WE MUST DO SOMETHING! / This is something… / DO THAT!

By Robert Fischer | Published: January 31, 2006

House Aims to Limit Members, Now Lobbyists – Yahoo! News

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., testifying to the Rules Committee, said the rules changes did not go far enough. He argued that lawmakers-turned-lobbyists should also have to stand in security lines like other visitors to the Capitol, lose their member dining room privileges and give up their parking places. A lobbyist, he said, should be treated the same as any other citizen who comes to Washington to petition his or her member of Congress.

You’ve sold your soul out to special interests completely…NO PARKING SPOT FOR YOU!

C’mon, people. There’s a real, broken piece of the system here. Banning them from the gym, or from the dining room, or taking away their parking space isn’t going to address the fundamentally broken issue of there being basically no accountability at the federal level.

I do like the idea of removing retirement benefits for lawmarkers convicted of felonies. That’s at least a start.

No related posts.

This entry was posted in To Be Categorized and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
  • TheHawk

    I do like the idea that the lobbyists should be treated the same as any other citizen. I don’t think that that alone is sufficient to deal with special interests influence on lawmakers, but at least its a sound principal.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    This bill addresses ex-lawmakers-turned-lobbyists — they are who would be treated like lobbyists (“normal” citizens), not like ex-lawmakers.

  • bhurt-aw

    The fundamental problem is that the elected Republicans don’t respect the law. We don’t need new laws, we need to effing enforce the laws we already have.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    We’ll see how well the Democrats do when they have something to sell.

  • analog

    The bill has nothing to do with controlling lobbyists. It’s about trying to talk “reform” in order to remove the stench of corruption over the entire GOP, without actually addressing the corruption. It’s perfume on a pig, at best. And better, when Democrats rightly refuse to go along with the charade, the GOP spin machine can accuse them of opposing “reform”, thus changing the subject from the fact that Republicans broke the law. If the GOP House Majority Leader is laundering cash by the suitcaseful, do you think they much care if some revolving-door retired-congressman-turned-lobbyist gets a nicer parking space?

    Republicans will not introduce REAL reform bills because real reform would threaten the money machine that keeps them in power and their friends fat on our hard-earned tax dollars. Democrats have no business going along with sham “reform” like taking away the parking spaces of a handful of special lobbyists, giving “bipartisan” cover to a deliberate, calculated political distraction. Better to point out the obvious – that the GOP is corrupt (the ENTIRE party, not just a handful of bad apples), that the reform is a sham, and that no reform will matter when they won’t follow the laws we already have. The ONLY reform is to remove them from power.

    And then after that, the Democrats need to stay clean. And I think there’ll be a LOT of grassroots pressure within the party to keep them clean. Democrats don’t march in lockstep like Republicans.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    We’ll see about grassroots pressure to keep the Democrats clean — quite frankly, I’m suspicious that the Democratic grassroots doesn’t really exist when you’re more than six to nine months from a Presidential-trail election. And I don’t think that the Democrats are going to be any better than the Republicans, because in the end, they’re all politicans.

    Aside from that, I’m certainly with your intent on the rest of the post.

  • bhurt-aw

    Want to see 24x7x365 Democratic grass roots action? DKos. And if you think that simply being a Democrat gets you a free ride, grep for Lieberman or Biden, and see what our opinions of those Gentlemen are. DKos logs several hundred thousand unique visitors a day. And it’s growing at about 25% a year. The more power the netroots (the online grass roots) has, the more people it reaches, the less power the lobbyists of K Street have.

    This is one of the reasons I think the elected Democrats need to be more sensitive of- more afraid of- the Democratic base, especially the netroots. The netroots are informed, engaged, and know that if you’re taking orders from the K Street lobbyists, you’re not listening to them. Thus any corruption, any tendency towards corruption, will be severely punished by an empowered netroots.

    New reform legislation will happen if the Democrats sweep into power. I comment that McCain-Feingold passed after the Gingrich revolution in 1994. After you’ve been elected on a “throw the corrupt bums out/reform” platform, you start needing to do something about reform.

  • Categories