Washington in which companies fear hiring Democrats for top jobs, even if they are the most qualified.”
We know that in recent months, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and House Leader Tom DeLay have grabbed the headlines–Abramoff, in part, because he paid for Tom DeLay’s trip to London and Scotland in 2000 and stole millions of dollars in fees from his clients; and DeLay, in part, because he repeatedly violated House ethics rules. In fact, from April 1 to June 30, DeLay accepted almost $800,000 in contributions from corporate lobbies ike the telecommunications and real estate industries–a sure sign that the corruption continues unchecked, as the progressive group The Campaign for America’s Future has argued.
But it’s equally important to remember that the corruption comes not only from DeLay, Abramoff and cronies but also at virtually every level of the Republican-dominated Congress. The Hill, for example, reported a couple weeks ago that congressional staff have become so brazen that they “actively solicit lunches, drinks and other favors from K Street”–acting as if lobbyists are providing them with “their personal expense account.” When one Senate aide ran into a lobbyist at the Capital Grille restaurant, he asked the lobbyist to foot the bill.
“The arrogance that brought Republicans into power is arrogance that will take them out of power, and that’s what you see more of on the Hill,” a Republican corporate lobbyist told The Hill.
Feingold’s legislation is an essential step on the road to clean government. Citizens who care about their country’s democracy need to fight for organized people against organized money, fighting for a transparent democracy while exposing the DeLay-Abramoff-K Street triangle for the corrupting force it truly is.
