Lobbyist Helps a Project He Financed in Congress

From the New York Times courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Soon after he retired last year as one of the leading liberals in Congress, former Representative William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts started his own lobbying firm with an office on the 16th floor of a Boston skyscraper. One of his first clients was a small coastal town that has agreed to pay him $15,000 a month for help in developing a wind energy project.

Amid the revolving door of congressmen-turned-lobbyists, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Delahunt’s transition, except for one thing. While in Congress, he personally earmarked $1.7 million for the same energy project.

So today, his firm, the Delahunt Group, stands to collect $90,000 or more for six months of work from the town of Hull, on Massachusetts Bay, with 80 percent of it coming from the pot of money he created through a pair of Energy Department grants in his final term in office, records and interviews show.

More here.

One way that lobbyists influence legislation is through direct campaign donations to candidates. All candidates, or, at least, the candidates who have a snowball's chance of winning. You know, just to hedge their bets. Ideology is irrelevant. The money's the thing. Give a candidate lots of money and he's yours.

Another way is, of course, rewarding the officials they've already bought by giving them lucrative lobbying/consulting positions once they've left office. John Breaux, for instance, the former Louisiana Senator, and a good friend to the pharmaceutical industry, became a lobbyist for, you guessed it, the pharmaceutical industry when he retired from the Senate. This system is valuable to politicians because it makes them rich once they leave public service; it's valuable to business interests because it gives them access, and lots of it.

In these ways, and a few others I haven't mentioned, business does an end-run around democracy, and rules the nation with influence rather than votes. It is corrupt and against everything for which America supposedly stands, but that's how it works.

This guy in the excerpt above, Delahunt, appears to have cut out the middle men, that is, already existing lobbying organizations, and formed his own firm. But it's the same thing: he's getting rich using his access to and understanding of the legislative system, smoothing the wheels of government for anybody willing to pay. On the one hand, I like that he's not working directly for big business interests; on the other hand, it's exactly the same kind of anti-democratic corruption that would be happening if he was working directly for big business interests.

And he's a "liberal," too. I guess that "liberal" now means milking the system for as much as you can get. He also may very well have broken the law in that he's lobbying on a project that he put together when he was serving in Congress--the overly obvious conflict of interest stands a chance of pissing off his Congressional brothers who are waiting for their turn on the gravy train; that is, he's going too far and doing it too flagrantly, which might bring public scrutiny down on the whole edifice of corruption.

In the end, though, that's the key word, "corruption." Right now, the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying business is, by and large, legal. That Delahunt may have crossed the line between legal and illegal lobbying is kind of irrelevant. The legal stuff is bad enough.

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