Extortion (25 page)

In 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that Congress would be moving to a five-day workweek rather than the traditional three-day week. It sounded like a good idea, but what did members do with the extra time? They held more fund-raisers! “Honestly we’ve already begun to schedule them,” said Monica Notzon, a political fund-raiser. “I think we’re going to see events every day of the week.”
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A lobbyist for the National Federal of Independent Business, Dan Danner, said, “If they’re here more that’s what they’ll do. There’ll be more fundraisers.”
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Imposing this ban would not completely purify all fund-raising, of course. But it would help nudge fund-raising events in the direction of genuine support rather than extraction. As one scholar puts it, “There is little reason to believe that the genuine supporter of a candidate” would not give when Congress is out of session and when supporters are allowed to give.
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2. Place an outright ban on contributions and solicitations involving lobbyists or government contractors
. Many states already have these sorts of restrictions in place.
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For example, Connecticut General Statutes §9-704 (c) provides in part that:

contributions from (1) communicator lobbyist; (2) members of the immediate family of a communicator lobbyist; or (3) principals of a state contractor or prospective state contractors shall not be deemed to be qualifying contributions and shall be returned by the campaign treasurer of the candidate committee to the contributor or transmitted to the State Elections Enforcement Commission for deposit in the Citizens’ Election Fund.

3. Restrict the ability of the Permanent Political Class to convert campaign money into a lifestyle subsidy
. If you want to loan money to your campaign, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t collect interest in doing so. You have a First Amendment right to spend money on your campaign and loan money to your campaign, but you have no constitutional right to make a profitable investment out of it.

4. Ban leadership PACs
. Leadership PACs have essentially become money-laundering operations. As Congressman Joe Hefley of Colorado put it, “My impression is that a lot of people use leadership PACs as a slush fund.”
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Even former FEC chairman Bradley Smith, who generally opposes restrictions on campaign financing on free speech grounds, believes that leadership PACs have to go because of how they are abused. Sometimes they are used to enhance a politician’s lifestyle, sometimes to bribe colleagues for votes. As one member of Congress put it, “Having a leadership PAC helps me tremendously with my colleagues, whether it’s getting legislation through [or] getting their support for it.”
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Members of Congress horse-trade all the time. They call it log-rolling: if you support building a bridge in my district, I will support beach restoration in yours. We cannot stop such trades. But leadership PACs are not about benefits for districts: they are about benefits for members of Congress.

Right now, politicians enjoy a nice loophole. They are provided an exemption from the provision in the
Ethics Manual
that prohibits soliciting or receiving contributions in congressional office buildings from fellow members. We need to extend the solicitation ban to members of Congress: selling your vote is selling your vote, whether it’s to a special interest or a colleague.

5. Restrict the ability of the Permanent Political Class to extort money for their families through political power
. We need to ban immediate family members (spouses and children) from registering as lobbyists. Period. We also need to prevent members of Congress from putting family members on the payroll. Campaigns and public service should not be about self-enrichment. Putting your kids on the campaign payroll can often be a simple way of moving campaign dollars into the family bank account.

But beyond restricting the extortionist avenues for the Permanent Political Class, we must also have transparency in the legislative process so that the practice can be exposed. If the military-industrial complex has been cause for worry, today there exists a legislative-lobbyist complex as well. Laws are so complicated that bills are not even read by members of Congress. Extortive practices are easy to carry out in a cloud of legal words.

All sorts of stuff is packed into bills. In an article for the
Washington Post
entitled “We Need to Read the Bills,” Congressman Brian Baird wrote about a particularly embarrassing episode in which someone inserted a provision into a spending bill that would have allowed House and Senate Appropriations Committee chairmen and their staffs to examine any individual American’s income tax returns.
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We can fix this problem by doing a couple of things. First, we should adopt a single-subject rule for all bills. Article III of the Florida Constitution “requires that every law shall embrace but one subject and matter properly connected therewith.” In other words, each bill needs to be focused on one specific subject. You shouldn’t be able to slip something in on an unrelated subject.

Second, we need to require members of Congress to actually read the bills they are going to vote on. This sounds like common sense to most people outside of Washington. But politicians, of course, think it’s ridiculous that lawmakers should actually read the laws they are making! Several bills that have already been introduced would try to accomplish this in some way. Some would require a seven-day waiting period between the time when a bill is ready to be voted on and when the final vote actually takes place. During this period, members of Congress would be required to read the bill. Others suggest that all bills scheduled for a full vote on the floor be read out loud—even the two-thousand-page monsters. Back in 2009, thanks to a legislative maneuver, it appeared that a monster bill with four hundred amendments might need to be read aloud on the House floor. Congressional leaders actually hired a speed-reader to comply, even though no one would have been able to understand what he was reading. “Judging by the size of the amendments, I can read a page about every 34 seconds,” said the speed-reader. Based on that estimate, it would have taken him nine hours to read the bill.
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If we can pass a law to make reading aloud a permanent requirement, it will need to guard against such shenanigans. (Imagine all-night readings to empty chambers.) How about simply requiring members to read the bills before a vote and to sign a legal affidavit attesting to that fact?

Such laws have to have teeth. Current Senate rules require that any bill that will be voted on be posted online beforehand, so that the general public can read it.
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But that rule is regularly suspended or ignored, without any penalty. So those who ignore the requirement to read a bill should face some sort of real sanction. After all, they are paid to be lawmakers. That is their job. How can they make laws if they don’t even read them?

Government is getting bigger—and it is getting meaner. One key reason: it is profitable for the Permanent Political Class. We need to change this reality. Dante, in
The Inferno
, placed corrupt politicians in the eighth circle of hell, the penultimate in eternal damnation. Yet as Lord Acton famously said, power corrupts. We must assume that the temptation to corruption is universal in Washington, and we must create earthly punishments to deter it.

Appendix 1

REPUBLICAN PARTY DUES LISTS, 2013
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