In through the out door: how lobbyists rule Congress | Pratap Chatterjee

The revolving door between the lobbying industry and Capitol Hill makes the lavishly funded K Street the real hub of power Every weekday, groups of scrubbed and shiny 14 year olds pile out of the Washington subway on school trips to visit the halls of the US Congress on Capitol Hill. They come to watch how their elected representatives govern “the land of the free and the home of the brave” in the real-life version of what they have studied in their civics textbooks. Alas, every last student goes to the wrong place. The real power in Washington is not on Capitol Hill, nor even at the White House, but rather a few blocks to the north on the much less exciting road of nondescript modern office buildings known as K street. Indeed, K street has become a euphemism for the world of lobbyists. According to an exhaustive new study just published by LegiStorm , a Washington watchdog group, there are 11,700 registered lobbyists in Washington, DC – almost one for each of the 14,000 staff that work in Congress. “You can’t tell your story unless you get your foot in the door,” a lobbyist by the name of William Chasey once told filmmaker Michael Moore in 1994 . “And if you already have your foot in the door it makes it a lot easier.” For the measly sum of $5,000, Chasey agreed to try to convince Congress to name one day in the year after “TV Nation” – the name of Moore’s satirical TV news show. Not only was Chasey able to introduce a bill, he even got a Republican (Howard Coble of North Carolina) to sponsor it. Moore got himself a bargain. Perhaps the most scandalous operative on K street was lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who charged six Native American tribes $85m between 1995 to 2004 to lobby on behalf of their casinos, even as he accepted money from other interests to do the opposite. Many a member of Congress accepted lavish gifts from such lobbyists – although few match Tom DeLay of Texas. In 2006, two activist groups – Campaign for America’s Future and Public Campaign Action Fund – took out a TV ad to hammer home how much DeLay had received: “Forty-eight trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world-class resorts and hotels. One million dollars from Russian tycoons to allegedly influence his vote,” intones the announcer. In a 2005 report published by Public Citizen , “The Journey from Congress to K Street”, the watchdog group calculated that more than four out of ten members of Congress had gone to work on K Street after they left elected office. Six years later, the story hasn’t really changed. In the last decade, 393 members of Congress have gone to work on K street to lobby their former colleagues, according to LegiStorm. All told, some 5,400 congressional staffers have worked as lobbyists over the same time period. And the revolving door works both ways – today, 605 former lobbyists work for members of Congress. There is a very simple reason – there is a lot of money to be made. Last year, these lobbyists spent a whopping $3.5bn, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics . Over the last 13 years, one group alone – the US Chamber of Commerce – spent over $750m trying to push its agenda in Congress . In 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” as his vision for the country, in his famous Gettysburg address. A century and a half later, LegiStorm’s new study suggests that Washington has become a government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, for special interest groups. But you won’t find that in a civics book. The lobbyists will make sure of that. US Congress Washington DC United States US politics Pratap Chatterjee guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 14, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.