![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Greedy Season: Money and Democracy
♠
“It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system -- your connections in it, and your understanding of it -- for personal profit.”
-- Michael Kinsley for The Washington Post
'Tis the season for more than Christian tidings. In addition to the Kinsley piece, I'm tagging an analytical article by Jeffrey Birnbaum on the current spike in corruption scandals and charges. Americans are not content with the government we are getting, and our democracy remains substantive enough that a political price is being paid - let some heads roll, more heads! One dreads the day when such corruption is truly accepted as business as usual and there are no investigations and charges, and we are simply told to eat our cake.
___ ___ ___
It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system -- your connections in it, and your understanding of it -- for personal profit.
And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and Co. arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.
By the 20th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing it down. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay -- the real boss in Congress -- openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this.
No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.
When Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty this week to accepting a comic cornucopia of baubles, plus some cash, from defense contractors, the vast right-wing conspiracy acted with impressive speed and forcefulness to expel one of its most doggedly loyal loudmouths and pack him off to a long jail term. Even Bush, whose affable capacity for understanding and forgiveness on the personal level is one of his admirable qualities, seized an unnecessary opportunity to wish the blackguard ill. There was no talk of "sadness" -- the usual formula for expressing sympathy without excusing guilt.
This astringent response would be more impressive if the basic facts about Cunningham's corruption hadn't been widely known for months. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in June that a company seeking business from the Pentagon had bought Cunningham's Southern California house from him, held it unoccupied briefly and sold it -- in the hottest real estate market in human history -- for a $700,000 loss. You didn't need to know that Duke's haul included two antique commodes to smell the stench. Yet all the Republican voices now saying that Cunningham deserves his punishment were silent until he clearly and unavoidably was going to get it.
Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the DeLay-Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician personally. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.
These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal. So where do you draw the line between harmless favors and corrupt bribery?
It's not an easy question if you're talking about sending people to prison. But it's a very easy question if you're just talking: The answer is that it's all corrupt bribery. People and companies hire lobbyists because it works. Lobbyists get the big bucks because their efforts earn or save clients even bigger bucks in their dealings with the government. Members of Congress are among the world's greatest bargains: What is a couple of commodes compared with $163 million worth of Pentagon contracts?
Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic senator John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist vs. 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents. That seems fair.
-- Michael Kinsley for The Washington Post
.........
For several years now, corporations and other wealthy interests have made ever-larger campaign contributions, gifts and sponsored trips part of the culture of Capitol Hill. But now, with fresh guilty pleas by a lawmaker and a public relations executive, federal prosecutors -- and perhaps average voters -- may be concluding that the commingling of money and politics has gone too far.
After years in which big-dollar dealings have come to dominate the interaction between lobbyists and lawmakers, both sides are now facing what could be a wave of prosecutions in the courts and an uprising at the ballot box. Extreme examples of the new business-as-usual are no longer tolerated.
Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, are most vulnerable to this wave. But pollsters say that voters think less of both political parties the more prominent the issue of corruption in Washington becomes, and that incumbents generally could feel the heat of citizen outrage if the two latest guilty pleas multiply in coming months.
No fewer than seven lawmakers, including a Democrat, have been indicted, have pleaded guilty or are under investigation for improper conduct such as conspiracy, securities fraud and improper campaign donations. Congress's approval ratings have fallen off the table, in some measure because of headlines about these scandals.
"The indictments and the investigations have strengthened the feeling that people have that in fact there's too much money in Washington and that the money is being used to influence official decisions," said William McInturff, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. "Polls show that neither party is held in high regard."
The latest court case came yesterday in San Diego when Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) wept openly after pleading guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy. His plea bargain came less than a week after public relations executive Michael Scanlon coolly admitted his role in a conspiracy to try to bribe a congressman.
Members of Congress, lawyers and pollsters recognize that both events taken together could signal the start of a cyclical ritual in the nation's capital: the moment when lawmakers and outsiders are widely seen as getting too cozy with each other and face a public backlash -- and legal repercussions -- as a result.
"I've been in town for 30 years, and it seems that every 10 years or so there is an episode of this type," said Jan W. Baran, a Republican ethics lawyer at Wiley Rein & Fielding. "We clearly are at that period now."
"It's gotten to a level that it can't be ignored anymore," agreed Stanley M. Brand, a criminal defense lawyer at Brand & Frulla who used to work for Democrats in Congress.
The worst of the blowback, both legal and electoral, could be blunted if ongoing probes turn up little or nothing. Indeed, some of the investigations are in the early stages and may take months or years to resolve. In addition, experts say that the most prominent cases are aberrational or else there would be even more investigations and indictments than there are.
Yet the activities under scrutiny can also be viewed as logical extensions of actions that once were rare but over time have become commonplace: massive political fundraising, freewheeling private travel given to lawmakers by groups interested in legislation, and the bestowing of other gifts and benefits on government officials by lobbyists.
As the Scanlon case demonstrates, the extent of this favor-buying has gone so far that the Justice Department is no longer deterred from bringing charges even if the gifts fall within Congress's gift-giving limits or are below campaign finance maximums. "It doesn't matter," Brand said. Charges could come, he said, if "anything of value is given to a public official that can be linked to an official act."
Scanlon was a partner of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and they are under investigation for allegedly improperly extracting $82 million from Indian tribes. Scanlon has agreed to return $19 million and is cooperating with authorities, who have broadened their inquiries to include at least half a dozen lawmakers, some lawmakers' spouses and several aides-turned-lobbyists, lawyers involved in the case have said.
Prosecutors have told one lawmaker, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), and his former chief of staff that they are preparing a possible bribery case against them, The Washington Post has reported. About 40 investigators and prosecutors are also looking into the activities of several lawmakers, including Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R), who is facing unrelated campaign finance charges in his home state of Texas. Burns, Doolittle and DeLay have denied any wrongdoing.
The Post has also reported that investigators are gathering information about Abramoff's hiring of several congressional spouses, including DeLay's wife, Christine, who worked from 1998 to 2002 with a lobbying firm run by former DeLay staffers, and Doolittle's wife, Julie, who owned a consulting firm that was hired by Abramoff and his former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, to do fundraising for a charity he founded.
Separately, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed in connection with probes by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department into his sale of millions of dollars' worth of stock in HCA Inc., the Nashville-based hospital chain founded by his father and brother. In yet another case, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible violations connected with a telecommunications deal he was trying to arrange in Nigeria. Both lawmakers say they did nothing wrong.
At least partly because of public reports of these inquiries, voters' feelings about Congress have turned upside down since the start of 2001. In January 2001, 59 percent of Americans approved of the way Congress was doing its job and 34 percent disapproved, according a Washington Post-ABC survey. Earlier this month, the same poll showed that 37 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved.
In addition, for the first time in its 15-year history, the Wall Street Journal-NBC poll this year showed that the public's negative feelings exceeded its positive feelings about both political parties at the same time. "These are cautionary notes that are affecting both parties' political standing," McInturff said.
-- Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "A Growing Wariness About Money in Politics" for The Washington Post
xXx
“It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system -- your connections in it, and your understanding of it -- for personal profit.”
-- Michael Kinsley for The Washington Post
'Tis the season for more than Christian tidings. In addition to the Kinsley piece, I'm tagging an analytical article by Jeffrey Birnbaum on the current spike in corruption scandals and charges. Americans are not content with the government we are getting, and our democracy remains substantive enough that a political price is being paid - let some heads roll, more heads! One dreads the day when such corruption is truly accepted as business as usual and there are no investigations and charges, and we are simply told to eat our cake.
___ ___ ___
It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then, finally, you exploit the system -- your connections in it, and your understanding of it -- for personal profit.
And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and Co. arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.
By the 20th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing it down. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile, Tom DeLay -- the real boss in Congress -- openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this.
No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.
When Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham pleaded guilty this week to accepting a comic cornucopia of baubles, plus some cash, from defense contractors, the vast right-wing conspiracy acted with impressive speed and forcefulness to expel one of its most doggedly loyal loudmouths and pack him off to a long jail term. Even Bush, whose affable capacity for understanding and forgiveness on the personal level is one of his admirable qualities, seized an unnecessary opportunity to wish the blackguard ill. There was no talk of "sadness" -- the usual formula for expressing sympathy without excusing guilt.
This astringent response would be more impressive if the basic facts about Cunningham's corruption hadn't been widely known for months. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in June that a company seeking business from the Pentagon had bought Cunningham's Southern California house from him, held it unoccupied briefly and sold it -- in the hottest real estate market in human history -- for a $700,000 loss. You didn't need to know that Duke's haul included two antique commodes to smell the stench. Yet all the Republican voices now saying that Cunningham deserves his punishment were silent until he clearly and unavoidably was going to get it.
Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the DeLay-Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician personally. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.
These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal. So where do you draw the line between harmless favors and corrupt bribery?
It's not an easy question if you're talking about sending people to prison. But it's a very easy question if you're just talking: The answer is that it's all corrupt bribery. People and companies hire lobbyists because it works. Lobbyists get the big bucks because their efforts earn or save clients even bigger bucks in their dealings with the government. Members of Congress are among the world's greatest bargains: What is a couple of commodes compared with $163 million worth of Pentagon contracts?
Perhaps conceding more than he intended, former Democratic senator John Breaux, now on K Street, told the New York Times that a member of Congress will be swayed more by 2,000 letters from constituents on some issue than by anything a lobbyist can offer. I guess if it's a lobbyist vs. 1,900 constituents, it's too bad for the constituents. That seems fair.
-- Michael Kinsley for The Washington Post
.........
For several years now, corporations and other wealthy interests have made ever-larger campaign contributions, gifts and sponsored trips part of the culture of Capitol Hill. But now, with fresh guilty pleas by a lawmaker and a public relations executive, federal prosecutors -- and perhaps average voters -- may be concluding that the commingling of money and politics has gone too far.
After years in which big-dollar dealings have come to dominate the interaction between lobbyists and lawmakers, both sides are now facing what could be a wave of prosecutions in the courts and an uprising at the ballot box. Extreme examples of the new business-as-usual are no longer tolerated.
Republicans, who control the White House and Congress, are most vulnerable to this wave. But pollsters say that voters think less of both political parties the more prominent the issue of corruption in Washington becomes, and that incumbents generally could feel the heat of citizen outrage if the two latest guilty pleas multiply in coming months.
No fewer than seven lawmakers, including a Democrat, have been indicted, have pleaded guilty or are under investigation for improper conduct such as conspiracy, securities fraud and improper campaign donations. Congress's approval ratings have fallen off the table, in some measure because of headlines about these scandals.
"The indictments and the investigations have strengthened the feeling that people have that in fact there's too much money in Washington and that the money is being used to influence official decisions," said William McInturff, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies. "Polls show that neither party is held in high regard."
The latest court case came yesterday in San Diego when Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) wept openly after pleading guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy. His plea bargain came less than a week after public relations executive Michael Scanlon coolly admitted his role in a conspiracy to try to bribe a congressman.
Members of Congress, lawyers and pollsters recognize that both events taken together could signal the start of a cyclical ritual in the nation's capital: the moment when lawmakers and outsiders are widely seen as getting too cozy with each other and face a public backlash -- and legal repercussions -- as a result.
"I've been in town for 30 years, and it seems that every 10 years or so there is an episode of this type," said Jan W. Baran, a Republican ethics lawyer at Wiley Rein & Fielding. "We clearly are at that period now."
"It's gotten to a level that it can't be ignored anymore," agreed Stanley M. Brand, a criminal defense lawyer at Brand & Frulla who used to work for Democrats in Congress.
The worst of the blowback, both legal and electoral, could be blunted if ongoing probes turn up little or nothing. Indeed, some of the investigations are in the early stages and may take months or years to resolve. In addition, experts say that the most prominent cases are aberrational or else there would be even more investigations and indictments than there are.
Yet the activities under scrutiny can also be viewed as logical extensions of actions that once were rare but over time have become commonplace: massive political fundraising, freewheeling private travel given to lawmakers by groups interested in legislation, and the bestowing of other gifts and benefits on government officials by lobbyists.
As the Scanlon case demonstrates, the extent of this favor-buying has gone so far that the Justice Department is no longer deterred from bringing charges even if the gifts fall within Congress's gift-giving limits or are below campaign finance maximums. "It doesn't matter," Brand said. Charges could come, he said, if "anything of value is given to a public official that can be linked to an official act."
Scanlon was a partner of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and they are under investigation for allegedly improperly extracting $82 million from Indian tribes. Scanlon has agreed to return $19 million and is cooperating with authorities, who have broadened their inquiries to include at least half a dozen lawmakers, some lawmakers' spouses and several aides-turned-lobbyists, lawyers involved in the case have said.
Prosecutors have told one lawmaker, Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), and his former chief of staff that they are preparing a possible bribery case against them, The Washington Post has reported. About 40 investigators and prosecutors are also looking into the activities of several lawmakers, including Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R), who is facing unrelated campaign finance charges in his home state of Texas. Burns, Doolittle and DeLay have denied any wrongdoing.
The Post has also reported that investigators are gathering information about Abramoff's hiring of several congressional spouses, including DeLay's wife, Christine, who worked from 1998 to 2002 with a lobbying firm run by former DeLay staffers, and Doolittle's wife, Julie, who owned a consulting firm that was hired by Abramoff and his former law firm, Greenberg Traurig, to do fundraising for a charity he founded.
Separately, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has been subpoenaed in connection with probes by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department into his sale of millions of dollars' worth of stock in HCA Inc., the Nashville-based hospital chain founded by his father and brother. In yet another case, Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) is under investigation by the Justice Department for possible violations connected with a telecommunications deal he was trying to arrange in Nigeria. Both lawmakers say they did nothing wrong.
At least partly because of public reports of these inquiries, voters' feelings about Congress have turned upside down since the start of 2001. In January 2001, 59 percent of Americans approved of the way Congress was doing its job and 34 percent disapproved, according a Washington Post-ABC survey. Earlier this month, the same poll showed that 37 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved.
In addition, for the first time in its 15-year history, the Wall Street Journal-NBC poll this year showed that the public's negative feelings exceeded its positive feelings about both political parties at the same time. "These are cautionary notes that are affecting both parties' political standing," McInturff said.
-- Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "A Growing Wariness About Money in Politics" for The Washington Post