Political Skullduggery

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are handing off to the RNC a practice reminiscent of the days of open labor racketeering on the waterfronts of our major port cities.

It was not unheard of for the families that controlled the docks to present a list of prospective workers to be put on the longshoremen payroll in exchange for favorable treatment (or lack of unfavorable treatment) from the powers that be. The fact that these workers usually didn't exist is the biggest difference found between operations of this type and the "K Street Project."

Republican lawmakers yesterday ended their long practice of routinely summoning lobbyists to the Capitol to try to persuade them to hire their aides and colleagues, in the wake of the Jack Abramoff political corruption scandal.

GOP lawmakers for years have regularly presented lists of job openings on K Street to lobbyists to encourage them to hire Republicans over Democrats. The program is a remnant of the K Street Project once championed by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) as a way to coerce trade associations and companies to hire Republicans as their top lobbyists and to warn firms that hired Democrats that they would not be welcome.

Yesterday, the staff director of the Senate Republican Conference said that a K-Street-job-vacancies memo -- the heart of Congress's remaining involvement in the effort these days -- will no longer be distributed during high-level meetings hosted by the conference on Capitol Hill between lawmakers and lobbyists. Responsibility for the listings migrated from the House to the Senate several years ago, according to lobbyists.

"Meet the new boss, same as the ..."

Participants describe the meeting as an information exchange at which Santorum and other GOP senators discuss their priorities and collect intelligence from lobbyists. Toward the end of the meetings, which begin at 8:30 a.m. every other Tuesday, a representative of the Republican National Committee distributes the document that lists who in Congress is looking for work and what jobs are available. A discussion of jobs sometimes ensued.

Asked whether the document will continue to be passed out during those meetings, Mark D. Rodgers, the conference's staff director, said, "Since the RNC is already widely distributing the jobs list, we have decided it is duplicative to hand it out and will no longer do so." But Brian Jones, a spokesman for the RNC, said the data were not easily obtainable. "It's not public information," Jones said.

Nice.