• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 830 0

economy lie earmarks. Candidate Obama may have been right in 2008 when he said that earmarks are a very small portion of the overall federal budget—less than 2 percent of the 2005 budget.52 But Senator McCain was certainly right when he said that the percentage itself is beside the point. The important question about earmarks isn’t their absolute size relative to the federal budget. The important question is how easily the value of those earmarks can be privatized, so that, in turn, they can benefit the (campaign cash) interest of the congressman: If a congresswoman could secure a $10 million earmark benefiting Company X, how easily can some of the value of that $10 million be channeled back to her campaign? Not directly, and not illegally, but if a congressman is going to make the president of Acme, Inc., $10 million happier, is there some way that some of that “happiness” can get returned? How sticky can the favor be made to seem? How fungible? And most important, once the dance to effect that translation gets learned, how easily can it be applied to other policy issues, not directly tied to earmarks?

The answer to these questions is obvious and critical: If the only actors involved in this dance are members of Congress and the special interest seeking favor, then the dance is quite difficult, at least within the bounds of legality. But if there is an agent in the middle—someone who works not for the congressman but for many special interests seeking special favors from Congress—the dance becomes much, much easier, since there are obvious ways in which it can happen well within the boundaries of federal law.

To see how, we must first address an assumption that tends to limit imagination about how this economy of influence might work.

Too many assume that the only way that government power can be converted into campaign cash is through some sort of quid pro quo. Too many assume, that is, that influence is a series of deals. And because they imagine that a transaction is required, too many are skeptical about how vast or extensive such an economy of influence could be—first, because there are laws against this sort of thing, and second, because almost every single member of Congress, Democrat and Republican alike, strikes any one of us as clearly above this sort of corruption.

There are laws against quid pro quo bribery. These laws are, in the main, respected. Of course there are exceptions. Consider this key bit of evidence in the prosecution of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Vietnam War Top Gun fighter pilot turned congressman who promised in his 1990s campaign a “congressman we can be proud of” (Figure 8).

FIGURE 8

Look at the numbers: The first column represents the size of the government contract (in millions) the congressman was promising. The second column reports the size of the bribe (in thousands) necessary to get that contract. “BT” refers to a yacht. I’m no expert, but I know enough to say: this is not genius.

There are more Randy “Duke” Cunninghams or William Jeffersons in Congress, no doubt. But not more than a handful. I agree with Dennis Thompson that ours is among the cleanest Congresses in the history of Congress.53 And if the only way that government power could be converted into campaign cash were by crossing the boundaries of criminal law, then there would be no book to write here. If the only possible “corruption” were the corruption regulated by bribery statutes, then I’d be the first to insist that ours is not a corrupt Congress.

Yet there is an obvious and overwhelming argument against the idea that corruption needs a transaction to work. Indeed, there is an argument—and it is the core argument of this book—that the most significant and powerful forms of corruption today are precisely those that thrive without depending upon quid pro quos for their effectiveness.

This argument can be proven in the sterile but powerful language of modern political science. Justin Fox and Lawrence Rothenberg, for example, have modeled how a campaign contribution “impacts incumbent policy choices,” even if