The guest at lunch was one of those sleazy, despicable Washington lobbyists. The restaurant was one of those typical Washington expense account clip joints where food is art, the portions are scant and the prices are merely obscene.
He had attained the rank of national pariah and scourge on democracy in the typical way: tours of duty on several campaigns, time served in the White House and hours logged as a top staffer on Capitol Hill — followed, of course, by the well-worn path to the lucrative lobbyist shop. Now he is on those lists of most influential in his tradecraft. And budding presidential candidates beg to come through his door so he and his compatriots can kick the tires of candidates with an eye on replacing President Bush in 2008.
Checking the lobbyist’s availability for lunch brought this reply:
“Usually on Monday we are bribing members, Tuesday fleecing clients and Wednesday rolling in the cash in our counting rooms. Thursdays are spent falsifying lobbying documents and Fridays cheating on the golf course. But since Congress is now going to save the Republic from the likes of evil lobbyists such as myself, I have plenty of time on my hands.”
You might think it’s not easy being a lobbyist in Washington these days with disgraced influence peddler Jack Abramoff making headlines, with the Federal City in alleged high dudgeon over the plague lobbyists have wrought. You would be wrong.
The firms are tallying record billings, and, headlines notwithstanding, the world of lobbying is alive, well and likely to stay that way. The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call reported last week the top 25 lobbying firms had $397.9 million in lobbying revenues in 2005, $36 million more than the top 25 from the previous year.
In late January, House Republicans, led by Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, offered up a cluster of measures they said would help curb the influence of lobbyists, including tighter rules on privately funded travel and gifts–in other words, matters that when they are made public are most likely to embarrass members even if they often have little impact on legislation. The fruit doesn’t hang much lower.
“We need to reform the rules so it’s clear beyond a shadow of a doubt what is ethically acceptable for members of Congress,” Hastert said when he unveiled his plan.
“If we don’t get our act together and we don’t pass some major reform within 60 days of coming back, we’re going to be in the minority party,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), told the Tribune then.
Democrats a day later offered a me-too-and-then-some version of the Hastert plan. Because they are in the minority, of course, they are unburdened by the prospect that anything they propose will actually happen.
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Then came the election of a new House majority leader to replace Rep. Tom DeLay, who is facing an indictment in Texas and is in trouble in part because of his ties to Abramoff. The winner, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, ran on a reform platform that conveniently omitted much meaningful change in lobbying rules and in fact suggested that the Hastert proposal went too far.
Naturally, Boehner won.
This is not the first bout of histrionics over the evils of lobbying to infect Washington. Recall the star-crossed presidential campaign of Ross Perot in 1992 when he very effectively painted lobbyists as villains before very effectively running his presidential ambitions aground. There have been spasmodic times when lobbyists are all lumped into the same stew of corruption.
During take-a-lobbyist-to-lunch week, our lobbyist companion was a little bemused by all the fuss.
His point was this: It takes a lot more than a $50 lunch or dinner to buy a member of Congress. That is a sucker play in the lobbying reform pseudo-drama. The real money, the money that buys the access, comes not from the ability to merely donate money personally to the officeholder, but to put together networks of deep pockets and hold large-scale fundraisers that make incumbency all the easier to maintain.
The lobbyist’s mailbox remains full of invitations to help the great cause of keeping incumbents re-elected. He could spend every night of the week eating bad chicken and drinking cheap wine (so long as he brought a maximum check).
In this case, at this lunch, he did not pick up the check.
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