Why US politicians are giving away money

By Gerard Baker

Washington has not been overcome by a charitable urge: its elected officials are running scared of a scandal

IT’S GOING TO BE a bumper month for charitable giving in Washington. With the year just a few days old, politicians have been suddenly energised by a warm rush of philanthropic spirit.
President Bush gave $6,000 on Wednesday to the American Heart Association. Senator Thad Cochran, the Republican chairman of the all-powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, has just given $8,000 to Hurricane Katrina Relief efforts. Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, said this week that he is giving away $69,000, while Tom DeLay, the Republicans’ No 2 in the House of Representatives, is coughing up $15,000.

If you’ve got a charitable project, if perhaps you’re the widow of a former Nigerian oil minister with real needs and access to an e-mail account, there are people you should definitely be in touch with in Washington. But hurry, because while they’ve got quite a bit more to give away, they can’t get rid of it fast enough.

The munificence is not the product of some heartwarming new year’s resolution by America’s most powerful men and women. It is not charity’s warm embrace that has propelled America’s political leaders to this state of grace but the long arm of the law.

The money was originally handed over to all these politicians by Jack Abramoff, a man so much the parody of the rich influential Washington powerbroker that he looks as though he has stepped clean from the pages of a John Grisham novel. Mr Abramoff, 46, tanned, fit, by turns, colleagues say, exquisitely charming and hideously threatening, was one of the more famous and well endowed of the city’s vast army of lobbyists.

The term lobbyist derives from the 19th-century Willard Hotel, one of the grandes dames of Washington establishments, a stone’s throw from the White House. In the hotel’s great front lobby, business representatives and others who had pressing business before Congress would cluster to grab influential lawmakers as they came in for a cocktail.

Things have moved on a bit since such innocent times. Mr Abramoff had no use for a mere hotel lobby. Instead he cut out the middleman and set up his own restaurant, Signatures, located on Pennsylvania Avenue, precisely halfway between Capitol Hill and the White House. There, surrounded by themed antiques, such as John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair (which you could buy for just $450,000), at cosy tables he and his staff would purchase rare grilled ahi tuna with roasted red onion, tomato concassée and burgundy port sauce — and members of Congress.

For a decade Mr Abramoff took in tens of millions of dollars from eager clients who had some important legislative matter that they wanted pursuing in the world’s most powerful city. He would then push the money on to lawmakers and administration officials to ensure that those interests were looked after; a convenient clause in a Bill would be added here; a pesky regulatory committee would be persuaded to back off there.

The members of Congress would then find funds flowing smoothly into their political campaigns. But there would be more direct benefits too: golf trips to Scotland, holidays on Mr Abramoff’s fleet of cruise ships, jobs for spouses and friends.

This week, the power lobbyist finally picked up the tab. On Tuesday he pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy in DC, and then flew to Florida where he pleaded guilty to two more. In all, he could go to prison for more than 30 years.

So the beneficiaries of his largesse are now racing to give away the money. When the announcement of the plea bargain came down from the federal courthouse, Washington reverberated to the sound of briefcases full of money being dropped outside homes for widows and orphans. For many of these newly expansive politicians it will be too late. As part of the deal, the überlobbyist agreed to name names, and more than one member of Congress is going to have his collar felt in the next few months.

But the real scandal of the Abramoff affair is not what it tells us about the illegal tip of the iceberg that occasionally peeks out above the waters of Washington’s political landscape, but the completely legal business that goes on underneath. Washington lawmaking increasingly resembles a large piece of financial machinery, cleverly constructed for the benefit of those who work and have business here.

Corruption, of course, is nothing new. Since the members of the Athenian assembly first started getting treated to extra helpings of olive in exchange for the right vote, a central flaw of democratic government has been the ease with which venal representatives can be purchased.

As Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, put it this week, US politics works as something like an incumbency protection racket. With the growth of the federal government in recent years, lawmakers have control over ever larger sums of money and ever greater influence over vast tracts of public life. At the same time, they have the essential task of ensuring they get re-elected. Fortunately these two responsibilities dovetail neatly into each other. By funnelling vast sums of public money to special interests in exchange for vast campaign contributions, they raise so much money that would-be opponents are scared off even before they can start.

Anyone running for Congress these days needs to raise tens of millions to pay for the TV campaign advertising just to have a shot. Unless you have access to the kind of levers members of Congress can pull, your chances of doing that are slim. It is, in its way, a threat as profound as any to the healthy functioning of American democracy, and it gets worse year by year, election cycle by election cycle. Neither is it, in case you were wondering, just a Republican problem.

Though Mr Abramoff himself and many of his most prominent beneficiaries were Republicans, the Democrats are also in it up to their eyeballs.

Prosecuting the egregious few who actually break the existing, highly forgiving laws is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for changing the culture. Wholesale changes to the legal arrangements of lobbying, legislating and campaigning are needed to stop American democracy slipping further into the pit of cupidity, venality and dishonesty that will eventually swallow it whole.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk