An already controversial component of the healthcare reform bill in the House has gotten more so, with the revelation over the weekend in the New York Times that 42 members of Congress used statements drafted for them by Genentech lobbyists on the issue of biologics.
Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.
E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.
The lobbyists, employed by Genentech and by two Washington law firms, were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress.
Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists....
Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to "revise and extend my remarks." It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.
The e-mail messages and their attached documents indicate that the statements were based on information supplied by Genentech employees to one of its lobbyists, Matthew L. Berzok, a lawyer at Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok who is identified as the "author" of the documents. The statements were disseminated by lobbyists at a big law firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.
In an e-mail message to fellow lobbyists on Nov. 5, two days before the House vote, Todd M. Weiss, senior managing director of Sonnenschein, said, "We are trying to secure as many House R’s and D’s to offer this/these statements for the record as humanly possible."
He told the lobbyists to "conduct aggressive outreach to your contacts on the Hill to see if their bosses would offer the attached statements (or an edited version) for the record."
This isn't unheard of, though certainly Genentech might have reached a record by getting a full 42 members to use their statement, conveniently written in both Democratic and Republican-speak. Members of Congress and their staffs are busy people, suffering from information overload. They take help getting up to speed on issues where they can get, and where they can get it is all too often lobbyists, who aren anything but disinterested helpers. This one is a little different, though, because it's getting information into the Congressional Record, statements that for the most part weren't even offered on the floor, but were inserted for the record. In a handful of cases, they apparently didn't even read the language before using it, and certainly didn't question it, since they used the identical, word-for-word language. Marcy's done the work to find out which members used the talking points, here and here (and notes that Heath Schuler worked off of the Republican script).
And how could these lobbyists have such great access to members and their staff? Even more discouraging:
But the Times misses a key piece of the puzzle: two of the Genentech lobbyists at the firm that wrote the pharma-friendly talking points are ex-staffers to Anna Eshoo and Joe Barton, co-sponsors of a key measure in the bill designed to benefit Big Pharma.
That good old revolving door, again. Sometimes it seems there are too many members of Congress more interested in providing universal corporate-care than universal healthcare.