The Political Bear

Sure they are looking out for the their industry, but they don’t have final control over the bill that gets introduced, passes committee, passes on the floor, passes the other chamber, gets conferenced before final passage, and then and only then makes it to the President’s Desk for a signature. Our system is riddled, or better yet- adorned- , with checks and balances that make it work out.

If any of my readers are unaware, I would put the average age of House of Representatives Personal office staffer at 28 years of age. On the Committees that age increases and in the Senate that number is also increased, but there are a lot of young staffers that provide much of the engine to keep our government working. Do we expect them to be experts regarding telecom law, constitutional law, education, defense…..etc. No. They need help, and like it or not that help comes from lobbyists. It is then the job of the staffer to filter out the biased sections and pass good legislation.

This article makes me think twice about that line of logic though:

The K Street lobbying industry has racked up almost a billion dollars in expenditures so far this year, and may be on pace to shatter spending records under the new quarterly filing system based on first quarter reports for this year.

Based on the reports, industry watchers are predicting that special interests could spend $4 billion on lobbying in 2008, far exceeding the $2.9 billion record set last year. And the spending projections could increase more as congressional officials in charge of processing the lobbying disclosure forms add new reports that were improperly filed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.