Lobbyist « The Feehery Theory

Posts Tagged ‘Lobbyist’

The Constant Gardener

May 26th, 2010 by John Feehery

Photo credit: Henry Brisse

In 2005, Paramount released a movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz called The Constant Gardener.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with that movie.

I was thinking about gardening when I was sweeping up the berries from my neighbor’s obnoxious tree, which spews smelly, ugly, messy berries every spring.

Like gardening, it requires constant work to keep my back patio clean.

To be a successful gardener (and believe me, I am not a successful gardener), you have to be constantly working to keep the flowers properly watered and pruned. You also have to constantly work to fight off the weeds. If you don’t, the weeds will eventually take over the garden, and the garden will be lost.

This isn’t a column about gardening. It is a column about government growth.

Like a garden, the government requires constant pruning. The weeds of government (or wasteful, Washington spending) can take over the whole government if there isn’t a constant gardener who is working to prune and cut and pull out the bad spending.

But there isn’t a constant gardener in the federal government, whose sole job is to get rid of wasteful spending. Read more...

Tags: Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Economy, General Accountability Office, K Street, Lobbyist, Office of Management and Budget, Politics, spending
Posted in Government, Politics, Theory, spending | No Comments »

Getting Caught in The Changing Times

March 3rd, 2010 by John Feehery

“The times, they are a changing.”

That anthem of the 60’s should always be in the minds of all Hill ethics counselors.

Charlie Rangel’s troubles with the Ethics Committee follow a familiar path.

I remember well in November of 1994, when an obscure challenger named Michael Patrick Flanagan knocked off a powerful Ways and Means Chairman who had delivered billions of dollars back to his hometown of Chicago.

Before 1992, Dan Rostenkowski’s picture was right next to the definition of power-broker in the Congressional dictionary. Two years later, his picture was next to the word “crook”.

Rosty did what he had always done. He used his office as a way to get a little extra money for his family. The particular crime he was charged with was cashing in the stamps that his office had bought and using the money for his own personal pleasure.

It was penny-ante stuff. Minor corruption with a little bit of legal graft.

But after the downfall of Jim Wright, what passed for minor graft no longer passed the muster in the country or the media.

Everybody loves Charlie Wilson now – thanks to the book and the movie — but Wilson’s antics wouldn’t have survived in this ethics environment today. Read more...

Tags: Barack Obama, Charlie Rangel, Charlie Wilson, CODELs, Congress, Fundraising, Jack Abramoff, Jim Wright, K Street, Lobbyist, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans
Posted in Fundraising, Government, Politics, Scandals | 2 Comments »

Obama and the Lobbyists

June 6th, 2008 by John Feehery

For the record, let me say that I am favor of a law that bans lobbyists from giving campaign contributions. That way, I could easily ignore all those requests for money from many of the politicians who seem to hate lobbyists so much.

Of course, if you are as rich as George Soros or any those other multi-billionaires who give so much money to the Democrats that they can fund their own political parties, the campaign laws don’t seem to apply to you.

Barack Obama can take money from Soros, and more importantly, political support from his front group, MoveOn.org, but he won’t take money from the normal schmucks who can only afford to give the paltry maximum contributions.

Obama has gone through some interesting contortions to define what a lobbyist is and isn’t. If you want to give to the junior Senator from Illinois, you have to show them your lobbyist termination report. But if your spouse decides to give, you don’t have to get a divorce. So, in that small sense, Obama is pro-family values.