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by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Institute Trustee
Watching Barack Hussein Obama work the crowds at public appearances might lead the non-thinking and the uninformed to believe that he is actually serious about limiting the power and influence of special interests and their lobbyists.
Standing on the platform, surrounded on all sides by adoring sycophants, he rails at the lobbyists and the special interests who populate the halls of Congress and the executive branch. “When I am elected President of the United States,” he intones, “the lobbyists and the special interests will no longer run Washington, D.C. Power will be returned to the people!”
And the crowds go crazy. They spring to their feet, screaming and shouting, waving their placards in the air…placards that read “Public Employees for Obama” and “Classroom Teachers for Obama.” These are the toadies of AFSCME, AFT, and the NEA, three of the ten most powerful special interest lobbies in Washington, who, along with the trial lawyers and the anti-American billionaire George Soros, own the Democratic Party.
We are forced to wonder, if Obama were to stand on the platform and shout, “When I am elected President of the United States, the teachers’ unions, the trial lawyers, and the public employees unions will no longer run Washington, D.C. Power will be returned to the people,” would he actually escape the auditorium unscathed? Probably not.
Obama’s own website tells us that, in January 2006, he co-authored the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, with 41 Democratic co-sponsors. The bill would have:
- Lengthened the waiting period from one to two years for members of Congress who seek to become lobbyists.
- Required immediate disclosure as soon as public servants enter negotiations to become lobbyists.
- Proposed the opening of conference committee meetings to the public.
- Required that all bills be posted on the Internet for 24 hours before they can be voted on by the Senate.
- Ended all lobbyist-funded gifts, meals, and travel.
All of these provisions were included in some form in the final bill passed in 2007. Most are mere “feel good” nonsense, disguised as real reform. For the Democrat sponsors, it must have reminded them of wetting their pants as children; it gave them a nice warm feeling while they were doing it, but it didn’t do any good in the long run.
For example, to require members of Congress to wait two years before becoming lobbyists is meaningless. There is nothing to prevent a member from moving from Capitol Hill to a K Street law firm and going to work immediately at a huge salary. The ex-congressman need not register as a lobbyist in order to be effective as a high-priced client magnet for his new employer.
And if a retiring member entered negotiations with a law firm or a lobbying firm, to whom would he disclose that information…Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, or Jay Rockefeller, all of whom leak everything they know that might harm a retiring Republican?
Open conference committee meetings to the public? Of all the bad ideas ever floated, this is among the worst. It is in the conference committee, where members of both parties, from both houses of Congress, get together and hammer out the tough compromises that eventually become law. It is where the business of legislating gets really “down and dirty;” it is political “mud wrestling.” Anyone who thinks that Congress will ever willingly expose such proceedings to public view is a fool.
Require that all bills be posted on the Internet for 24 hours before the Senate votes on them? Again, this is the kind of “feel good” idea that might be popular in a third or fourth grade civics class. It is the rare bill that does not run to hundreds of pages. Many, such as the annual appropriations bills, contain thousands of pages. Obama, himself, does not read the bills before he votes on them, even though he has hard copy on his desk in front of him. So who does he expect to read the bills on the Internet?
And finally, Obama apparently thought it would be a good idea to prevent lobbyists from buying meals for senators. We presume that his intention was to prohibit a senator from actually sitting down with a lobbyist at an upscale Washington restaurant and discussing the pros and cons of legislation over a $25 steak and a $50 bottle of wine. However, if that same senator held a campaign fundraiser in a private room of that same restaurant, where the price of admission was $2,000 per person and the fare was finger food and cheap white wine, and where the senator and his guests merely stood around and talked things over, that would be permitted.
Apparently, as Obama sees it, bad things happen when people sit down over a $40 or $50 meal, but it’s okay to contribute $2,000 to a senator’s reelection campaign…so long as the lobbyist and the senator are standing up while nibbling hors d’oeuvres and sipping Chablis.
Senator Obama’s best-selling book is titled The Audacity of Hope – high-sounding words for a man who is so audacious in his efforts to deceive.
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