United Liberty

“To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly, to give our people the government they deserve.” - Barack Obama, on January 27th in the State of the Union address

“In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren’t participating in the administration than any administration that’s come before us.” - Barack Obama, on January 29th during a meeting with House GOP Conference

You know all that populist pandering on special interests and lobbyists by the president? It’s not true, as Tim Carney points out:

More than 40 former lobbyists work in senior positions in the Obama administration, including three Cabinet secretaries and the CIA director. Yet in his State of the Union address, Obama claimed, “We’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

Did Obama speak falsely?

Well, it depends on what the definition of “excluded lobbyists” is.
[…]
Sure, some of Obama’s 40 ex-lobbyists are like that anti-smoking activist, but many are of a different stripe, such as William J. Wilkins, the general counsel of Obama’s IRS, a former lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association.

Or Monsanto’s former VP for public policy, Michael Taylor, who Obama tapped as deputy commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration.

William J. Lynn became Obama’s deputy defense secretary within 10 months of being a lobbyist for Raytheon, a giant of the military-industrial complex. By the way, Raytheon’s fourth-quarter profits were up 20 percent from a year ago.

Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, was a K Street lobbyist who represented Fannie Mae during the housing boom, opposing regulation of the now-bailed-out mortgage giant. And Biden’s deputy chief of staff is Alan Hoffman, a K Street veteran who helped oil giant Unocal avoid U.S. sanctions against its natural-gas partnership with the military dictatorship of Burma.

Obama touts the ethics executive order he signed his first day, and none of the above lobbyist appointments violate it (which should suggest how toothless Obama’s lobbyist regulations are). Wilkins, for instance, stopped registering as a lobbyist for Swiss bankers and the like in 2003, while Obama’s restrictions reach back only two years. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack avoids issues dealing with his former employer, the National Education Association.

William Lynn at DOD? He got a waiver from the president, and so he’s exempt from the new rules.

But then there’s Mark Patterson, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist until April 2008 (apparently, back then, Wall Street lobbyists weren’t all evil in Obama’s eyes) who now serves as chief of staff at the Treasury Department. He’s one of those lobbyists whom Obama neither “excluded” nor granted a waiver.

Personally, I have nothing against lobbyist, at least in general terms. The Bill of Rights is clear that citizens have a right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Whether we do it as citizens lobbyists or hiring a firm to do it for us should make no difference.

We should have a problem with lobbyists that are asking lawmakers to raid the treasury for purposes outside of the responsibilities of Congress laid out in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The problem here is the doublespeak of the Obama Administration, which talks a great game about ethics in government but engages in those very same corporatist economic policies of the past.