The Man who bought Washington
A recent issue of Time Magazine featured Jack Abramoff, the man who bought Washington.
Abramoff could not have bought Washington had not Washington been for sale in the first place.
Everything in Washington, DC is about money. As the saying goes, “Follow the money.”
Details on political spending may be found at www.tray.com. But that only scratches the surface.
Abramoff certainly perfected the fine art of lobbying as bribing, but it is the bribing by lobbyists like Abramoff which leads to the inescapable conclusion that it is the whole lobbying function that has become so dirty.
And no one raises an eyebrow, because “everybody does it.” And with that excuse our leaders, those who should be setting an example to the nation as a whole, and particularly our young folks, our leaders sink ever deeper into the morass of lost honor, lost integrity, lost virtue.
“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.” — President Ronald Reagan, speaking in Los Angeles, March 2, 1977
Lobbying is actually the heart of the problem. Lobbying may be considered to be provided for in the First Amendment, but lobbyists as a group have gotten out of control. Why? Because the only limit is lobbyists’ imagination:
- They spend money without restraint to buy favor and access.
- They ingratiate themselves with members with favors, entertainment and cash in the form of campaign contributions, or even worse, as untraceable cash under the table.
- They lobby not only members but individual staffers
- Lobbying becomes a goal for members when they retire or are beaten at the polls.
To get its house in order, Congress must do something it has no heart to do:
It must eliminate the money associated with lobbying.
And that includes “earmarking.” One definition of earmark is “An identifying mark in the ear of a domestic animal.” — Pig?
The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund wrote a compelling expose of the way earmarking works in Congress. The following paragraphs are lifted from that article:
Nothing better illustrates the meltdown in spending restraint than earmarking, the process by which members secure special pork projects such as Alaska’s infamous $223 million “bridge to nowhere.” Pork is an inevitable product of political compromise, but earmarks are a particularly corrupt form. They are often last-minute additions to conference reports that were never considered in the original bills passed by either the House or Senate. They can thus avoid competitive bidding, performance standards or even disclosure of the direct recipient.
In 1998, Congress approved 1,850 earmarks just for transportation projects. Last year’s transportation bill contained 6,371. [Robert Novak estimates that the national total approaches 15,000.] Earmarks have become the corrupt currency by which bills like the ruinously expensive prescription drug entitlement are bought vote by vote. They inevitably result in some lower-priority projects being funded first, with potentially disastrous results. In Louisiana, the Army Corps of Engineers spent $1.9 billion between 2000 and 2005, more than 80% of which was earmarked. Less than 4% of the total was spent on protecting levees, while over a third of the money went to building a new lock on an underused canal. Then along came Hurricane Katrina.
Congress, on both sides of the aisle, is working hard to make it look as if it were really reform minded.
What they are trying to do is the minimum they can get by with. No one notices the hippopotamus in the living room (hate to say “elephant,” it sounds partisan).
That hippopotamus is lobbyists’ common and regular practice of throwing big campaign fund raisers, yielding millions of dollars for members.
For these pork-laden public servants at the public trough the expression “checks and balances” means incoming certified checks and (their own) bank balances.
Follow the money indeed.
Plaudits to Fred Barnes of Fox News, who recognizes that there is only one solution to a Congress that is out of control, and that is term limitation.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams (Address to the Military, 11 October 1798), cited by Patriot Post.
What is needed is what many would call “reform” but what we see as actually not so much a reform as it is a return to basics.
It is a constitutional amendment limiting congressional terms.
