Pursuing a Fast Track To Party
Leadership
Some of Blunt’s activities have prompted criticism, for instance an unsuccessful 2002 maneuver to attach a
provision banning tobacco sales on the Internet to the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security.
Blunt did not succeed,
but the effort struck many of his colleagues as an overreach, given that his son was a lobbyist for Philip Morris in Missouri, Blunt
himself was dating a Philip Morris lobbyist whom he later married, and the congressman had received more than $150,000 in contributions
from the company and subsidiaries.
by Bush’s Aides Is Ruled Illegal – New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: October 1, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 –
Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s
education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to
analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability
Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
Contract Killers – New York Times
It’s quite a
fall, no doubt about it: from agile insurgency to bloated establishment in just over a decade. So what went wrong? The 1994 Republicans
understood that power in Washington was not simply a matter of who controlled the White House and Congress. Passing legislation also
required the support of powerful unelected business interests and their representatives on K Street, the historic home of the lobbying
trade.
Led by Mr. DeLay in the House, Rick Santorum in the Senate and Grover Norquist downtown, Republicans worked not just toward
the partisan realignment of the country, but of the influence industry, too. They tracked which lobbyists were Democrats and which
Republicans, refused to meet with the Democrats and pressured business groups and law firms to hire the conservatives. Their strenuous
efforts to blur the boundaries between corporate America and the Republican Party came to be known as the K Street Project.
It was
an incredible success. By 2002, if you look at numbers from the Center for Responsive Politics, industries that had long made bipartisan
campaign contributions largely abandoned the Democrats, leaving Republicans with an overwhelming edge in corporate donations. By 2004,
the lobbyists themselves gave the Republicans $1 million more than they gave Democrats. The number of Republican lobbyists grew. And so
did the number of lobbyists, period – from about 9,000 when the Republicans took power to more than 34,000 today.