K Street Republicans wary of conservative Tea Partyers

A 35-year veteran of Congress, former Senate majority leader, and now partner at K Street's most storied lobbying firm, Trent Lott knows the system. And the system has rewarded him richly -- as when Patton Boggs recently wrote a multimillion-dollar check to buy his firm, the Breaux-Lott Leadership Group.

So the last thing Lott needs is a bunch of unwashed, Tea-Partying right-wingers coming to Washington on a wave of anti-establishment, free-market populism, and messing up the good thing he has going.

"We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott told the Washington Post, referring to the conservative South Carolina senator who has been a gadfly for party leadership and a champion for upstart conservative candidates. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them."

But Lott is no longer in the Republican leadership -- he resigned from the Senate in December 2007, mid-term, just before a law kicked in that would have required him to wait two years before lobbying the Senate. So who is he talking about when he says "we need to co-opt them"?

"We" means the K Street wing of the Republican Party.

White House deal makers go to Caribou Coffee to make deals

WASHINGTON — There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital.

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

The off-site meetings, lobbyists say, reveal a disconnect between the Obama administration’s public rhetoric — with Mr. Obama himself frequently thrashing big industries’ “battalions” of lobbyists as enemies of reform — and the administration’s continuing, private dealings with them.

Barney Frank goes for a spin on the high road

Peter Roberson, a former staffer for the House Financial Services Committee, may have thought he was moving up in the world when he became a lobbyist for Intercontinental Exchange. But that's not the way his old boss saw it. In a rare break with the Hill's back-scratching culture, Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., criticized his former staffer for taking the new job. And Frank did so in the bluntest possible terms, telling Roberson not to show his face around his former boss's committee.

Were everyone on Capitol Hill to follow Frank's example, it would dramatically change the paradigm of public service as a mere steppingstone to a cushy K Street job. It would jam up Washington's revolving door, by which public officials do favors for rent-seeking companies and industries, which later reward them with highly lucrative lobbying gigs. Every year, hundreds of staffers pass through this door, often with their bosses' approval and encouragement, and sometimes to join former bosses who've previously done so. They use their access on behalf of their new employers, while raising industry money for their old patrons.

It's a system that works for everyone involved -- everyone except the taxpayers and consumers who pay for it all. Thus, it was no surprise last summer when theWashington Post reported more than 350 former staffers and members of Congress had been hired to lobby on Obamacare. When the bill passed through the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the biggest special interests in the health care field were represented at the bargaining table by two former Baucus chiefs of staff.

How bad is Obamacare? It took 4,525 lobbyists and $1.2 billion to buy its enactment

About 1,750 businesses and organizations hired about 4,525 lobbyists, total — eight for each member of Congress — and spent at least $1.2 billion to influence health care bills and other issues, according to a Center analysis of disclosure documents that included “health reform” or similar wording. The exact dollar amount spent on health care reform remains unclear because lobbyists are not required to itemize how much money in a given contract is devoted to a specific area. But if only 10 percent of that lobby spending went toward health reform, the amount would total $120 million — and that’s likely a record for a single year’s spending on a particular issue, experts say.

From former congressional aides to former agency heads, the firms unleashed well-connected lobbyists to push their clients’ agendas, including Thomas Scully, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President George W. Bush, and Colette Desmarais, a former top health policy aide to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. Scully is now a lobbyist with Alston & Bird LLP and Desmarais works for Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc.

The tremendous financial boost that health reform brought to lobby firms in 2009 was greater than even veteran observers expected. “I think it is unprecedented,” Washington lawyer and lobbying expert Ken Gross said about the amount of money spent on the health reform battle. The length of the debate, paired with the more than 1,750 business and organizations that signed up to lobby on health reform bills, likely made it the strongest and most expensive lobby push ever, he said.

“First of all, it went on for so long,” Gross said. “Second of all, it was high-stakes poker. It stands to reason that it would be a record-breaker.”

Crony capitalism: Washington lobbyists earned almost $3.5 billion in Obama's first year

Lobbyists, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, had a record 2009 in Barack Obama's Washington. Despite candidate Obama's promises to shun them, they raked in $3,470,000,000.

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Goldman employee contributions to Democrats in 2008 ranked second only to those employed by the University of California. JPMorgan Chase's employees ranked No. 7. The stereotype of Wall Street being Republican is decades out of date.

Crony capitalism is now the order of the day in the United States. The government and the United Auto Workers own General Motors and Chrysler, which aren't likely to pay back their billions in TARP money anytime soon, if ever. Meanwhile, the government tells Americans to stop driving Toyotas.

The government was going to remake the health care sector, and so Billy Tauzin and other health care industry lobbyists were busy in the White House cutting deals to keep their clients above water. The government was going to remake the energy sector, and utility CEOs and lobbyists have been busy flaunting their green credentials.