Boomtown rats
Matthew Continetti says that crooked lobbyists are what you get when Republicans embrace big government and go on a spending spree
Washington
Observers of American politics would do well to learn how to pronounce the name of a former Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. The first syllable should be enunciated not, as is common, like the stomach muscle, but rather like the nickname of the 16th American president, Honest Abe. Of course, Abramoff was dishonest. And this has landed him — and the party of Lincoln — in a lot of trouble.
In early January, in a Washington DC courtroom, Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, mail fraud and conspiracy. Looking like Al Capone in a black fedora and matching trenchcoat as he left the courthouse, Abramoff travelled to Miami the next day, where he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy (again). The pleas were the result of a federal investigation into Abramoff’s business practices that has lasted almost two years and ranges from California to Michigan to Louisiana to Florida. He and his partner, Michael Scanlon, the former press secretary to the former House majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas, have admitted that they bilked six Indian tribes out of close to $90 million, bribing congressmen and staff along the way.
Abramoff and another business partner, Adam Kidan, have also admitted that they committed wire and mail fraud in their 2000 purchase of SunCruz Casino Line, a fleet of gambling yachts operating out of south Florida. A few months after he had sold majority control of his company to Abramoff and Kidan, the businessman Gus Boulis was gunned down in a mob-style hit. Last September three men connected with organised crime families in New York and Miami were arrested for his murder. Before the hit, it turns out, Kidan had put these men on the SunCruz payroll. (Abramoff and Kidan deny any involvement in the shooting.) So far a total of seven people including Abramoff — have been arrested in the course of the two investigations.
It is likely they will soon be joined by others. Abramoff’s plea agreement devotes much space to ‘Representative No. 1’, the Ohio Republican Bob Ney, chairman of the House Administration Committee, who, according to the plea, performed ‘a series of official acts to benefit defendant Abramoff’s businesses, clients and others, including but not limited to, agreements to support and pass legislation, agreements to place statements into the Congressional Record, meetings with defendant Abramoff’s clients, and advancing the application of a client of defendant Abramoff for a licence to install wireless telephone infrastructure in the House of Representatives’. Ney, who says he was ‘duped’, has told reporters that he has been subpoenaed in the case.
Roughly two dozen investigators are unravelling Abramoff’s career and scrutinising his relationships with half a dozen congressmen, mostly Republicans. The investigators are also looking at former congressional staff members, such as ‘Staffer A’, elsewhere identified as Tony Rudy, Tom DeLay’s former chief of staff, who, according to Abramoff’s plea, ‘successfully solicited’ a $25,000 donation from a liquor company to one of Abramoff’s many fronts, a ‘charity’ called the Capital Athletic Foundation. However, rather than help disadvantaged tykes play midnight basketball, Abramoff used the money ‘to partially pay for a golfing trip to Scotland for public officials, members of his staff and others’.
It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the lawmakers, who are caught like helpless flies in Abramoff’s web. But then you realise that, like a bunch of Dr Frankensteins, they created the instrument of their demise. Shortly after Republicans stormed Congress in 1994, party leaders instituted the K Street Project, an attempt to tilt the partisan affiliation of the lobbying industry in a conservative direction. The project was named after the street in downtown Washington where lobbyists ply their trade, and where Abramoff, licking his wounds from an unsuccessful career in Hollywood as a movie producer, set up shop as a ‘government affairs’ lawyer at the firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds in November 1994. (The Gates in Preston Gates is Bill Gates’s father.) The Republicans thought they could control the special interests. They were wrong. The special interests ended up controlling them.
One of the K Street Project’s unintended consequences was an explosion in the number of people who call themselves lobbyists. There are now more than 36,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, and countless other ‘public affairs’ specialists and ‘grassroots’ consultants. The capital is now a boomtown, the dominant industry of which is influencepeddling, navigating the complexities of big government for selfish ends. This was Jack Abramoff’s specialty. His excesses were unique, but his methods were not. Consider his dealings with the El Paso Tigua tribe.
In early 2002 Abramoff, his business partner Scanlon and the former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed helped to shut down the Tigua’s casino. They were hired guns; another American Indian tribe, the Louisiana Coushatta, had paid them to close the casino in order to maximise their own casino’s profits. But Abramoff wasn’t finished. He secretly approached the Tigua — who had no idea of his role in their undoing — and said he could get their casino reopened. Moreover, he would do this for free, on the condition that, if successful, they would hire him as their Washington representative. The Tigua agreed. Then Abramoff insisted that the tribe hire Scanlon, an expert in ‘grassroots’ politics. Hiring Scanlon would cost money. How much? $4.2 million. The Tigua sent the cheque. However, the ‘grassroots’ work cost only a fraction of that amount; Scanlon and Abramoff pocketed the rest in secret, splitting the swag 50–50. They called this arrangement Gimme Five. In the end, the Tigua casino remained closed. Abramoff failed. He cashed his cheques anyway.
But now Abramoff’s career is over, as is Scanlon’s, as are many others’. Tom DeLay, who once called Abramoff his dear friend, has been forced to resign from his leadership post, creating an unprecedented power vacuum in the House of Representatives. Three Republicans, all conservative, all unfurling the banner of ‘reform’, are vying to replace him. As they do so, they should keep in mind two lessons. One concerns what happens when a small-government party takes over a big, big government. The result, inevitably, is that the party stops believing in small government. Flushed with power, conservatives have happily engaged in a spending spree over the last several years. In November 2003, when they added a prescription drug entitlement to the Medicare programme, these same Republicans acquiesced in the largest single expansion of federal power since Lyndon Johnson’s ‘great society’. And when Jack Abramoff approached conservative lawmakers about favours for his Indian casino clients, no one bothered to ask what business the federal government had regulating Indian casinos in the first place. Which is telling. Republicans have abandoned conservatism for K Street.
The second lesson is about political movements. Abramoff first entered the national stage many years ago, in the early 1980s, when he became national chairman of the College Republicans. He was a lion of the Reagan revolution, an activist known for the ferocity of his ideals. When he returned to Washington in 1994, however, he was a professional, looking for the first opportunity to cash in. The ideals had been washed away, replaced by self-interest. And so it went. His conservatism and that of his friends started as a cause, turned into a career — and ended up as a racket.
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