Looks like the long-running scandal of Washington--the selling of access, influence, legislative favors, regulatory interventions and straightforward raids on the U.S. Treasury by public representatives to wealthy private bidders--is being mis-framed as a "lobbying scandal" and thus is about to get us some band-aid measures called "ethics reform." That's because what's going on here isn't so much the "Looting of Washington" by private interests as it is the "Selling of Washington" by public representatives.
Leaders of both parties in Congress are now falling all over each other to propose new measures to require greater disclosure by lobbyists, to clamp down on outside groups paying for Congressional travel, to restrict or ban gifts to Members or their staffs. While it would be good to have greater disclosure from lobbyists about their contacts with Congress, this approach is hardly going to change the underlying condition that leads to so much corruption in Washington.
That's because lobbyists and the wealthy special interests they represent would have very little of the kind of power deployed by fixers like Jack Abramoff if Members of Congress weren't so desperate for the one thing they provide: Big Money to finance their campaigns. If you don't change that, even the best-intentioned Members of Congress will find themselves altering their behavior to suit the needs of Big Money.
Sure, it would be great if Members were required to disclose what "earmarks" they have inserted into bills on behalf of particular interests, and if Senators had to disclose when they place a "hold" on a bill, since these are both common practices they now use to show their value to Big Money contributors. But until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns--"clean," disinterested, public money--we aren't going to see a real decrease in the Selling of Washington.
I see that pundits like Andrew Ferguson and Glenn Reynolds are happily using the mis-framed "lobbying scandal" to sneer--with some justification--at reformers' efforts to write ever more stringent rules defining what is a "gift" to a Member, and to embrace the libertarian argument that the real source of Washington's corruption is the sheer size of government and all the special pleading that inevitably results when government claims so much power to regulate our lives.
"Congress is fixing the wrong problem," Reynolds sniffs. "It's not a coincidence that while the lobbying community roughly doubled in size, the federal government's budget grew by nearly two-thirds," Ferguson claims. (In fact, while total federal spending has grown by 33% since 1995, the total number of lobbyists swarming Washington doubled since 2000--could it be that the election of George W. Bush and the ascension of a brazen and unchecked class of Republican pigs like Tom DeLay had more to do with the explosion of the lobbying community?)
While I agree that there may be some unintended and perverse consequences of some of the proposed lobbying reforms (Ferguson points out that banning all outside financing of Congressional travel will likely produce an even more provincial group of Members than we currently have), neither Reynolds nor Ferguson are proposing any kind of serious way to get to the smaller, more rational government they seek.
Well, consider this, my pundit pals. If Members of Congress were no longer beholden to wealthy private interests to finance their campaigns, do you think they would keep voting for hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies and boondoggles? Would they vote for tobacco subsidies at the same time that they vote for anti-smoking education? Would they vote for weapons systems the Pentagon says it doesn't even want while shortchanging troops on vital body armor and salaries? Would they vote to artificially prop up the price of commodities like sugar and peanuts, and to keep semi-monopolists like the cable industry and the pharmaceutical industry from dealing with lower-priced competition?
You want a smaller government that wastes less of our tax dollars? Maybe you should get behind public financing of campaigns, instead of taking lazy potshots at a Big Government that mainly does the bidding of Big Money.
Posted by msifry at January 18, 2006 01:05 PM