Yes they deserve the rap but the problem is the system that evolved from the First Amendment's “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. Add in the whole "Corporate Personhood" thing (wrongly decided IMHO) and even Magna Carta* and, well, here we are.
From the Washington Independent Review of Books, May 17:
....MUCH MOREThe Wolves of K Street is a book about big-time lobbyists behaving badly. Some break the law, steal from clients, or steal from their own partners. They all get rich and arrogant on the tab of wealthy corporate clients. They throw their weight around with all the trappings: big cigars, yachts, Porsches, mansions, private jets. And they almost all come to bad ends: sickness, suicide, prison, bankruptcy, or messy divorces.
In the book’s opening, an ultra-rich lobbyist, about to be exposed as a crook, sitting by the golf course at his ultra-exclusive country club with a cigar and an expensive bottle of wine, quietly puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, setting the stage for a morality play with comeuppances galore.
So far, so good. Pretty clear picture. But once I’d finished it, this book left me feeling conflicted and a bit put off.
Living and working in Washington, DC, for many decades, I don’t presume every lobbyist to be a villain, even those representing big business or causes I dislike. (Full disclosure: As a lawyer, I have registered as a federal lobbyist more than once along the way, as do over 12,000 professionals each year.) The Wolves of K Street, however, seems to have its own slant, seen both in its splashy title and in the book’s offhanded, repeated use of the pejorative term “influence peddling” as a blanket description for Washington advocacy.
Still, for all my misgivings, I found it a guilty pleasure and a delicious read, detailed and finely researched. The characterizations and backroom stories are well crafted and as salacious as promised. The authors, brothers Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins, investigative reporters for the Wall Street Journal and Washingtonian, respectively, who’ve covered DC lobbying for years, tell a heck of a yarn.
Weighing in at 508 pages, plus endnotes, the book’s narrative spans five decades. But instead of dry history, it tells its tale primarily through the messy human stories of men at three cutting-edge lobby firms: Tommy Boggs (Patton Boggs), starting in the 1970s; then Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater (Black Manafort), starting in the 1980s; and finally, Tony Podesta (Podesta Group), also starting in the 1980s.
As the authors put it, “Together, members of these three lobbying houses helped to tilt the playing field against ordinary Americans in all sorts of ways” — the narrative arc in a nutshell.
First, Boggs, scion of a political family and son of Congressman Hale Boggs (D-La.), who served as House majority whip and leader from 1961 until his death in a mysterious plane crash in Alaska in 1973. Tommy gave up the chance for a political career in the 1970s, when consumerism was at its height, to turn instead to lobbying. He combined deep old-school political connections — “influence peddling” in the traditional sense of trading on personal contacts — with techniques borrowed from the consumer movement. But he used his skills to represent business at a time when business was losing most political battles in Washington.
Boggs soon started scoring wins. He defeated the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a 1977 Senate reauthorization battle, branding it the “National Nanny” and forcing the agency to abandon several major rule-makings. This success convinced scores of businesses to hire DC agents. A few years later, Boggs used his deep knowledge of House procedures to help kill key provisions of the Clinton Administration’s healthcare legislation.
With success came money. By 1992, Patton Boggs employed 180 staffers and represented some 1,500 clients. By the time it was purchased by Squire Sanders in 2014 (to form Squire Patton Boggs), it was one of the world’s largest lobbying firms, with 1,600 lawyers, 280 in the District alone.
With money came finery for Boggs: a Rolls-Royce convertible, Cuban cigars, waterskiing in the Gulf of Mexico, expensive wines, multiple properties and mansions, a 425-acre marshland preserve for duck hunting, and “boozy weekends” for political friends. Cynical? Absolutely! We’re told how, during consideration of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, when a senator asked Boggs what would happen if Congress eliminated certain tax deductions popular with his clients, he said simply:
“I think it would be great, because then I could spend the next twenty-five years trying to put them all back in.”
Boggs died a short time after losing control of his firm to an outside group, a fact that bothered him greatly. But he’d set a pattern. With skilled advocates like him, big business could now carry a big stick in Washington. According to the authors, if Democrats wanted to build a “legacy of achievement,” they had to leave behind the “New Deal tradition” and “step into the future of corporate capitalism.”....
*Article 61 (The original manuscripts are written continuously without section breaks; here the generally accepted numbering of the clauses has been followed. There was no title or headline.):
Since for God, for the improvement of our kingdom, and to better allay the discord arisen between us and our barons, we have granted all these concessions, and wishing that the concessions be enjoyed in their entirety with firm endurance (for ever [5]), we give and grant to the barons the following security:
Namely, that the barons choose any twenty-five barons of the kingdom they wish, who must with all their might observe and hold, and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties we have granted and confirmed to them by this our present Charter. Then, if we, our chief justiciar, our bailiffs or any of our officials, offend in any respect against any man, or break any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is notified to four of the said twenty-five barons, the four shall come to us—or to our chief justicicar if we are absent from the kingdom—to declare the transgression and petition that we make amends without delay.
And if we, or in our absence abroad the chief justice, have not corrected the transgression within forty days, reckoned from the day on which the offence was declared to us (or to the chief justice if we are out of the realm), the four barons mentioned before shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons. Together with the community of the whole land, they shall then distrain and distress us in every way possible, namely by seizing castles, lands, possessions and in any other they can (saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children), until redress has been obtain in their opinion. And when amends have been made, they shall obey us as before.
Whoever in the country wants to, may take an oath to obey the orders of the twenty-five barons for the execution of all the previously mentioned matters and, with the barons, to distress us to the utmost of his power. We publicly and freely give permission to every one who wishes to take this oath, and we shall never forbid any one from taking it. Indeed, all those in the land who are unwilling to this oath, we shall by our command compel them to swear to it.
If any one of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country, or is in any other manner incapacitated so the previously mentioned provisions cannot be undertaken, the remaining barons of the twenty-five shall choose another in his place as they think fit, who shall be duly sworn in like the rest.
If there is any disagreement amongst the twenty-five barons on any matter presented to them, or if some of them are unwilling or unable to be present, what the majority of those present ordain or command shall be held as fixed and established, exactly as if all twenty-five had consented in this.
The said twenty-five barons shall swear to faithfully observe all the aforesaid articles and will do all they can to ensure that the articles are observed by others.
And we shall procure nothing from any one, either personally or indirectly, whereby any part of these concessions and liberties might be revoked or diminished; and if any such thing has been procured, let it be void and null, and we shall never make use of it ourselves or through someone else.
