Wolf D. Fuhrig

Home

When Lobbying Turns To Bribing

If you want a favor from a lawmaker to whom you cannot get access otherwise, you might want to hire a lobbyist. For a fee, he or she may intercede for you, or even get you access to influential officials who may listen and respond to your concern. Remember, however, that lobbyists usually cannot guarantee you success and will not return the funds you entrusted to them if they achieve little or nothing.

As a lawmaker or other public servant, you might find it profitable to get to know and accommodate lobbyists, particularly those with wealthy clients and wide-ranging connections. If you are willing to listen to lobbyists’ concerns, they are likely to invite you to lunch, or to a golf outing, or even to a first-class tour of a faraway country. More valuable yet may be the dollars your lobbyist friends contribute to your campaign fund and the fat cats they steer your way.

It is no secret that lobbyists and public servants routinely extend favors to each other. Favors are not thought of--God forbid!--as bribes because bribing is illegal. Patriotic Americans stand for the rule of law. Hence, recipients of contributions in cash or kind may not want to see a need for questioning their donors’ integrity and motivation. Dictionaries commonly define a lobbyist as “a person who tries to influence a public servant on behalf of a special interest.” And they describe a bribe as “money or other favor given or promised in order to influence the conduct of a person in a position to comply.”

Legally, when a lobbyist materially compensates a public official for a service he is not allowed to trade, a bribe has been committed. "You can't have a corrupt lobbyist without a corrupt member or a corrupt staffer on the other end," explained Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker whose downfall nine years ago included a $300,000 penalty for violating House ethics rules.

To learn how smoothly big-time lobbying may turn into big-time bribery, we only need to study the ongoing saga of the ambitious Jack Abramoff who sought to build America’s biggest lobbying portfolio. By hook or by crook, he accumulated millions of dollars so he could buy ample access to people of influence and a lavish life style for himself.

Lobbyist Abramoff found himself pliable clients, such as the Coushatta Tribe in Elton, Louisiana, that operated a casino but needed somebody to squelch rival Indians’ applications for gambling permits. Jack promised to do that for a fee: just $32 million--more than $38,000 for each of the tribe's 837 members, according to a Washington Post report. Yet, not only gullible Indians sought Abramoff's services. Tyco International, for example, whose CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, stole $600 million from his company, hired Abramoff for a fee of $1.6 million to iron out tax problems.

Soon, alert politicians were attracted by Abramoff’s moxie and money. Lawmakers and their aides packed his restaurants and skyboxes and jetted off with him on golf trips to Scotland and Pacific islands. Large numbers of influential Republicans, including President Bush and Speaker Hastert, apparently asked few questions when they accepted his campaign contributions and gave him the access he desired.

Press reports indicate that over the past five years an estimated 600 lawmakers took $18 million worth of gifts in kind from lobbyists. One of the biggest spenders of those perks was their friend Abramoff.

Now, after he has pleaded guilty to numerous cases of fraud, bribery, and tax evasion, many of the recipients of his tainted gifts are turning them over to charity, "as if they were buying indulgences for a political inquisition to come."

Why, one has to ask, do public servants so often fall for the temptation of dispensing services for favors in ingeniously concealed ways? Do America’s lawmakers need those perks because their salaries are insufficient or the government does not adequately compensate them for their business expenses? Do they not have better health and pension benefits than most Americans and profitable money-making opportunities after they leave office?

The right to lobby is an essential element of any open society. The fine line between permissible advocacy and impermissible bribery, however, will always be difficult to draw. Yet, ending the egregious abuses of lobbying in American government urgently requires more effective legal remedies.