The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [21]
Westar’s internal memoranda made it clear that they were buying the influence of those members actually important to the passage and/or back-room rewriting of the bill. One memo from Westar VP Doug Lawrence to executive VP Douglas Lake puts it plainly:
Right now, we are working on getting our grandfather provision on PUHCA repeal into the senate version of the energy bill. It requires working with the Conference committee to achieve. We have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table, which has been approved by David [Wittig.] The total of the package will be $31,500 in hard money (individual) and $25,000 in soft money (corporate). Right now, we have $11,500 in immediate needs for a group of candidates associated with Tom DeLay, Billy Tauzin, Joe Barton and Senator Richard Shelby.
Lawrence then goes on to explain why the influence of each of these members is needed:
DeLay is the House Majority Leader. His agreement is necessary before the House Conferees can push the language we have in place in the House bill. Shimkus is a close associate of Billy Tauzin and Joe Barton, who are key House Conferees on our legislation…
The Westar story looked like clear proof of a number of felonies, and in any case proved in writing what everyone already knew: Congress was for sale. But in the end the only action taken was a nonbinding censure of DeLay by the Ethics Committee.
Significantly, the committee also rebuked Chris Bell, the freshman congressman from Texas who brought the complaint to the Ethics Committee, for the curious offense of using “inflammatory” language in his complaint. The offending language involved, chiefly, Bell’s allegation that DeLay had violated federal bribery laws by taking money from Westar in exchange for favors. Bell, incidentally, would have to leave Congress after losing a primary in the wake of DeLay’s infamous Texas redistricting plan.
Westar was ultimately fined about $40,000 by the Federal Election Commission, but the case stopped there. As is often the case with corruption investigations involving Congress, the FEC’s Westar investigation was ultimately sealed. Most congressional scandals end not when the investigation is concluded, but when it stalls in perpetuity, with the papers sealed to keep the press from fanning the flames any higher.
With the exception of DeLay, most all the members involved in the Westar affair came off clean. Tauzin, the esteemed congressman from the incorruptible state of Louisiana, fared the best of all. He left Congress to take a $2-million-a-year job heading the nation’s leading pharmaceutical lobbying firm, PhRMA, seemingly just hours after shepherding the Bush prescription drug benefit bill into law.
Barton, meanwhile, ascended to the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, where he continued, by all appearances, to perform exactly the same role he had in the Westar case—the securing of favors for donors at the crucial way stations of the legislative process. Again, this involved stuffing desired bits into bills in the original committee of jurisdiction, keeping undesired parts out, chaperoning the bill through the Rules Committee, coming through in conference, and so on.
Barton performed ably on most all of these counts with the post-Katrina energy bill. The original plan for the bill included virtually the full energy industry wish list, including the opening of ANWR to drilling, the loosening of regulations to allow offshore drilling in the previously restricted outer continental shelf area (also known as OCS, which includes waters off Florida and Georgia, among other states), the repeal of parts of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (allowing the expansion of oil traffic in Puget Sound), and a long list of other horrors.
Eventually the ANWR and OCS provisions were junked, but Barton did manage to put together a bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee markup that included the extension of Clean Air cleanup deadlines for states