The Money Problem

Michael Tomasky has published a solid if somewhat dry article in the current New York Review of Books entitled "The Money Fighting Health Care Reform." Somewhat frustratingly to this reform-obsessed liberal, he opens with a little I-told-you-so in which he rehashes an argument he made in 2008 to the effect that for his first year in office Obama should focus like Clinton's laser beam on the economy and specifically on jobs and defer any major initiatives until he had satisfied the voting public that he was a good economic steward. That's as it may be. This sort of politics-as-sport, Monday morning quarterbacking is exactly what I intend avoid in this blog, and so I will--avoid it I mean. It's the meat of Tomasky's piece, a heavily referenced catalog of the sources and targets of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into lobbying Congress on health care just over the past year that gets me riled up. Appropriately, he raises a question as to whether Congress is capable anymore of the kinds of sweeping reforms it passed in number in the 1960s and early 70s, and he cites two things, procedural rules such as the Senate cloture rule and the exponential growth in lobbying expenditures, as being key factors in preventing Congress from again becoming the progressive institution it was forty five years ago.

$3.47 billion was spent lobbying the federal government--mostly Congress--in 2009, a record. $544 million of that was spent by the health sector, with $267 million spent by the pharmaceutical industry alone. These figures include money paid to lobbyists in salary and expenses for lobbying-related activities such as dinners, conferences and junkets attended by public officials as well as individual campaign contributions and industry-sponsored issue ads. One fact that I found most telling is that a full ten percent of registered lobbyists are former Congressional employees including staffers and several former Representatives. Forget about how it might influence a Congressman for him to be wined and dined by some industry shill at a golf retreat on Hilton Head, how much more influential must it be if he knows that should he lose his reelection bid or should he decide to retire early from electoral politics, he can sell access for a high six-figure salary and not even have to worry about jetting home from Washington for face-time with his constituents?

It seems to me that this last part of it would be easy enough to fix. Just pass a law banning any Congressperson or staffer from acting as a lobbyist for a fixed period of time after leaving office. Five years, maybe? Maybe ten? Of course the folks most adversely effected by such a law are the ones who'd have to pass it, so don't hold your breath. And then this Roberts Court would just as likely overturn it anyway. As we now know, corporations are people and spending money is a speech act subject to First Amendment protections.

Here are some useful links suggest to me by the article:

Center for Responsive Politics aka OpenSecrets.org

Common Cause