When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist looked at DC’s infamous K Street, home to the city’s powerful lobbying industry, and noticed a problem: some of the lobbyists weren’t Republicans. It was a calamity that demanded a remedy. They created the “K Street Project” — a concerted effort on the part of the GOP majority to quickly take control of Washington’s lobbying apparatus through intimidation, hardball political tactics, and even private threats when necessary.
At times, the GOP has used all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In one infamous example, Gingrich and Tom DeLay intentionally blocked a vote on an intellectual property bill in the House in 1998 because the Electronics Industry Association announced it intended to hire a new director — who happened to be a Democrat. Gingrich and DeLay told the group, hire a Republican or we won’t pass your bill.
In another one of my favorite examples, Services Committee Chairman Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) pressured the Investment Company Institute (ICI), a consortium of mutual fund companies, to fire their chief lobbyist because she was a Democrat. Oxley’s staff suggested to industry officials that a congressional probe of the mutual fund industry might ease up if ICI complied.
The project has seen sterling successes. Scared firms and trade associations, anxious to keep the GOP majority happy or face retribution, started purging Dems from top lobbying jobs, hiring Republicans, and filling Republican campaign coffers. It was legal corruption at a masterful level.
And now it’s poised to get worse. As bad as it’s been, the K Street Project is now going to have a full-time staffer.
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has tapped Sarah Smith, a former College Republican team leader and field representative for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, to be the first manager of the project, which is run out of the office of Norquist’s Washington-based group, Americans for Tax Reform.
The idea is that a staff for the project will allow conservative lawmakers and activists to coordinate better because Smith will monitor “who’s moving where” on K Street on a full-time basis. Under the old system, apparently, a stray lobbying job here and there might fall through the cracks and go to a Dem. Perish the thought.
It’s an odd dynamic. Republicans in Washington are really bad at creating jobs for Americans across the country, but they’re really good at creating jobs for Republican lobbyists. There’s a lesson in there somewhere for the rest of us.