| 摘要 | Kansas Republican Rep. Lynn Jenkins had been heralded as a champion of small business, and so it was only fitting she would hang up her own shingle now that she’s leaving Congress. The one wrinkle in this feel-good story: Her business is a lobbying firm, and she’s already launched it, before even leaving Congress.
As Jenkins votes on bills to extend special corporate tax breaks, as she votes on massive spending bills, and while she’s supposedly still representing the people of Topeka, LJ Strategies LLC — which the congresswoman established in November, according to a Facebook post — will be lining up corporate clients who will pay Jenkins’ bills in her post-congressional career.
It’s already extraordinary that a sitting congresswoman already owns a lobbying firm. But it’s part of a revered biennial tradition in the swamp: the Great Cash-out. Defeated and retiring members monetize their elected positions by going to work right away for K Street firms with major corporate clients. The erstwhile congressmen and senators get jobs lobbying or quasi-lobbying for the companies they enriched with subsidies. The ex-members get jobs helping companies navigate the regulations they just wrote and passed into law. More broadly, most of them line up jobs selling to the special interests the connections and knowledge they gained while in public service.
After Obamacare cost many Democratic senators and congressmen their seats, the bill—loaded with subsidies, mandates, regulations, and taxes—created dozens of post-congressional jobs for those same members. Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., was perhaps the most famous House-side “casualty” of Obamacare, but his bank account benefited tremendously from his electoral defeats. Two days after leaving Congress in January 2011, Pomeroy had a job at K Street giant Alston Bird, where today he lobbies on behalf of life insurers, hospitals, and other companies subsidized and regulated by Obamacare. Dozens of others did the same thing.
Now it’s the Republicans’ turn to swarm K Street. At noon on January 3, the lame duck members will enter the private sector, and you can expect a handful of them to catch an Uber to what D.C. residents call “downtown” for work. They’re already lining up those jobs during this lame duck session.
Keep a special eye on the committee chairmen and other leaders.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has not made his plans clear, but you can bet the bidding is high for his services downtown. All of his predecessors since the 1980s have become lobbyists or shadow lobbyists except for two—Speaker Jim Wright, who left office in 1989 amid scandal, and Nancy Pelosi who hasn’t yet left office.
John Boehner is a senior adviser at the law/lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs. Dennis Hastert launched his own firm and went to lobby for K Street stalwart Dickstein Shapiro. Newt Gingrich never registered as a lobbyist, but he did lobbying work for the government-relations arm of government-sponsored housing financier Freddie Mac, and the drug industry paid him while he lobbied Republicans to expand Medicare.
Tom Foley is the last Democratic speaker to leave Congress, and he became a lobbyist for Akin Gump. So Ryan will have to break tradition and resist the siren call of K Street if he abstains from the Great 2018 Cash-out.
Then there are the committee chairmen. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, is the retiring chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. He’ll have the banks, the insurers, the hedge funds all knocking on his door. His six-year tenure in that chair was marked by adherence to free enterprise and thus often coldness to the finance giants who wanted more subsidies and taxpayer backstops. Will the salaries on K Street be enough to make him abandon his principles?
There won’t be much left to abandon for Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., retiring chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The former free-marketer became an agent of international corporate welfare when he had the gavel in his hand, championing the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which subsidizes U.S. companies who set up shop overseas. It’s hard to imagine a better warmup act to big-business lobbying than shepherding subsidies to multinational corporations around the globe.
John Culberson, who chairs an Appropriations subcommittee, likewise lost his seat. But the most interesting to watch will be Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. Kyl cashed out after his first stint in the U.S. Senate, and was enjoying life “downtown,” until Arizona Governor Doug Ducey picked him to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John McCain. But Kyl may not stick around until the special election in 2020—there’s plenty of talk that he’ll resign in the coming weeks.
So here’s the question: will he return to Covington & Burling, where he was a lobbyist as recently as August? If so, was Kyl a sitting U.S. senator who had his K Street job waiting for him the whole time he was voting on taxing, spending, regulating, and subsidizing his once-and-future clients?
Many Republicans and a few Democrats will partake in the cashout. But they shouldn’t. The revolving door corrupts government by rigging the game in favor of the big guys who can hire the likes of Boehner and Pomeroy and by creating perverse incentives for sitting members. It corrupts businesses by drawing them into the swamp where they choose handouts over free enterprise.
If our congressmen and senators really are public servants, they’ll stay away from this corrupting tradition of the Great Cash-out. |
