Did you know about the London-based conglomerate that owns a huge chunk of K Street? It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes plot to me, but it’s true, and Thomas Edsall explores the implications in a good essay at the New York Times.
Here’s the paragraph that caught my eye:
That’s an impressive group there. Edsall discusses some implications for Washington. This is the most interesting to me:
If you piss off the lobbyists for the drug companies by voting against ObamaCare, you could still get hired by the lobbyists for the banks, right? But if the special interests’ agents in DC are more of a monolith, lawmakers might be increasingly unwilling to upset the lobbyists.
A related point: one factor mitigating the destructive effect of K Street on policy has been the adversarial nature of many lobbying fights — only when concentrated benefits stand on both sides of an issue do both sides really stand a chance. The last thing we need is various powerful industries and companies working together to shape legislation. The guaranteed result of that is incumbent-protection regulation and bailouts that tilts the playing field towards the better connected and bigger, while crushing entrepreneurs, blocking entry, and harming consumers and taxpayers.
