Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success
, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.
With all the goings-on in Washington over the last couple of weeks, from the withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination to the indictments of Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby, the story that may reveal the most about the nature of Republican power has been advancing along with little notice. But the Jack Abramoff scandal— about which even more questionable behavior was revealed last week through hearings in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee—is indispensable for understanding just how Washington works under GOP rule.
No one can blame the Indian tribes who retained Abramoff to do their lobbying for thinking he was the guy who could get things done in Washington, with his extraordinary friendships among the Republican ruling class. But in the process of buying access and influence, Abramoff, with the help of a supporting cast of sleazy operators, also appears to have swindled the tribes out of tens of millions of dollars.
Whenever a newspaper or magazine has attempted to unpack the scandal, they have found it necessary to print dense flow charts marking the intricate connections and the flow of money and influence between all the players—Abramoff, Republican uber-activist Grover Norquist, political consultant and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed (currently running for lieutenant governor in Georgia), Karl Rove, Tom DeLay and many others. The tentacles of the scandal reach through the Republican lobbying establishment, Congress and even the White House (former White House procurement chief David Safavian was recently arrested for lying to investigators about his contacts with Abramoff).
It also touches nearly every part of the Republican coalition, including the religious right, whom Abramoff and Reed played for suckers. As Abramoff partner Michael Scanlon put it in a recently revealed e-mail , “the wackos” —i.e. the Christian right—could be mobilized to work against an Indian casino proposal, even though the effort was being sponsored by another Indian tribe looking to protect their own casino from competition. “The wackos” were brought in with the help of Ralph Reed, despite his well-known religious opposition to gambling. Reed was paid $4 million for his efforts (score one for Mammon).
What is so disturbing about the Abramoff scandal isn’t just the way he fleeced his Indian clients, but how the apparatus for doing so was so neatly in place. Abramoff simply had to plug his marks into a circular web of money and influence that connected interest groups, lobbyists, Congress and the White House. When Abramoff told them to give money to this or that conservative interest group or Republican candidate, they went along, and the recipients were glad to help.
And though Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon took their clients for tens of millions of dollars, they did get something for their money. Here's an example: One of the bagman organizations was the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, to which Abramoff instructed his clients give $250,000. CREA—which claims to be an “environmental” organization, yet is funded by the typical list of interest groups “concerned” about the environment (mining companies, chemical companies, etc.)—was started by Grover Norquist and Gale Norton, the secretary of the interior. For some mysterious reason, CREA head Italia Federici repeatedly contacted Interior Department officials to push the cause of Abramoff’s Indian clients, despite the fact that their interests did not seem to have much to do with the environment. But according to one Interior official who testified before the Indian Affairs committee, one of the people Federici pressured—Norton’s second-in-command, Steven Griles—“had a very keen interest” in the case of a competing casino Abramoff’s clients were seeking to stop, and made “constant requests to be involved in meetings” on the matter (Griles denies this). E-mails revealed that Abramoff made Griles a job offer to join his lobbying shop (Griles would have been right at home working with Abramoff; before becoming the deputy secretary of the interior he was a lobbyist for oil and mining companies). And it wasn’t just CREA; the AP reported that staffers in Tom DeLay’s office assisted Abramoff in the effort to block a casino belonging to the Jena Choctaw tribe, which would have competed with the casino owned by Abramoff’s client, the Coushatta tribe.
And that was just one case. According to news reports, Abramoff’s modus operandi also involved front groups, kickbacks to people like Norquist for serving as conduits for cash, money funneled into Abramoff’s own pet projects, and favors lavished on friendly elected officials and Congressional staffers.
With so many characters involved and so many shady deals going on, the Abramoff scandal can get confusing pretty quickly. So if Democrats want to present it to the public as something significant, they need to link Abramoff and the other Republican scandals as symptoms of the same disease. The Abramoff scandal, Tom DeLay’s alleged money laundering, the Valerie Plame scandal and Bill Frist’s possible insider trading all show a corrupt Republican establishment that thinks it’s above the law. Because it reaches into every corner of that establishment, the Abramoff scandal can be the centerpiece of a unified narrative about the rot spreading through Republican Washington. Just as Newt Gingrich used the House banking “scandal” as a symbol of a larger culture of corruption, Democrats could use the Abramoff mess as a stand-in for the fruits of Republican rule.
To do so, they first need to make sure to talk about Abramoff’s connection to DeLay. It happens to be accurate; without his juice with DeLay, Abramoff wouldn’t have been half the mover and shaker he was. And DeLay certainly enjoyed the fruits of their relationship, between jetting to Scotland to play golf on Abramoff’s credit card and kicking back in Abramoff’s skybox at the MCI Center. Most Americans’ introduction to Tom DeLay came accompanied by the word “indictment.” DeLay was so successful in building his power base in the House that nearly any Republican can be legitimately tied to the fallen majority leader.
From the beginning, the Republicans who took over Congress in 1994 sought to normalize corruption, to take what was once considered ethically questionable if not illegal and make it nothing more than the way business is done in Washington. What had been scandalous became standard practice; no wonder DeLay’s defense in his money-laundering indictment is that what he did was just politics as usual.
If there is one quality that marks today’s Republican power structure in Washington, it is shamelessness. Contemplating actions that would make more tender hearts blanche, the likes of Rove, DeLay and Abramoff have hesitated not a moment before saying, “Let’s do it.” Allow lobbyists to write bills that enrich their clients at the expense of the American taxpayer? Sure! Attack the patriotism of those who fought heroically in a war you avoided? Absolutely! Compromise national security to punish your political opponents? Of course! Bilk naïve clients out of millions to make yourself and your cronies rich? Hell yeah!
Corruption isn’t just about money. It’s also about the belief that the ethical and legal rules that bind ordinary people don’t apply to you. This belief is what lies at the heart of all the various Republican scandals now bubbling to the surface.
As they look forward, the key challenges the Democrats face have less and less to do with George W. Bush. Although things can change rapidly, at the moment Bush seems utterly defeated in both policy and political terms. Indeed, we are rapidly moving into the post-Bush era, as both parties struggle to define themselves for the coming elections. The Republicans are already showing cracks in the coalition that people like Norquist have held together so skillfully for so long, as the various factions jockey for dominance. If the Democrats are smart, they just might be able to pull all of them down together.
