Breaking The Machine
by digby
TIME magazine has posted an essential article about the effect of the Abramoff scandal on the house Republicans.
Meet the “reform” candidates who would like to replace Tom DeLay:
Boehner is no babe in the woods. He was one of Newt Gingrich’s closest allies in bringing Republicans to power in 1994. When they took control of the House in 1995 after 40 years of Democratic rule, Boehner, as the House conference chairman, the No. 4 leadership position, was put in charge of building coalitions with business groups. He ran a meeting every Thursday of more than a dozen top business lobbyists in Washington. The relationship was mutually beneficial: House Republicans pushed through pro-business legislation, while the business groups provided campaign cash and grass-roots support to get bills passed. Boehner, who was part of the so-called Gang of Seven that had attacked Democrats for overdrafts from the House bank in the early 1990s, quickly became less known for his reform actions than for his closeness to lobbyists. He famously handed out campaign donations in the form of checks from tobacco lobbyists to members on the floor of the House in 1995.
[…]
The battle between Boehner and Blunt got ugly quickly. Blunt allies called Boehner a “joy boy” more concerned about partying than about the party. Boehner allies distributed a Rube Goldberg- like diagram, intentionally drawn to resemble opponents’ depiction of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failed health-care plan, headlined Rep. Roy Blunt’s efforts on behalf of Jack Abramoff and his indian gaming clients.
[…]
Shadegg has the strongest reform credentials of the three contenders. He entered Congress in the famous class of 1994, which campaigned on a pledge to reform Washington after years of Democratic rule. He once headed the caucus of the House’s most conservative members of Congress
There you have it, two crooks and a fanatical wingnut. Excellent choices all.
The TIME article from which I excerpted the above has a great lede that should be sent around to everyone you know. It encapsulates the whole ugly business:
The spreadsheet, bristling with million-dollar totals, jumped from flat screen to flat screen last winter in the Washington underground of fund-raising consultants and political-action committees. It had been created by allies of Congressman John Boehner, an Ohio Republican known for massive, raucous late-night parties. A window into the science of the shakedown, the spreadsheet calculated the “efficiency” of fund-raising committees headed by various leaders of the House, showing which were most generous to other Republicans. Boehner’s backers were thrilled when the widely forwarded spreadsheet produced a front-page headline in The Hill, a newspaper focused on Congress, saying boehner boasts of big bucks. Eight months later, his team smiled again when the paper ran a list of Boehner’s “K Street Cabinet,” loyal lobbyists and other power brokers who would help run the show if he achieved his longtime ambition of becoming House Speaker or majority leader. With Tom DeLay’s machine still in charge of the Capitol, those were the credentials that would get an aspiring lawmaker taken seriously.
They didn’t even try to hide it.
Haven’t you ever wondered why it is that we are told constantly that it’s nearly impossible for the Democrats to take back the house because they’ve been safely gerrymandered and yet Republicans spend almost all their time fundraising? If their seats are safe, what do they need all this campaign cash for?
It’s a money laundering operation. The lobbyists give money to the GOP as campaign cash, the recipients gain power and influence in the party by spreading that campaign cash around. The Republican leadership allows the lobbyists to write their own legislation and the members earmark large sums of money to their own personal special interests. The taxpayers then pay back the lobbyists at a very nice profit.
The taxpayers are thereby funding the Republican party. Nice racket isn’t it? And anybody who doesn’t understand that this is a distinctly Republican problem (like the inexplicable Deborah Howell who refuses to see the forest for a couple of twigs on the side of the road) is willfully blind.
In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay’s office and shown their place in “friendly” or “unfriendly” columns. (“If you want to play in our revolution,” DeLay told The Washington Post, “you have to live by our rules.”) Another was to oust Democrats from trade associations, what DeLay and Norquist dubbed “the K Street Strategy.”
[…]
It took the 2000 elections, which gave Republicans the White House and Congress, to completely change the climate. In the months after, Santorum became the Senate’s point man on K Street and launched his Tuesday meetings. Working on the outside, Norquist accelerated what he calls the “K Street Project,” a database intended to track the party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town. With Democrats out of power, these efforts are bearing fruit. Slowly, the GOP is marginalizing Democratic lobbyists and populating K Street with loyal Republicans. (DeLay alone has placed a dozen of his aides at key lobbying and trade association jobs in the last few years–“graduates of the DeLay school,” as they are known.) Already, the GOP and some of its key private-sector allies, such as PhRMA, have become indistinguishable.
The piece in TIME ends with this:
…in the warrens of the Capitol, Republicans debate how they can project change while keeping things much the same. The big totals on future spreadsheets depend on it.
It is hard to overemphasize how important this Abramoff scandal is. It’s not just “gotcha” politics. This Republican political machine is one of the most corrosive forces this country has ever seen. They are literally stealing huge sums of money from the taxpayers, sometimes blatantly for personal financial gain, as with the Dukestir. But in a larger sense they are blatently using our money, the people’s money, as the primary way to fund their party and keep it in power. The exposure of this scam has shaken the foundation of their long term strategy.
The combination of their proven undemocratic impulses with their propensity for thuggishness and corruption has made the modern GOP one of the most pernicious political factions in our history. Putting an end to their shakedown racket is a necessary first step to breaking up their coalition and restoring some sanity to our two party system.
.