American League of Lobbyists

print page

Recent Press Highlights

Opinion
Don't tarnish all lobbyists for others' sins
Petitioning government to redress grievances is everyone's right, not a privilege of the wealthy

By Craig Snyder

I am a lobbyist. Part of my job is seeking appropriations "earmarks" for clients. I have the expertise and network to do this effectively, having passed through the "revolving door" from Capitol Hill to "K Street," as a Senate chief of staff.

According to the emergent view, I am part of a "culture of corruption" and my work has about it, at least, "an appearance of impropriety."

According to the agenda of the self-appointed reformers, the mainstream press (which has apparently bought this worldview without critical thinking) and even the Republican leadership (having revived the 1950s "duck and cover" drill for this issue), lobbying should be further regulated or simply terminated.

The problem is that this new conventional wisdom is false and threatens fundamental constitutional values.

The "reformers" have revived the tactic of guilt by association. Dirty lobbyists and congressmen should be punished. But their crimes don't make the entire profession dirty anymore than, as one friend put it, we need "banking reform" because we haven't eliminated bank robbery.

Lobbying is just the pejorative word for free expression, for petitioning our government for the redress of grievances. But people shouldn't make money from the exercise of their First Amendment rights, it's said. OK, then everyone who makes money from TV news or magazines is dirty too.

The argument continues - lobbyists and their rich clients have special access, purchased through campaign contributions, which give an unfair advantage to the free expression of some. Nonsense. Of course not every American can equally exercise the right to petition the government, just like not everyone can equally exercise the right of free speech by owning a newspaper. But the genius of our democracy allows, even encourages, the voice of the entire nation, in its full diversity, to be heard in the halls of power - in other words, to be lobbied for. Some of DC's biggest and most winning lobbies - AARP, the Sierra Club, the Children's Defense Fund, etc. -proclaim themselves as voices of the "voiceless."

How amazing is it that in recent "investigative news" articles about lobbying and earmarks, reporters don't mention that the "Center for Responsive Politics" and similar groups, are lobbyists themselves, paid to advocate for certain policy outcomes?

So what about these earmarks? The question shouldn't be the motives of those who ask for earmarks or of those who champion them in Congress, but about the merits of this type of federal spending.

The entire federal budget, every penny of it, is an earmark. It's all congressionally directed spending. That's what the Constitution requires.

So why are some of Congress' uses of its power of the purse subject to such scrutiny and scorn? Surely it's not because these budget items have been shown to be, as a group, any more wasteful or wrongly directed than other items within the great bulk of federal spending which Congress has, de facto, turned over to the bureaucracy.

Even if you accept the (inflated) numbers on earmark spending put out by opponents of the process, it amounts to 1 percent of federal spending specifically directed by elected representatives in Congress. The rest is controlled by unelected bureaucrats.

I often see earmarks that are Congress' exercise, not only of its rightful constitutional power, but of its obligation of oversight with respect to the manifold failures, political influences and prejudices that systematically warp the executive's spending decisions - from the Pentagon to the NIH, HHS, the Department of Education, and so on.

Maybe projects I lobby for are worthwhile, in the national interest and necessary to redress flaws in executive agency decision-making. Maybe not. But that's what the debate should be about, not an ad hominem attack on the legitimacy of citizens advocating their own views and interests with their own elected officials.

My own earmark practice has included funds for an awareness campaign to promote early diagnosis of autism, equipment which helped the military dramatically reduce "friendly fire" casualties in the Iraq invasion, and college scholarships for poor, rural high schoolers.

If the public becomes convinced that funding these and countless meritorious projects around the nation is corrupt - by a media consciously or unconsciously supportive of efforts by the Democrats to regain power by destroying public trust in Congress - the country will regret it and a future Congress will doubtlessly have to reform the "reforms" of 2006.

Craig Snyder (snyder@ikoninc.net) is a managing partner of IKON Public Affairs and a former chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter.