Calling All Wingnuts

Another Washington favorite of mine is Representative Louise Slaughter.   She has a diary up over at Kos that discusses the Republican response to her report on Washington corruption, America For Sale.

I hope she’s selected as Feingold’s running mate. 

(Non sequiter:  since my last post, I read a piece that claimed Gore may be repositioning himself for another run.  Ugh.  I’d hate to have to choose between Gore and Feingold - the promise of Gore’s EPA is just too much for me to contemplate…  it throws me into writhing fits of unalloyed pleasure just thinking about it…)

Anyway, back to the issue at hand.  I love Rep. Slaughter for putting this report together, but at ~120 pages, I’m not  sure how many people have actually read it.

So…  I’m going to publish a chapter at a time over the next coupla days.  We’ll start out with the executive summary:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“WE’VE CREATED A CULTURE THAT JUST BREEDS CORRUPTION” – REP. JEFF FLAKE (R-AZ) 1

The United States Government used to belong to the people. Now it belongs to the highest bidders with the best Republican political connections. Congress is no longer a place where legislators work to make sure the government acts in the people’s interest and uses taxpayers’ dollars wisely. Instead, it has become a place where the Republican representatives who have the power to set Congress’ agenda work to re-distribute as many of those taxpayers’ dollars as possible to their special-interest friends in a massive “pay to play” scheme. It has become a place where the insurance and drug companies write our health care legislation, and the oil and mining industries write our energy policy.The most important thing to know about Washington these days is the following statistic: over the past ten years, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has grown from around 10,000 to more than 34,000, while the fees that lobbyists charge their new clients have increased by as much as 100 percent. Today there are 63 registered lobbyists for each Member of Congress.2 The Washington Post recently reported that starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to “move downtown” from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration.3 For example, the twelve lobbyists working at the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm with particularly close ties to former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) and convicted GOP super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, earned an average of $650,000 per lobbyist in 2004.4

Why do well-connected lobbyists make two, three, or four times the salary of the Members of Congress voters have sent to Washington to represent them?  It’s because America is for sale. The Republican White House and Congress do not even pretend to be acting in the public interest any more. As conservative columnist David Brooks recently put it, in the past few years the Republican Congress has washed away “the walls between the public servants and the private lobbyists.”5 Today the Republicans’ only interests are those of the corporations and contractors who have purchased access to a government that is supposed to belong to the people. The new national pastime in GOP controlled Washington, George Will recently wrote, is “bending public power for private advantage.”6

Serving as the conduit between special interests and public officials are the loyal Republican lobbyists put in place over the past ten years through the so-called “K Street Project.” The Republican Conference recently reaffirmed their support of the “K Street Project” system by elevating one of its founding fathers, Representative John Boehner (ROH), to the position of Majority Leader.7 Another architect of the K Street Project, and now a public symbol of its corruption, is the former lobbyist and now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff, who made millions of dollars selling his access to prominent Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration to any client who would pay his outrageous fees.  Abramoff would then redistribute a portion of his profits back to his Republican allies in Congress through both campaign contributions and a dizzying array of “charitable” organizations. Commenting on the Abramoff scandal, former Republican Congressman and Congressional expert Mickey Edwards recently called it a “disturbingly broad scandal driven by lobbyists whose attitude seemed to be ‘government to the highest bidder.’”8

The results are bizarre, outrageous stories that seem more at home in the pulp paperback thrillers of John Grisham or Carl Hiaasen than in the halls of Congress:

• a corrupt politician who lives on a yacht bought and paid for by a defense lobbyist;
• three mysterious Russian industrialists who launder $1 million dollars into the coffers of a prominent political leader;
• a shady lobbyist and his mob-connected friends who recruit the help of a politician to take over a Florida casino boat business;
• a radical religious anti-gambling activist who is secretly on the take from the gaming industry;
• prominent politicians working with the leaders of an obscure Pacific Island to allow Third World-style sweatshops to operate on American soil.

In the current Republican-ruled Washington, the truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CURRENT REPUBLICAN CULTURE OF CORRUPTION?

For the foreseeable future, Congressional Republicans will be working hard to distance themselves from Jack Abramoff and other K Street Project lobbyists. They will be holding hearings and rolling out proposals to re-create themselves as the champions of “lobbying reform” and cleaning up Congress. Their strategy will be to distract the American people from the painfully obvious fact that lobbyists like Jack Abramoff were only able to flourish in Washington because Republican elected officials collaborated with them. The USA Today editorial board recently made just this point:

What is most shocking in the Abramoff case is not that he would want to make a fortune and spread it around to gain power and influence. It is that so many members of Congress would be so quick to accommodate him.9

The uncomfortable truth is that Jack Abramoff and his associates are just a symptom of the disease that has infected our nation’s capital. As is documented in Appendix 2 to this report, a large number of senior Republican legislators have accepted contributions, trips, and other gifts from Abramoff, and then taken official legislative actions that benefited Abramoff and his clients. Referring to both the Abramoff scandal and another Republican scandal that has rocked the Capitol, Representative Mark Edward Souder (R-IN) recently warned the Republican Conference, “Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, and the ongoing and disgusting saga of abuse of power and public trust are not just made up by the Democrats.”10

The culture of corruption has thrived in Republican-controlled Washington because the Republican Congress has intentionally allowed the processes that normally hold our politicians accountable to the American people to completely collapse. For the past several years, the Republican Congress has not enforced the code of ethics that requires Members of Congress to act with honesty at all times and to put the public interest above their own. At the same time, it has not exercised its constitutional responsibility of oversight—to ensure that the federal government is not abusing or overstepping the powers Congress has given it. As Republican Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) recently summarized the situation to USA Today: “We simply have too much power… We Republicans have abused that power badly over the past several years.”11

The Republican culture of corruption has also infected the legislative process itself. As Rules Committee Democrats argued in a report issued at the beginning of the 109th Congress, Republican House leaders have broken the promise they once made to conduct the people’s business in an open, democratic manner. Instead, they have routinely twisted and broken the House rules to jam their lobbyist-written bills through the House without giving elected representatives an opportunity to debate, amend or, in some cases, even read those bills. And, as Appendix 3 to this report demonstrates, it’s getting worse. In the first session of the 109th Congress, the percentage of bills debated under open rules hit a record low. This report will cite case after case where GOP leaders denied both Democratic and Republican members the opportunity to improve major legislation that Republicans have moved through the House.

Scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann recently wrote a column reviewing the many procedural abuses that have proliferated in the Republican House. Among the items they list are: extending roll call votes well beyond 15 minutes, rushing huge conference reports to the floor for votes, secretly slipping controversial items into conference reports that have already been signed and filed in the House, and employing closed rules that shut out all amendments. More importantly, Ornstein and Mann explain why Americans should care that their House is no longer a deliberative legislative body:

What has all this got to do with corruption? If you can play fast and loose with the rules of the game in lawmaking, it becomes easier to consider playing fast and loose with everything else, including relations with lobbyists, acceptance of favors, the use of official resources and the discharge of governmental power.13

WHY SHOULD AMERICAN FAMILIES CARE THAT THEIR GOVERNMENT IS FOR SALE?

This report will show that the culture of corruption that has developed in Washington under the Republican Congress and the Bush White House is not just an “Inside the Beltway” problem. It is more than a few corrupt politicians putting a few dollars in their pockets. It is a national problem, because Americans must live with the bad policies that corrupt Republican legislators have been making for them for the past five years. A Congress that makes its important decisions in back rooms where only lobbyists have access is not promoting the general welfare of the American people. When pieces of their government are sold off to the highest bidder, our children, our families, and our seniors must live with the consequences. Here are few examples taken from different sections of this report showing that Republican politicians have taken care of special interests instead of the American people:

• A Confusing and Expensive Medicare Program Millions of American seniors have been forced into a confusing and expensive new Medicare drug program that was not created for them, but for the insurance and drug industries who were given special access to shape this legislation.
• An Energy “Strategy” That Saves No Energy While American consumers must live with an energy policy that the Energy Department itself has found will not reduce our high oil and gas prices, the Republican Congress and the Bush Administration have rewarded the oil companies with billions of dollars in new tax breaks and subsidies.
• Polluters Re-Writing Environmental Laws The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink has been degraded because energy lobbyists temporarily working in the Bush Administration have undermined some of our country’s most important environmental standards.
• A Nation Still Vulnerable to Terrorist Attacks No American citizen can be sure that the billions of dollars the federal government is spending on homeland security projects are making us safer, rather than just making politically-connected defense contractors richer.
• A Government Run by Political Hacks Americans have no confidence that their government will be able to adequately respond if a disaster (natural or man-made) strikes their community, because its agencies are staffed not by professionals, but by political cronies and lobbyists like Michael Brown, who botched the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
• Fat Cats Get Their Defense Contracts, but Soldiers Don’t Get Their Body Armor American soldiers and their families don’t know if they are going to have the body armor and other supplies they need to fight in Iraq, because Members of Congress are instead steering hundreds of millions of dollars to defense contracts for products and services the military often says it does not need and, at the same time, unscrupulous contractors like Halliburton are defrauding the government of millions of dollars.
• Drug Companies Get Off the Hook if Their Products Injure Americans While American citizens, public health officials, and first responders worry about how our country would handle the outbreak of a flu pandemic, the Republican Congress recently relieved the pharmaceutical industry of any responsibility for the harm their vaccines or other products might cause during such a crisis.
• Corporate Profits Up, American Family Income Down While record numbers of American workers are losing their good-paying jobs as well as their health and pension benefits, large corporations are enjoying new tax breaks and record profits, and are still free to move their corporate organizations overseas to avoid taxes.
• Student Loan Debt, Student Loan Industry Profits Both at Record Highs Thanks to the efforts of newly-elected Majority Leader John Boehner, private student loan companies are some of the most profitable companies in America and American students are graduating with record student loan debt.

These examples, along with the many others documented in this report, should deeply concern all Americans. A true culture of corruption has developed under today’s Republican Congress and Republican White House, and the real-life costs it has for everyday Americans are staggering. America - all of America - is literally for sale. Our government is working on behalf of the special interests, not the public interest, and the time for a change is long overdue.

Footnotes:

1.  Representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ), quoted in Edward Alden, “Conservatives call for return to core Republican principles,” Financial Times, 1/11/06.
2.  According to new data released by PoliticalMoneyLine, lobbying spending in the first half of 2005, which exceeded $1.1 billion, set a new record. Judy Sarasohn, “Record Sum Spent on Lobbying,” Washington Post, 2/16/06.
3.  Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “The Road to Riches Is Called K Street; Lobbying Firms Hire More, Pay More, Charge More to Influence Government,” Washington Post, 6/22/05.
4. Michael Forsythe, “’DeLay Inc.’ Lobbying Company Links Three Scandals,” Bloomberg, 1/6/06.
5. David Brooks, “A Scandal Waiting to Happen,” New York Times, 11/20/04.
6. George F. Will, “For the House GOP, a Belated Evolution,” Washington Post, 1/10/06. 7. See Appendix I to this report, entitled: “The K Street Project and Majority Leader John Boehner.”
8. Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi, “The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff; How a Well-Connected Lobbyist Became the Center of a Far-Reaching Corruption Scandal,” Washington Post, 12/29/05.
9. USA Today editorial, “Lobbyist’s Plea Likely to Expose Seamy Underside of Congress,” 1/4/06.
10. Jonathan Weisman, “Boehner Suggests New Tack on Lobbying; Emphasis Would Be on Disclosure,” Washington Post, 2/4/06.
11. Jim Drinkard, “In Congress, ‘We simply have too much power,’” USA Today, 1/10/06.
12. Rules Committee Democrats, “Profoundly Un-Democratic. A Congressional Report on the Unprecedented Erosion of the Democratic Process in the House of Representatives and the Rise of the ‘Imperial Congress’ During the 108th Congress,” March 2005.
13. Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, “If You Give a Congressman a Cookie,” New York Times, 1/19/06.