Arianna Huffington
June 25, 2009
Lobbyists on a Roll: Gutting Reform on Banking, Energy, and Health Care
Remember all that change Americans voted for in November? Well, there's been a change in the plans for change.
The detour has come courtesy of a familiar nemesis: DC lobbyists who, this year alone, have watered-down, gutted, or out-and-out killed ambitious plans for reforming Wall Street, energy, and health care.
The media like to pretend that something's at stake when a big bill is being debated on the House or Senate floor, but the truth is that by then the game is typically already over. The real fight happens long before. And the lobbyists usually win.
Last year, 15,000 registered lobbyists spent more than $3.25 billion trying to sway Congress. This year has brought even more of the same. Oil and gas companies spent $44.5 million lobbying Congress and federal agencies in the first quarter of 2009 -- more than a third of the $129 million they spent in all of 2008, which in itself was a 73 percent increase from two years before. Medical insurers and drug companies are also digging deep: 20 of the biggest health insurance and drug companies spent nearly a combined $35 million in Q1 -- a 41 percent increase from the same quarter last year.
All that spending has proven to be money disturbingly well spent.
Take energy policy. President Obama arrived at the White House promising prompt and far-reaching policies on climate change. But the energy bill currently winding its way through Congress, officially called the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is in danger of becoming considerably less, uh, clean. As HuffPost's Ryan Grim reported last week, the coal lobby may be on the verge of a big victory -- essentially gutting the Clean Air Act by taking away the executive branch's authority, through the EPA, to regulate carbon emissions at the nation's dirtiest coal plants.
Which brings us to health care and the reform-killing armada currently steaming towards Washington. Their attack is shaping up to be unprecedented. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has pledged $100 million to defeat reform -- while, of course, calling it reform.
Much of the battle will be focused on the so-called public option, which the American Medical Association has already given a cold shoulder to, telling Congress it "does not believe creating a public health insurance option... is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs." Indeed, the AMA has been steeling itself for this battle. Since the 2000 election, it has doled out almost $10 million to congressional candidates.
And, again, this fight won't break down along Democrat vs Republican battle lines. Case in point: Tom Daschle. The former Senate Majority Leader, who came within a few unreported chauffeur-driven rides of being Obama's health care reform czar, recently hinted that Obama would have to drop the public option. "We've come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue," he told ABC News.
Of course, as Daschle certainly understands, without that "one issue," there is no real reform. But that's the reform killer's M.O.: identify the essential element of any reform bill and remove it -- leaving behind a worthless shell.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/lobbyists-on-a-roll-gutti_b_220521.html
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