On the Outside, Looking In
Congressional Democrats are having a field-day with the Jack Abramoff-directed payoffs to (mostly) Republican office holders. It’s kind of a grin, because all that principled positioning shields the fact that they’ve been very much cut out of the spoils.
Tom DeLay, everyone’s favorite punching bag, now that he’s sidelined with legal problems that threaten to get far worse, heralded the restructuring of lobbyist access to Congress with his Republicans only strategy. It was incredibly and alarmingly successful. Lobbyists are non-denominational in their bribery of legislators. They go where the access is and for ten years the access has been through DeLay.
It's illuminating to listen to the silence in K-Street, where the halls of lobbyist power reside and the temperament is unruffled to the point of boredom. They know the appropriate loopholes will be looped.
Democrats, lunging at the ethics issue like junkyard dogs, are actually far more angered by their being denied access to the trough t…