Systemic corruption
by David Atkins
The Washington Post has a good bit of journalism on family members of congressmembers getting hired as lobbyists, with all the problems that one might expect from such incestuous relationships:
The Post analysis shows that the interests of lawmakers and their relatives have overlapped to varying degrees on bills before Congress. In the past six years, for example, 36 congressional relatives — including spouses, children, siblings, parents and in-laws — have been paid to influence 250 bills passing through their family members’ congressional committees or sponsored by the members.
All of this is legal under the rules Congress has written for itself.
That lawmakers have relatives working as lobbyists has been widely reported over the years. Lawmakers have consistently said their relatives don’t lobby them directly. The 2007 overhaul prohibited spouses from direct lobbying but gave other relatives more leeway.
For the first time since the changes, however, The Post examination reveals the extent to which relatives are still paid to work on issues before their family members.
“It’s a technique of throwing money at the feet of the congressman who can influence my business,” said Craig Holman, a campaign finance and government ethics lobbyist for Public Citizen.
The family ties are another example of the intersection of lawmakers’ public and private interests, which The Post has been documenting in a year-long series. Earlier articles revealed lawmakers who secured earmarks for projects near properties they own, traded in stocks of companies lobbying on bills before them and pushed legislation affecting industries in which they had financial interests.
Historians are going to look back in awe at this New Gilded Age of ours in which an utterly broken government functioned solely on behalf of the wealthy when it functioned at all, with open graft and corruption everywhere in spite of unprecedented access to citizen mobilization and information.
It’s stunning and not in a good way.
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