Our opponents seem to be drowning. It's time to throw them an anvil. Let's start with this quote from a piece by Ari Berman (
link):
Republicans rose to control in 1994 vowing to clean up this cesspool. Instead, they've turned Congress into a "transactional institution" where lobbyists hire Republicans who write the legislation passed by the Republican leadership.
Point number one is that Republicans won in 1994 by promising to solve a problem that they have made even worse than it once was. Consider this quote from an
Elizabeth Drew piece:
Abramoff's behavior is symptomatic of the unprecedented corruption--the intensified buying and selling of influence over legislation and federal policy --that has become endemic in Washington under a Republican Congress and White House. Corruption has always been present in Washington, but in recent years it has become more sophisticated, pervasive, and blatant than ever. A friend of mine who works closely with lobbyists says, "There are no restraints now; business groups and lobbyists are going crazy--they're in every room on Capitol Hill writing the legislation. You can't move on the Hill without giving money."
The next important point, more important than finding out who got the small portion of Abramoff's money that has been traced to specific individuals in Congress, is that through the K Street Project the Republican Congress has become little more than a rubber stamp for legislation written by business groups and lobbyists. And that is the new cesspool. Think Prescription Drug Bill here that was written by the Prescription Dug industry or the Bankruptcy legislation that was written by lobbyists working for lenders. And almost every other bill that the Republican Congress has passed has had similar ties to lobbyists and business groups. Here's one observation about the process:
Corporations get their rewards. The oil and gas industry now gives 80 per cent of its campaign cash to Republicans (20 years ago, the split was roughly 50-50), and influence on this year's energy bill was a classic sting. American petrol can now contain a suspected carcinogen; operators of US natural-gas wells can contaminate water aquifers to improve the yields from the wells; ...- concessions all created by DeLay's inside track. And to provide ideological juice, there's a bevy of think-tanks, paid for from the same web of contributions, cranking out the justification that the 'state' and 'regulation' are everywhere and always wrong.
(If you want to learn more about the K Street Project, start with Nick Confessore's piece. Then read Elizabeth Drew's piece. You might read this from the Next Hurrah. You could also go here, here, here, here or here.)
And the third important point is that if business groups and lobbyists are writing legislation then the interests of the people and the interests of other entities who aren't flush with millions in extra cash are being ignored, as stated eloquently here:
As such, not only has DeLay's K Street Project and his welcoming of high-priced lobbyists into the legislative process created the environment rife with potential conflicts of interest and ethical abuses, but it has further isolated and insolated Capitol Hill from the public. The interests that lobbyists like Jack Abramoff represent are special interests with a capital "S". Don't think for a minute that the mom and pop businesses or small businesses in general are at the table. This is about who can pay to play.
Fourth, the reason the Republican Congress was willing to become a rubberstamp for such legislation is that the business groups and lobbyists gave money and other favors that were funneled to those who voted for their legislation. One point of the K Street Project is to have associates in the lobbying industry arrange campaign contributions for the indefinite future. Let's start with this quote:
As described by American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, the K Street Project by which DeLay domesticated the corporate lobby is a "Tammany Hall operation" that ensures only Republicans are hired for big lobbying jobs that pay as much as $1 million a year. Once hired, "everyone is expected to contribute some of that money back into Republican campaigns," Ornstein told me when I was working on a book on DeLay last year. According to Ornstein, DeLay and the K Street project have even locked up the entry-level lobby positions that pay from $150,000 to $250,000 a year -- with the understanding that anyone who gets a job "maxes out" in contributions to Republican candidates and campaigns.
Here is another insightful observation in the comments to an article in
The Nation:
It is the election campaign money angle that has made the lobbyists problematic. Re-election is a central if not the principal concern of most legislators, and elections have become enormously expensive. That remains the crux of the problem. Politicians have found, the easiest way to secure the enormous sums competitive campaigns require is trading lobbyists access for campaign donations. From there the stink eminates.
Now let's talk about the slush funds. Republican bagmen like Abramoff, DeLay and Scanlon have created huge slush funds that are spread around to other Republicans off the books. The official campaign contributions that we know about are likely just a small fraction of the real money that has gone to buy favors from the Republican Congress. Here's what Josh Marshall said recently:
Look at the sums of money involved and the what they were being used for -- off-the-books political activity and individual personal enrichment. A lot of attention has been focused on 'hard money' contributions from Abramoff and his associates and clients. But these hard money (i.e., federally regulated contributions) pale in comparison to the sums of money talked about here. They're not the real story or the heart of the money lubricating the cogs of this machine. They're more like the initial ante up. As in the case with Duke Cunningham, the above-board hard money contributions were more like a clue to the real action going on either out of the regulated money system or through straight out cash bribes.
So even if Republican members of Congress have managed to hide the favors and/or money that has been thrown their way by business groups and other Special interests (and yes the capital "S" is intentional), their lockstep votes for legislation written by the same show that they are voting against the interests of the people. If they are getting paid to do so, they belong in jail. Even if they are not getting paid somehow to do so, which seems unlikely, they need to be fired from their jobs for not representing the interests of the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
As just one example, let's take Randy Kuhl (aka Rubberstamp Randy, who is being opposed by Eric Massa in NY29) We know that Kuhl got $20,000 from DeLay's PAC (link to a list a DeLay beneficiaries). But when you see that Kuhl voted with DeLay about 98.85% of the time (link), it doesn't take a genius to see that he has been in DeLay's pocket, and thus in the pocket of the special interests DeLay has catered to. And Kuhl is just one example. There are many others.