Recently, the Abramoff lobbying scandal has yielded a raft of proposals from both sides in an effort to combat the “Culture of Corruption” meme we’ve been hearing so much about.

Before I (or anyone else) talk about these reform proposals, we need to understand what Abramoff is really charged with and how lobbying works in Washington. One of the greatest aids to corrupt Congresspeople is the fact consciousness of the lobbying scandal extends to people knowing Abramoff’s name, but not the specifics of the charges against him.

If the Abramoff case is, in fact, the impetus for reform, then we need to understand what about the current laws enabled him to do what he did and why current laws weren’t enough to stem the tide of corruption. Because he has pleaded guilty to several charges, we know that what he’s done is already illegal, so the existing laws not only need to be enforced, but buttressed with more far-reaching statues which would make the circumstances surrounding the case less likely.

Let’s backtrack for a minute, because we need to discuss Abramoff’s history with criminal investigation and prosecution. There were two other prosecutorial investigations of Abramoff since 2002; one in Guam relating to his services on behalf of Guam’s Superior Court (he was lobbying to pass legislation declaring them superior to Guam’s Supreme Court, if you can believe it), and one regarding his acquisition (with Adam Kidan) of SunCruz Casinos in Florida from one Gus Boulis, who was later shot to death gangland-style after getting into a fistfight with Kidan.

In Guam, the probe ended when the Bush White House demoted the lead prosecutor the day after a subpoena was issued for Abramoff’s financial records. Strangely, the Bush White House promoted the lead prosecutor in Abramoff’s Federal case to a Federal judgeship two weeks after Abramoff’s guilty plea, resulting in his resignation from the case. While BushCo have so far been successful in limiting photographic exposure of their ties to Abramoff, their judicial appointments smack of, shall we say, ‘damage control.’

By the way, Abramoff’s January 3rd guilty plea to Federal charges in the lobbying scandal has ensured that any prison time he receives from his January 4th guilty plea in the SunCruz case will be served concurrently with the time from the lobbying case.

Now, because on this blog I do the reading so you don’t have to, I went and downloaded the PDF of the lobbying case charges against Abramoff (to which, you will recall, he has pleaded guilty). The charges are several and complicated, but they boil down to the following:

1. Conspiracy to defraud tribal clients. Abramoff and his associate Michael Scanlon (along with a host of other Republican operatives including Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) overcharged several Native American tribes millions of dollars to lobby Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to let them operate casinos. Abramoff hired several former aides to the Congresspeople involved in violation of Congressional ethics codes by refusing to wait one year to make those hires.
2. Denial of Honest Services and Mail/Wire Fraud. Not only did Abramoff and Scanlon skim money off the top and hide their involvement in the ‘non-profit’ organizations to which the tribes donated, but they had used their influence with Republican leadership to work against those same tribes’ interest before bribing ethically challenged Crongessmen and Interior officials to reverse their positions on tribal gaming.
3. Tax Evasion. Looks like they threw this one in just for fun. You have wonder what Grover Norquist thinks of Jack pleading guilty to this charge.

In light of these clearly illegal activites, you have to wonder what the circumstances were which enabled Team Abramoff to think they could get away with this. The more research you do about Abramoff, the more complex the web of cronyist fraud becomes. But each case, from the Northern Marianas lobbying imbroglio to Safavian’s obstruction of justice indictment, have a single connection: Republican bigwigs like Tom DeLay and the K Street Project.

So, how we get here? Do the roots of this problem lie in the Supreme Court’s infamous Buckley v. Valeo decision, which declared a candidate’s expenditures to be Constitutionally protected speech (while upholding limits on individual donations)? Well, not really. As we see from a cursory glance on the history of campaign finance reform, political corruption is just as American as breaking contracts with Indians.

The question here is really whether or not the legalized corruption we call lobbying ought to be allowed in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment–those without the means to lobby do not enjoy the equal protection of the laws (we’re talking about ‘the laws’ as a whole here) as those who can use money to lobby the Congress to change those laws. One person, one vote, not one dollar, one vote. Just because somebody has more money than me ought not to make a difference when it comes to government catering to their needs–all you should be able to do is write your Congresspeople a fucking letter and vote in the upcoming election. If you want to speak on behalf of a group of people, get some signatures together and petition. Of course, civic responsibility being what it is, money talks and bullshit walks and unless you impact your elected officials’ bottom lines, your opinions may be noted but not necessarily acted upon.

The fact that campaigning is so expensive and requires more and more money for paid staffers, events, and ad buys is just a convenient excuse to sneak more money into politics. The line between giving politicians money for campaign expenses and trading cash for legislative favors is practically non-existant. Other types of influence trading are more obvious examples of corruption; handing out jobs to family members, paying for travel, donating to ‘non-profit’ pet causes owned by the officials, etc. Though many of the traditional scams are prohibited by Congressional ethics rules, both parties have called a ceasefire when it comes to enforcement because practically every Congressperson is armpit-high in plainly unethical monies. There’s a reason law firms are the ones running the lobbying game–it takes a law degree to find as many holes in anti-corruption legislation as possible so as to provide maximum value to your clients.

While we’re talking about Congress getting fat off of the spoils of corruption, we need to mention the role of incumbency in this whole process. With incumbents being reelected to Congress more than 90% of the time in the past decades, it seems hardly controversial to point out that incumbents in Congressional races enjoy huge systemic advantages. One of these is the seniority system of Congressional committee appointments; the longer you’re in Congress, the more you can do for your constituents, which makes retaining an incumbent regardless of political ideology an attractive choice for voters.

I was going to compare the various proposals by lawmakers to plug up this latest round of influence peddling loopholes, but thankfully Clean up Washington has already done it, so I don’t have to. In addition to the bills being proposed, there are some novel ideas that have been floated by various pundits and political playmakers:

The Republican reform proposal by John McCain (and Conrad Burns, who, coincidentally, is implicated in the scandal), is a tragic, toothless farce. Is it a coincidence that both McCain and Burns have been implicated in political corruption, or merely the fact that they’re Senators? The Democratic reform proposals, on the other hand, tend to start off well but lose steam when it comes to actually dealing with the “Culture of Corruption.” The Carville-Begala public financing is a good riff on public financing, but it seems big-governmenty and expensive. Newt Gingrich’s reform plan, which I actually found by going through the official K Street Project website, is a weird amalgam of the Democratic transparency proposal combined with a call for a complete reversal of the Valeo decision (and it seems aimed entirely at chastizing former Goldman Sachs CEO and current Democratic New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine for spending his own fortune to buy a Senate seat). But even Newt, a casualty of corruption scandal himself, calls for more transparency (something you usually hear about emerging democracies).

To sum up, the pressures on the system are as follows:

• The cost of campaigning is ever-increasing
• Neither party is really interested in enforcing anti-corruption statutes not only for the benefits to their own coffers, but the threat of losing
• Neither party is interested in giving up their legally ill-gotten gains, and realize that no one can win the corruption-reform game.
• Lobbying is a huge industry and it isn’t going to disappear without a fight.

So when we talk about reform, we need to realize how extremely unlikely it is to happen in any meaningful sense; Congress has a major disincentive to do it and K Street has too much power to let it happen.

Now, if you scroll down this page, you’ll see that a few weeks ago I wrote, “why not have all lobbyists contribute instead to a slush fund to be equally distributed to all of Congress?” I still believe this is the best approach, because at least it spreads the funds so widely as to be ineffective i lobbying individual fat cats while letting the less propositioned members of Congress in on the spoils (making them more likely to approve of the measure out of abject jealousy). But I have a few more suggestions:

1. Ban corporate/PAC/group donations to individual campaigns, turning them over instead to the FEC slush fund.
2. Raise Congressional pay to a level where two years’ salary is enough to run a House campaign, having lowered the potential costs
3. Provide free airtime–wither it will be carried on all networks as required by the FCC, or just PBS, which is owned by the government anyway. Airtime is the most expensive item in a campaign, and so it has to be made affordable to rein in costs.
4. Free publications at polling stations provide voters with enough information on each candidate and their positions (or even charges against their oppenents, having been certified as non-libelous by the FEC). This is the system we had in place for student elections at McGill, and I think it is worthwhile.
5. Expand disclosure system to every possible gift or favor
6. Make influence peddling a criminal offense
7. Make constituents eligible to sue their representatives for corruption. That way the ceasefire will be nullified because Congress will no longer be in charge of policing themselves. Will this lead to a nightmare involving hundreds of lawsuits and investigations of bribery? I can only hope it will, and scare future Congresspeople into keeping their noses excessively clean to avoid them (although more likely they’ll just avoid disclosure).