By ANDRE FRANCISCO
I'm sure you've heard the calls. They've come from Republicans, Democrats, and groups like POGO, the Sunlight Foundation, and now the National Taxpayers Union. The message has all been the same--the Super Congress must be open and transparent to ensure integrity and protect against special interest lobbying.
But earlier this week, a senior editor for The Atlantic reiterated his call for a secret Super Congress. “I'm not worried about shady dealings, a la Cheney and oil companies, because the deliberations will focus on removing, rather than giving away, tax breaks, loopholes, and favors,” Joshua Green wrote on Monday. “That’s incredibly hard to do in the current political climate.”
POGO knows all too well how difficult it can be to cut an unnecessary program. But that’s not going to stop special interests from doing everything they can to make sure their pet programs are spared from the budget axe.
As highlighted in Politico on Monday, lobbyists are already working to influence the committees that are going to send recommendations to the Super Congress. “Everyone is going to try to make a case about their issue,” said Jonathon Jones from the lobbying firm Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart.
Last week, the president of a government affairs consultant with major defense companies as clients told Reuters that the industry was coming together in an unprecedented way to lobby the Super Congress. “This is do or die,” he said.
As POGO’s Joe Newman recently pointed out, these groups already have a leg up in other ways. The revolving door between government and lobbying groups has provided special interests with a long list of connected employees who already get a seat at the table with policymakers. In fact, many lobbyists are former Members themselves, and get special privileges to access special “Members only” venues at the Capitol.
Lobbyists also get special access to policymakers by bundling donations towards political campaigns and by leveraging relationships from their previous jobs. They don’t need transparency to get this access—it’s the rest of us who need it.
Green’s argument that a closed committee would create a “venue for candid exchange” does make some sense. It’s less important that everybody sits up straight and thanks everyone in the room because they are in front of TV cameras than it is for them to actually get something done. But a closed committee doesn’t ensure independent input from the committee members. It ensures a decision with no history. No public record of meetings, documents or discussion used to craft $1,200,000,000,000 in debt reduction. A closed committee will be closed to public scrutiny, but not to the reach of well-connected lobbyists.
The negotiations running up to the 11th-hour debt ceiling deal were secret, but whatever “candid exchanges” happened there did not remedy the fundamental breakdown in Congress that Green laments.
Open or closed, lobbyists will influence the Super Congress. It’s already happening. Now let’s work towards greater transparency so those lobbyists don’t have undue influence over $1.2 trillion in debt reduction that will affect all of us.
Andre Francisco is a POGO communications associate.
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