(DPI BOOK REVIEW) I was born in Washington and grew up here in the 60s and 70s. Since returning after 30 years afield, I’ve reflected often on what’s changed. More traffic on the Beltway and new bike lanes in Georgetown, for starters.
But Washington has seen a deeper transformation – of its political culture. Old news, I know, but the city is a meaner, much wealthier, more cynical and – probably – a more corrupt place than a generation ago. Money is no longer the source merely of political power: It is the basis now of all political action – and inaction.
It’s a place, too, where politicians, regulators, lobbyists and lawyers have built – or re-built – a deliberately complex world of rules and mandates that the rest us must live by. ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank are only the latest entries. Worse, many Americans must now pay Washington’s Permanent Political Class to either explain the opaque world they’ve created, pay them to be exempted from it, or pay for protection from more of it.
More and more people are beginning to recognize this for the racket it is. It’s all laid out clearly in Peter Schweizer’s “Extortion,” published last year by Houghton Mifflin. Schweizer, of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the Washington observer who sounded the alarm a few years back on insider trading of stocks by our congressmen and senators – a practice perfectly legal and apparently acceptable. That is, until America became aware of it after Schweizer appeared on a “60 Minutes” segment.
With “Extortion” Schweizer pulls back the curtain further. According to the author, today’s Washington plays every side of an issue for money – the two parties dun constituents that have a stake in a matter up for vote. There are “extender” bills – which conveniently allow the political class to raise more money when an initial law expires. There are “milker” bills, like the SOPA legislation of 2011 that brought cash to Washington from Hollywood and Silicon Valley, which until then had managed to avoid alms to politicians. And there are more “tolls collectors” in Washington these days – Congressional leaders like John Boehner who hold up legislation while they raise money from the corporations that would benefit from the vote. Apparently not a new practice – only more brazen, and on a larger scale, Schweizer writes.
Washington has always been a sausage-making factory – democratic politics is an ugly process. But I guarantee this: Today’s Washington, politically at least, is worse, much worse than the city I grew up in, which was staid, almost proper and certainly non-theatrical by comparison. It’s not clear that this Washington is even capable of passing a practical, straightforward law for the common good.
Schweizer covers a lot of ground, but he doesn’t cultivate it too deeply, which weakens his premise that Washington is a self-dealing machine. Much of his information is old and well reported. But taken together, his narrative is hard to dismiss. Committee appointments on the Hill are now determined entirely by fund-raising ability. After reading about the backgrounds of Harry “Mr. Cleanface” Reid (D) and Sen. Roy Blunt ( R ) – particularly their bald nepotism, which doesn’t sound offensive until you read about it – you may come away energized with anger.
Yes, a title like “Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.” sounds like Libertarian Propaganda – and some may treat it as such. And I wondered why the publisher would lamely package a message from such a credible source into something that, on its cover, looks like an ideological comic book. It all suggested to me that the publisher, perhaps fearing retribution from the very politicians Schweizer writes about, wanted to distance itself. What a crazy point of view!
Schweizer doesn’t much get into why all this happened. In my view, there’s an innocent explanation for today’s mess: America over the last 30 years has prospered mightily, thanks in part to the technology revolution, 1980s deregulation (including free trade and global finance) and the Reagan tax cuts. (You might even argue that those tax cuts fostered the explosion of political lobbying in Washington – corporations and others decided to pay agents to keep Washington from enacting new taxes and regulation again.)
In that respect today’s Washington is the cart, not the horse. With deregulation and growth came the explosion of Wall Street and corporate compensation. Those well-heeled titans of industry – corporate executives making seven figures, Wall Streeters eight figures, tech entrepreneurs nine – all were the source of envy and resentment among Washington’s political class, which got by on a measly six figures. That explosion in pay all around helped spur Washington’s you’ll-play-with-us demands that are part of today’s political process.
Those rich supporters also provided cover for the politicians, whose transactions even today look small by comparison. How can anybody get steamed that Charley Rangel paid his son a paltry $79,000 of campaign dough for a $100 web site?
There are more factors at work empowering Washington nowadays. The rights revolution of our generation is a great thing, bringing more and different people to the political table. (The aging Boomers, though, still seem to control the dialogue.) And the trauma of 9/11 gave Washington carte blanche on national security matters, enriching secrecy-protected contractors and anyone with a security clearance. We may be more diverse and perhaps more secure because of these developments, but the the new rules that came with them have made the sausage factory only more difficult to comprehend. It’s an arrangement the factory’s insiders are benefiting mightily from.
Americans have some things to be happy about, but our political system remains a mess, and that mess poses some big risks. Some of the mildest reforms Schweizer suggests – like limiting campaign fund-raising to specific non-legislative periods, and barring family members from lobbying – are sensible enough. I might offer that we lengthen terms to reduce the need for campaign money. We might randomly re-district to weaken the duopoly. Term limits might help, too.
But somehow I don’t think any of that will happen – Washington isn’t getting off this gravy train anytime soon. We need a broad reform movement, one that’s coherent and intellectually consistent, and one that gets many of today’s Americas signing on. That of course means simplification and clarification – of the tax code, business and financial regulation, even health care — but all of that is contrary to the interests of a modern Washington dazzled by its profitable role as the house dealer.
It’s possible Washington today is really no more corrupt or self-serving than it was when I was growing up here, and some will scoff at the whole idea, given Watergate and all the rest of that era. But then, no one back in the 70s – not even Woodward and Bernstein — wrote anything even close to the indictment that is Peter Schweizer’s “Extortion.”
–Stephen E. Clark