Business As Usual In DC

You'll recall that the winner of the House Majority Leadership post was the one who WASN'T as tied to lobbyists as Roy Blunt. He ran on and won the position on a pledge of reform. But John Boehner is making a mockery of it.

Far from trying to put the brakes on lobbyists and the money they channel into Republican coffers, Mr. Boehner, who has portrayed his ties to Washington lobbyists as something to be proud of, has stepped on the gas.

He has been holding fund-raisers at lobbyists’ offices, flying to political events on corporate planes and staying at a golf resort with a business group that has a direct stake in issues before Congress.

Tapping a rich vein of longstanding relationships with lobbyists and their corporate clients, Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, has raised campaign contributions at a rate of about $10,000 a day since February, surpassing the pace set by former Representative Tom DeLay after he became majority leader in 2002, a review of federal filings shows.

It's still pay to play Republican government, still business as usual. Of course, the whole thing was a smokescreen from the beginning. The only reason Boehner got away with the reform pose in the first place is because he was relatively unknown and not tied in with the current leadership.

“The Republican Party needed somebody to say they were a reform candidate, so he said it,” said L. Sandy Maisel, a professor of government and director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Colby College. “But in reality, he’s carrying on in the tradition not just of DeLay, but past Democratic and Republican leaders alike.”

I think Maisel is being charitable by playing the "everybody does it" line at the end of his statement. I don't know how many connections and investigations have to come out before people realize that this particular kind of corruption is systemic and indeed built into the workings of today's broken House of Representatives. 90% of Rep. Jerry Lewis' campaign spending in the last quarter has been for his legal defense team. He knows what's coming down the pike. So does Bob Ney, who has so many legal bills he's six months behind on the payments. The Feds are questioning Katherine Harris' advisers over her involvement with Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor who was at the center of the Duke Cunningham scandal.

The buzzards are circling and they're all over the place. And though there is systemic corruption at the top designed and implemented by Republicans, there's a softer kind of ethical free-fire zone that affects both parties. There are apparently special off-the-books Congressional caucuses that use trips and perks to schmooze representatives without public scrutiny. Like 500 of them. Reform Democrats outside of Washington need to not only run on cleaning up the system, highlighting these abuses of power, but they need to be mindful of how they conduct themselves once they get to Congress. I do believe in personal responsibility when it comes to our lawmakers. They have a sworn duty not to let lobbyist largesse get in between their role as a representative for their constituents.

The whole system must change, most importantly through public financing of elections, which would remove a major lever for big lobbying money to get what they want. Making elections less dependent on money would leave only personal aggrandizement as a reason for getting in bed with lobbyists. That's a big temptation, but it's also something we can root out.