My mom, the lobbyist
My mother works at an all-women penitentiary in Ohio (this one, I think). She offers psychological counseling to the inmates by day and coordinates activities of the employees’ union on the side.
Recently her union has asked her if she would like to take part in a 10-week paid training session for lobbyists in Washington, DC. After her training is complete, I guess the plan is to have her apply her newly acquired skills at the Ohio statehouse.
In the course of our discussion, I mentioned to her that the Republicans have been making a concerted effort to remake K Street in the GOP’s image. (What’s K Street, you ask? The main lobbying district in DC, of course!)
Nicholas Confessore writes about it in this article in The Washington Monthly:
The chief purpose of these [Republican-only] gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington’s K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street.
Actually, it was Paul Krugman who called my attention to the plan, the “K Street Project” as it is called, in this recent article:
Nicholas Confessore draws together stories usually reported in isolation—from the drive to privatize Medicare, to the pro-tax-cut fliers General Motors and Verizon recently included with the dividend checks mailed to shareholders, to the pro-war rallies organized by Clear Channel radio stations. As he points out, these are symptoms of the emergence of an unprecedented national political machine, one that is well on track to establishing one-party rule in America.
…
Of course, interest groups want to curry favor with the party that controls Congress and the White House; but as The Washington Post explains, Mr. Santorum’s colleagues have also used “intimidation and private threats” to bully lobbyists who try to maintain good relations with both parties. “If you want to play in our revolution,” Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, once declared, “you have to live by our rules.”
…
Mr. Confessore suggests that we may be heading for a replay of the McKinley era, in which the nation was governed by and for big business. I think he’s actually understating his case: like Mr. DeLay, Republican leaders often talk of “revolution,” and we should take them at their word.
I tend to agree with Krugman’s assessment: We are heading on a course that would create a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations”.
Although I doubt my mom will have an office on K Street any time in the near future, perhaps I can persuade her to give us an inside look at what the lobbying scene looks like in Bush’s Washington.
[Note: See also this MetaFilter discussion: K street antics.]
