Lobbyists, Earmarks and Gridlock – an Unholy Trinity

America has some pretty serious problems these days – Wall Street is in freefall, the dollar is in the gutter, people are losing their homes, unemployment looms on the horizon – and these are just our economic problems. We haven’t reinvested in our infrastructure for decades and our roads and bridges, highways, the electrical grid, our public works facilities are crumbling. Our health care system is staggeringly expensive yet still doesn’t cover all Americans. Our education system isn’t training our young people for the next generation of jobs, and American preeminence in the world – be it military, economic, financial – is on the slide.

Politicians on both sides of the political aisle blame each other. Our candidates say it’s because we lack strong leaders, but what they mean is if we just put them in charge things would be different.

Candidates take impassioned stands, make speeches with all the right sound bites, but in the end can’t get the consensus necessary to enact anything but watered down bills with temporary fixes. Any serious plan put forward has powerful detractors so, rather than slog through and hammer out a compromise, we have partisan gridlock. After a while, we throw up our hands, and move on to the next problem. We’re like hamsters running on that wheel in the hamster cage. We keep running, but never seem to get anywhere. We’re trying all right, we’re running as fast as we can, but the wheel – the system – won’t let us make progress.

Why? Is this because, as some politicians argue, we just need a change of leaders? You would be tempted to say yes if this was the first time we’ve failed to find bipartisan consensus. But it isn’t. We’ve been revisiting most of these issues for over two decades and, like the hamster, haven’t made much forward progress. We’ve changed leaders and parties but to no avail. What has changed in the last 20 years, though, is the amount of money special interest groups and lobbyists spend ‘convincing’ legislators to vote their way. Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan vetoed a transportation bill saying it had too much pork barrel spending – it had 150 earmarked programs for legislators’ special pals. In 2005 President Bush signed a transportation bill that had a staggering 6,376 pet projects worth $24 BILLION in unnecessary earmarks.

We’ve had lobbyists and special interests groups in Washington since the founding of the republic, but the difference today is the amount of money they’re willing to spend to get the legislation they want. When it comes to politicians, money talks. It doesn’t matter if it is labor union money or trial lawyers’ money or Wall Street money or oil money. Today our legislators – both Republican and Democrat – are all too often in the pockets of the highest bidder. Not only is this a waste of our tax dollars, but it’s also forcing our entire system of government into gridlock.

In the end the most important issue isn’t the housing crisis, or the liquidity crisis, or the immigration crisis, of the host of other crises we face. None of them will get solved unless we take the money out of the system. But that won’t be easy – no incumbent legislator will willingly pass legislation to restrict his ability to collect campaign contributions from lobbyists – it’s the single biggest advantage he has over any potential opponent. It’s like asking the fox to leave the hen house when he’s got free run over the eggs.

But what can happen is for voters to insist on transparency. While the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act goes a long way in identifying big money donors to a legislators’ campaign, it’s only half of the picture – we need to know what earmarks that legislator gives to his generous donors. Right now it is extremely difficult to discover who attaches an earmark to legislation before a bill is passed. They’re added at the last minute, behind closed doors and anonymously. That’s got to change. If congress won’t give up their precious earmarks, we’ve at least got a right to know about them. Once we have both parts of the picture – who donates to a congressman’s campaign and what earmarks he gives that donor – it may not be proof of outright corruption, but it certainly won’t look good come reelection time.

That’s why it is so important to elect the candidate who will get to the bottom of the rot in Washington and reform the system. John McCain has championed this cause his entire career – fighting against Democrats and his own fellow Republicans. Unless we find a way to get corruption out of the system, we’re unlikely to ever solve that long list of problems.