The hip thing to do this week is to encourage people to adopt lobbying-reform legislation. Conservative writers say the GOP should minimize the damage done by the Jack Abramoff scandal and other sleaze clinging to the congressional party. Liberals writers say the Democrats should lead the charge in order to maximize Republican pain. Other editorialists focus on the need to "clean up" Washington. But while lobbying reform would be nice, it's beside the point.
Tellingly, the Senate Republican leadership has put Rick Santorum in charge of devising their strategy on this front. Santorum, of course, when he's not musing about "man on dog" sex, runs the K Street Project, an initiative designed to effect a fusion of the GOP and the business lobby. And in many ways, he's the ideal man for the job. He's well-placed to maximize the extent to which the mechanics of the lobbying game are changed without the underlying dynamic changing. He'll ban that which is incidental, but eyebrow-raising, and leave intact what is genuinely pernicious -- the practice of selling public policy to the highest bidder.
But the problem here is government-by-lobbyist, not the fact that a medium-sized number of Republicans seem to have personally profited from the practice. It was thanks to the K Street Project that we got the horror show known as the 2003 Medicare Reform Bill, an irresponsible Republican policy initiative motivated by political opportunism and indelibly shaped by lobbyists employed by the medical - industrial complex.
As best I can tell, precisely zero members of Congress received illegal financial benefits in exchange for pushing this farce through the legislature. Instead, the (large) sums of money spent to get the bill passed seem to have been spent on above-board things. HMO and pharmaceutical company cash went to pay for astro-turf organizing, misleading television ads, and campaign contributions, while nobody got a boat out of the deal. But the Bill was no better for the legality of the financial machinations underlying it than it would have been if those supporting it had toted home garbage bags full of five dollar bills. Nor was the mechanism of its passage more honest for the fact that it didn't reach the legal standard of bribery.
The problem with the Bill was the policy. And the problem with the policy is that it was devised by a group of people whose approach to policy analysis is to do whatever their paymasters tell them to do. No procedural reforms will stop this behavior. Instead, it needs to be confronted head-on. If voters aren't convinced that government-by-lobbyist creates bad laws and that ending it would produce better ones, then any change resulting from the current interest in good government will be superficial.
The current preoccupation with clean legislating does, however, offer an appealing frame within which to discuss something like 90 percent of the policy areas under the sun. The Medicare Bill is so bad because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't make student loans more affordable because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't stop transferring huge sums of money to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't reorient military spending toward transnational threats because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't have Internet access as fast as Koreans and Japanese have because lobbyists run the Republican Party. You can't get the ABC Family Channel without paying for ESPN Classic (or vice versa) because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't adopt a simple method for slowing the growth of Medicare spending without cutting benefits because lobbyists run the Republican Party. We can't make the tax code fairer and simpler because lobbyists run the Republican Party.
For now, we don't need better policies about lobbying. What we need are better policies -- policies that aren't written by lobbyists. Whether or not politicians who dance to the big-money drummer or merely profit politically from their decision to hand governing authority over to the highest bidder is neither here nor there.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
