Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who has spread a lot of money around Washington buying favors, has plead guilty to several Federal counts today and is turning state's evidence. I guarantee you there are many legislators on the Hill right now quaking in their boots. Expect several major indictments of Congressmen in the next few months for accepting bribes and selling influence. Duke Cunningham wasn't the first and he won't be the last. Many more will go down in flames.
Update: For a really thorough overview of all of the folks who have been subponaed, indicted, or received large donations (more than $10,000) from Abramoff, go here. While most of them are Republicans, they also include 3 prominent Democratic senators, including the minority leader, Harry Reid. What is most fascinating about it all to me is that what went on is absolutely business as usual for both parties. Take Harry Reid for example...
One of Abramoff's clients, an Indian tribe, wanted to stop another Indian tribe from opening a competing casino. Abramoff's firm lobbied Reid and Nevada Republican Congressman John Ensign to help stop it and they sent a letter to that end. The day after they sent the letter, Abramoff's client donated $5000 to Reid's PAC. Now, his defenders will tell you that this was just a matter of political agreement, that Reid was opposed to the expansion of Indian gaming in general (hardly a shock, given that he's from Nevada and the casinos there don't want the competition) and this was just a group giving money to a like-minded politician to support their own beliefs.
I would submit that anyone who really believes this is blissfully naive and unaware of how politics works. Believe me, folks, I've been in congressional offices and I've watched this go on, it is absolutely tit for tat. Lobbyist A walks in and says, "If you'll do X, we'll make sure X amount of dollars goes to Y." Y may be a PAC controlled by the legislator. If they are maxed out on what they can give to that group, Y may well just be a cause that the legislator supports. I know it works this way because I've seen it with my own eyes many times.
Everyone who has ever formed a non-profit organization knows that the first secret is to get a legislator or two involved on the board or in some manner. You have to have the legislator's name on the letterhead somewhere and you have to have their full support. It may be a pet cause they really believe in and you have to seek out the one who might get involved, and preferably it will be someone who chairs a powerful committee. Why? Because there are limits on what a lobbyist or a corporation can donate to that legislator directly, to their PAC, or to the party. Once that is maxed out, the lobbyist has to find other ways of influencing the legislator and the primary alternative is to give money - without limit, I might add, and tax-deductible on top of that - to a non-profit organization that the legislator supports. That's how politics works in the real world, folks, and it's true of both parties. Always follow the money.
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One of the really frustrating aspects of this is the failure of Doc Hastings (a regionally "local" representative) to open the House Ethics Committee investigations into any and all of this. We have been deluging his office with calls, letters, and faxes to no avail. At least the Federal prosecutors can perform some of the "cleansingl;" thank them very much!
Hmm. I've been watching this for awhile, and I note the stories are all doing the "COngressmen of both parties" dance -- but the only Democrat named is Dorgan.
But Dorgan's money didn't come from Abramoff, but from the same lobbying firm -- and it came well after Dorgan was on record as supporting the issue.
It looked -- to me -- like the standard lobbyist thing: Donate to candidates who already support your view.
Am I missing other Democrats involved? Is there more to the Dorgan donations?
My impression of this affair is that it's heavily Republican -- and that it was more than just the excess of power going to their heads. It's been going on for 20 years now -- Abramoff and Reed and Delay have been crafting this since the 80s.
Oh, please, please, PLEASE, pretty please, let Senator Jim Inhofe be one of the ones going down. I know he's being investigated but it would be REALLY nice to see that sanctimonious creep in prison!
Morat-
My understanding is that this one is going to hit mostly Republicans, though that doesn't matter a bit to me. I hope it nails everyone involved, regardless of party. Given that Abramoff's partner, Scanlon, was an aide to Tom Delay, it's hardly a surprise that mostly Republicans were involved in this one. Which doesn't mean that Democrats don't do the exact same thing, of course, as I have no doubt they do.
There's a big gap between a cynical "It's like this for both of them" and "Who gets indicted".
Unethical behavior spans a wide continiuum -- from "unethical but not against any rules or laws" to "felony".
If, just as an example, you took two groups of people and showed that both groups had equal numbers of convicted criminals.
But one group was composed of people who were convicted for parking violations and speeding tickets, and the other group was convicted of robbery, larceny, and burglary -- well, I wouldn't consider each group equal.
There's the usual "money makes the world go round" bit -- donations coming from Abaramoff's clients and the regular lobbyist behavior -- which seems to be spread in the usual places (who can make things happen, etc).
Then there appears to be an entire other layer to Abramoff's activities -- and this is where he ended up in severe legeal trouble -- that seems to connect only to Republicans.
Which doesn't surprise me, as Abramoff has always been part of the GOP money machine.
The "A pox on both their houses" setntiment is generally counterproductive. We live in the real world, and it pays to differentiate between the mildly corrupt and the criminal.
My point, however, was that at least on the first level that you refer to, what Abramoff did was little different from what goes on every single day in every legislator's office from either party. And the sooner we recognize that, the better off we'll be. Do you really think we can't find tons of examples of this for Democrats too? Do you think it's just a coincidence that Tyson chicken donated gazillions to the Clinton campaigns and then had Clinton's EPA rewrite the administrative rules governing runoff from their agribusiness farms? Do you think it's just a coincidence that Clinton got huge donations from Wall Street investment houses and then got his support for the deregulation bills in the early 90s that allowed those companies to expand into businesses previously forbidden to them by conflict of interest laws? That's largely what led to Enron, by the way. The "pox on both houses" is counterproductive only to those whose partisanship gives them a stake in making one party look perfect and the other look evil. In the real world, this kind of influence buying goes in all day, every day, in the offices of every legislator of either party. And it's the people who get screwed over.
I realized that they did this sort of thing, I just didn't think they gave so little effort in covering it up. I thought they would find some better legal loophole.
But i'm about at the point where scraping it all and going back to monarchism doesn't seem so bad.
They only cover it up if it is blatantly violating the admittedly lax and ineffective laws governing lobbying and contributions.
The truth of the matter is that our political system is essentially a free market in which influence, money, and favors are traded back and forth between various groups and individuals. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is what it is.
Certain things, however, are unacceptable. One is direct personal payments to legislators. Contributions to a campaign, PAC, or favored non-profit acceptable, but not personal payments such as what happened with "Duke." This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it isn't for a number of reasons.
Also out of bounds are direct quid-pro-quos, although this is obviously a murky area, but money and favors cannot be offered directly in exchange for a vote on a particular bill. One can make donations to a politician who supports bills you like, and one can make donations to a politician who later supports bills that you like, but there is a line, however fine, where if a politician directly promises a vote in exchange for donations, and makes said vote directly dependent upon donations, this is unethical.
There is, however, one easy and simple check upon this type of behavior. If a politician's desire for donations and favors causes him to vote against the best interests of his constituents, he could be voted out of office. However, this requires people to actually read their newspapers and get out and vote.
There have got to be a lot of crap filled drawers on the GOP today. I am looking forward to a good housecleaning and maybe some steele bracelets on the hill. It is good to keep in mind though that while this is affecting mostly repubs that's likely only because they're the majority party and so theres not a lot of motivation to lube the democratic ticket. Especialy on issues like workers rights in the Mariannas Islands which aren't likely to garner support from some democrats - should they regain power - no matter how much money is offered. Not that I think there are a lot of dems who have enough integrity to deny the cash but they still have to get elected and their constituents would go apeshit if they supported some of the crap that Abramoff was into. Don't mistake me as either sort of republicrat either though. I think that the two party system just breeds this kind of crap.
They only cover it up if it is blatantly violating the admittedly lax and ineffective laws governing lobbying and contributions.
The truth of the matter is that our political system is essentially a free market in which influence, money, and favors are traded back and forth between various groups and individuals. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is what it is.
Certain things, however, are unacceptable. One is direct personal payments to legislators. Contributions to a campaign, PAC, or favored non-profit acceptable, but not personal payments such as what happened with "Duke." This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it isn't for a number of reasons.
Also out of bounds are direct quid-pro-quos, although this is obviously a murky area, but money and favors cannot be offered directly in exchange for a vote on a particular bill. One can make donations to a politician who supports bills you like, and one can make donations to a politician who later supports bills that you like, but there is a line, however fine, where if a politician directly promises a vote in exchange for donations, and makes said vote directly dependent upon donations, this is unethical.
There is, however, one easy and simple check upon this type of behavior. If a politician's desire for donations and favors causes him to vote against the best interests of his constituents, he could be voted out of office. However, this requires people to actually read their newspapers and get out and vote.
There is, however, one easy and simple check upon this type of behavior. If a politician's desire for donations and favors causes him to vote against the best interests of his constituents....
I sympathize with your sentiment, but I will merely ask you. Who are his constituents? Several decades ago, a SciFi author (I believe it was Phillip K. Dick) wrote a story in which the legislators essentially represented corporate and commercial interests. Sound familiar?
Further to my previous comment, who do you believe the customers for the "media" are in the US? The customers are not you, the viewer, or (in the case of print media) the reader. The customers are the advertisers. US media exists to sell advertizing. That was clarified to me 20 years ago in the Wall Street Journal (!).
No, actually, the customers are still the readers in that model. Why? Because absent readers, the advertising is worthless. The income made from advertising is tied directly into circulation and readership. The same is true with campaigns to an extent. Even though contributions, donations, favors, publicity etc will make a difference in who gets elected, one should still remember that there is an ultimate point to it: you still need to get more votes than the other guy. A massive campaign contribution will certainly allow you to create and distribute more effective campaign advertisements towards the voters, but the end goal is still to get those voters out to the polls.
You're confusing intermediate and ultimate goals here. The intermediate goal is to gain certain resources that can in turn be used to attain the ultimate goal of re-election.
With newspapers, of course, the intermediate goal certainly is to increase readership for the ultimate goal of selling advertisement. But again, the two are inextricably linked.