The Medicine Does More Damage Than the Disease

Now that the Abramoff scandal is front page news, lawmakers in Washington have been bending over backwards looking for ways to "do something" about the problem of lobbying. Of course, the fact that the first thing Congress did was ban lobbying by former members of Congress in the House Gym was somewhat of a weird first step ("I've been going to the gym for 14 years, and nobody's in there lobbying...I've never seen any nefarious plots hatched on the treadmill," said Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia).

My fear is that, once again, Congress is going to produce a medicine that does more damage to our political system than the disease ever will. What Jack Abramoff did is already against the law. And he has been caught and punished for his crime. As part of his plea deal, he is also going to provide evidence against former members of Congress who also broke the law. How will radical lobbying reform for the sake of lobbying reform change this? It would seem that the Ethics Committees need to do a better job of policing their own and enforcing the existing laws than passing new laws that will never actually be enforced. The problem with Congress specifically and lawmaking bodies in general is that they see a major news story break, whether it be a corruption scandal or a school shooting, and immediately overreact. How many lawmakers proposed new, tougher, more restrictive gun laws in the wake of a gun crime, particularly when it is a rash of inner-city drug-related murders? Plenty. But none of those lawmakers stopped and realized that oftentimes the shooter had already broken numerous gun laws prior to committing those crimes. How would a new law stop that shooter from still committing the same crime? It would not. All a new gun law would do in that situation is restrict the right of self-defense to those who are clearly in need of it. An overreaction by law makers.

McCain-Feingold was a similar overreaction. There was a perceived problem with money in politics. There was a perceived problem with negative campaigning and negative advertising. So McCain-Feingold was passed. So the so-called "soft money" was virtually removed from politics altogether. So federal candidates would be required to put ridiculous disclaimers on all of their campaign advertisements saying that they "approved" the message. What has McCain-Feingold wrought:

• Hundreds of millions of dollar spent by the Bush and Kerry campaigns in 2004
• A Presidential election year with ads more vicious and more negative than ever before.
• The rise of "527" groups that can spend unlimited sums of money and interject themselves into the campaign.

All at the cost of free speech; Political Action Committees, remember, are no longer allowed to run candidate-specific advertising in the last 30 days prior to a federal primary or in the last 60 days prior to a federal general election. Can anybody truly say that politics are better since McCain-Feingold? Can we really say that the influence of money is lessened? Can we really say that be restricting the rights of groups to voice an opinion about candidates that the voice of the people is being defended and preserved?

And that is what worries me most about the so-called lobbying "reform." What steps will members of Congress proposed to create a panglossian system of lobbying that can only exist in the minds of the naive? Where will this all end? Will reform do more damage than the lobbying itself? We will need to keep a keen eye on these reform proposals over the next several months. But if history has taught us anything, is that Congress, in the words of Congressman Shadegg, does two things well -- nothing and overreact. The smart money, for political purposes, will see them overreact once more.