Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [103]
The prospects are even better if you enter the revolving door. Start your career as an associate at a law firm, leave to spend a few years as a staffer on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, and return to that law firm as a principal making hundreds of thousands if not millions a year, where you will represent numerous financial institutions before the Senate.22 As of 1987, “most of the administrative assistants or top congressional staffers in the House spent 5.5 years working in Congress.” A decade later, the average tenure had fallen by more than 25 percent.23 Between 1998 and 2004, 3,600 former congressional aides had “passed through the revolving door.”24
In both of these types of cases, the government employee traded her experience for cash. And as the amount of cash that gets traded goes up, more and more will enter government service with that trade in mind.
Again, sometimes this trade is completely benign. After World War II, fighter pilots became commercial pilots. They were paid (practically) nothing to risk their lives to protect America. Then they were paid lots more because of the experience they’d earned while serving to protect America. No one thinks that the prospect of becoming a commercial pilot somehow compromised the service of the military pilot. Indeed, to the contrary: the lucrative post-service salary made it easier to get great pilots to serve in the war.
Sometimes, however, that trade is not at all benign.
Consider, for example, the lobbying firm PMA Group, Inc., created and run by staff alumni of Representative John Murtha (D-Pa.; 1974–2010). In 2008 that firm persuaded 104 different House members to add separate earmarks into the defense appropriations bill worth $300 million to PMA Group clients. These same lawmakers have received $1.8 million in campaign donations from the lobbying firm since 2001. When these deals came to light in 2009, the PMA Group closed shop. Its founder, former Murtha aide Paul Magliocchetti, pled guilty to illegally laundering political contributions, and was sentenced to twenty-seven months.25
Or consider a second example: When an artist records an album, the artist gets the copyright. For many years, the recording industry has wanted that rule changed, so that the company making the recording, by default, gets the copyright. This is no small matter: for many artists, and their heirs, the copyright to the recording is the most important right they get. In 1999, Mitch Glazier, the chief counsel to the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property in the House of Representatives, is said to have inserted into a bill of technical corrections to the Copyright Act a fairly fundamental change: an amendment that classified many recordings as “work made for hire” (meaning the record company, not the artist, would by default get the copyright). Immediately after he allegedly did this, Glazier left Capitol Hill and became senior vice president of governmental relations and legislative counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America.26
Our government is shot through with examples like this, far beyond the problems with Congress. A huge proportion of the “staffers” who support the military move seamlessly from private defense contractors to the government and back again, keeping their security clearance, doing the same sort of work, but sometimes at a high salary (when private) and sometimes at a low salary (when for the government). The rotation balances out to a very nice salary on average, but many would not be in this service if the private part didn’t complement the public.
Again, maybe sometimes this accommodation is completely harmless. Much more often, these relationships earn the insiders something special, whether it is special access to members of Congress that a lobbyist firm then sells to clients, or a special relationship that an ex-staffer