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From the New York Times
WASHINGTON - One of the more depressing facts of Capitol life is that close to half of each Congress’s departing members now stay in town for far richer careers as lobbyists. They gratefully cycle into modern government’s shadow estate that has doubled in size in the last decade. Public service as a public trust? It’s become more an undergraduate’s training for the inner-sanctum swagger of K Street.
And then there’s Representative Martin Meehan, who is quietly packing it in after 14 years in Congress. He labored as one of the House’s most aggressive fighters for ethics reform, taking aim at alumni lobbyists, among others. Typically ornery, Mr. Meehan is not letting the door hit him in the wallet on the way out. He’s going back home to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts’s campus in Lowell.
“Good people get elected,” the 50-year-old Democrat concluded from his perch in the people’s House. “But when money becomes so important in the process, when lobbying becomes so incredibly powerful in the process, it’s really difficult to get decisions that are truly made on the merits.”
Sour grapes? Not at all. Mr. Meehan proudly points to the presidential pen that enacted the campaign finance crackdown outlawing the unlimited, unregulated traffic in “soft money” donations that used to buy privileged access to politicians. Now there are other ways to do that, but the soft-money ban at least shut one trough by using that rarely used tool of bipartisanship. Mr. Meehan worked with Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, and Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.
That victory seems a millennium ago. It was never designed as a brake on the runaway growth in regulated hard-money donations that are making the next presidential election a record $1 billion showdown for the two finalists. “Where’s the public outrage?” asks Mr. Meehan of the fact that the major candidates are making no real effort to salvage the post-Watergate campaign money law. That proved public financing could be an alternative to the siren call of deep-pocketed special-interest donors, until it was outdated by inflation.
“We never went far enough; we should have a system of public financing for Congress, too,” says Representative Meehan, a reformer in retreat who sees little chance of that happening for the next few decades. In truth, more big-money campaign techniques and ever more cash-laden lobbyists are moving in as he moves out. That is unlikely to change, even if Congress manages final approval of a mandate that lobbyists disclose, but not end, some of their mammoth money-raising ways on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Meehan smiles when reminded that university fund-raising will figure big in his new job. “I had to develop a special fund-raising skill,” he noted, as one of the rare Washington politicians who relied on campaign donations from individual constituents at home rather than from Beltway political action committees.
In one of his last Washington fights, Mr. Meehan failed with a measure to force his fellow representatives to wait two years, not the current one year, before they can begin their back-slapping, nice-to-see-you rounds as inner-circle lobbyists. There was rare bipartisanship as members staged an ugly revolt defending their right to rush from public service to private wealth. “What you are telling me is, I cut off my profession,” one lawmaker whined.
Representative Meehan was hardly surprised. “I gave it the best I have,” he said, packing up for a new career calling well out of town.
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