Thursday, January 05, 2006
Editorial: K Street corruption pervades Congress
Abramoff's plea agreement will help federal prosecutors determine how completely public officials have sold themselves out.
From the RoundTable blog
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The plea agreement by überlobbyist Jack Abramoff could herald the cleansing floods that might wash the unbearable stench of corruption from the Augean stables of Washington, D.C.
Members of Congress who sold influence and favors in exchange for free dinners, lavish golf trips, campaign cash and lucrative jobs for spouses should don their life jackets.
Influence-peddling is not a new pastime in the nation's capital, but the Abramoff guilty plea and continuing criminal investigation are laying bare what appears to be an unprecedented level of almost casual corruption.
The Washington Post reported that Abramoff is prepared to testify against about half a dozen members of Congress, as well as a number of congressional staffers, who took actions to benefit his clients in exchange for favors and campaign cash.
A Capitol Hill correspondent for Business Week has said that as many as 60 members of Congress could be caught up in the investigation.
Abramoff was a bipartisan benefactor, but Republicans are especially concerned. And they should be. Abramoff was, without doubt, a creature of the GOP.
He was also a key behind-the-scenes player in the "K Street Project," the unprecedented and largely successful effort by congressional Republicans to turn Washington's lobbying establishment into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.
Using hardball tactics, the GOP made it clear that companies should not hire Democrats for lobbying positions.
In 1998, DeLay and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., even held up legislation protecting intellectual property rights to protest the hiring of a Democrat by the Electronics Industry Association.
The message was clear: Hire Republicans if you want to get things done on Capitol Hill.
After President Bush's election in 2000, the K Street Project really took off. "We're making progress on K Street because the times they are a-changing," GOP lobbyist Dan Cohen told The Washington Post in 2003.
In an August 2003 article, Washington Monthly editor Nicholas Confessore called the K Street Project an attempt to build a new Republican political machine "built upon patronage, contracts and one-party rule ... among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal."
The theory behind the project, Confessore wrote, boiled down to this: "As Republicans control more and more K Street jobs, they will reap more and more K Street money, which will help them win larger and larger majorities on the Hill."
Abramoff may throw a wrench in that machine, and his extensive involvement in the K Street Project will make it difficult for Republicans to successfully distance themselves from the growing scandal -- which in hindsight can be seen as an almost inevitable consequence of this partisan effort to co-opt the lobbying industry.
The extent of the corruption should become clear in the next few months. The public should pay close attention as the unsavory drama unfolds.
Only a concentrated flood of voter wrath can successfully wash out the institutional stench.
