Former Speaker of the House John Boehner has cashed out, and nobody is surprised. Boehner, as he passes through the revolving door to K Street lobbying giant Squire Patton Boggs, is following a road well traveled.
His former Hill staffers have preceded him to K Street, and even to the same firm. His House colleagues have cashed out in droves. And Boehner’s predecessors and counterparts — in both parties and both chambers — have all done the same.
Boehner’s cashout is still outrageous. It’s outrageous not because it’s extraordinary — it’s not — but because it’s totally ordinary.
Most of Washington expects our senators, congressmen and cabinet officials to monetize their public service. Most of America has no idea how cozy K Street and Congress are, and they would be horrified if they knew.
Five of the six richest counties in American are in commuting distance of the U.S. Capitol, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This isn’t a sign of a healthy republic. This is the sign of a rigged game in which the insiders enrich themselves by extracting wealth from the rest of the nation. And the lobbying industry is a major cause.
Most people in power in Washington cash out. From the most recent Congress, half of the retired or defeated members work at lobbying firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
For party leaders like Boehner, it’s nearly 100 percent. Almost every top party leader in both chambers for the past two or three decades has become a lobbyist upon leaving office. That’s every speaker of the House and House minority leader going back to the 1980s, and every Senate majority leader and minority leader going back to 1977.
Boehner’s immediate predecessor as speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is still in the House, and so we should consider her a future lobbyist. Pelosi’s predecessor as speaker was Dennis Hastert, who joined lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro in 2008, a few months after resigning from his House seat mid-term. By April 2009, according to the firm’s filings, Hastert was lobbying on the stimulus on behalf of Polybrite, a maker of LED light bulbs. Coincidentally, Hastert, while still a member of Congress, had co-sponsored legislation that effectively forced LED bulbs on consumers. Rep. Hastert even testified in a committee about how great Polybrite was.
Soon Hastert was lobbying on behalf of tobacco companies, shipping giants, telecom firms and energy companies. At the same time, taxpayers were actually paying for Hastert to keep an office at the Capitol, according to Roll Call.
For the first two years of Hastert’s speakership, his Democratic counterpart had been Dick Gephardt. Gephardt left Congress in 2005 after a failed presidential run. Two years later, the same month his former party took over the House of Representatives, he launched the Gephardt Group LLC, a lobbying firm with clients including biofuels makers, clean-coal peddlers and Boeing. Later clients included Goldman Sachs, Anheuser Busch and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The speaker before Hastert was Newt Gingrich. Gingrich never registered as a lobbyist, but that’s a technicality. When Gingrich was hired as a consultant for Freddie Mac (the government-sponsored housing-bubble-inflator that was later bailed out) he worked for Freddie Mac’s lobbying office. Gingrich, while working for the drug lobby petitioned members of Congress to pass the Medicare expansion the drug lobby wanted.
Gingrich had supplanted Tom Foley as speaker of the House. Foley lost reelection the same day his party lost the House majority in 1994. By 2001, Foley was a lobbyist at Akin Gump, representing foreign banks, among other clients.
Foley’s GOP counterpart Bob Michel — the House minority leader throughout the 1980s — was already a lobbyist by then, with clients such as General Electric.
You have to go back to Jim Wright — the Democratic speaker who resigned amid scandal in 1989 — to find a top party leader in the House who didn’t become a lobbyist upon leaving the House.
It’s the same on the Senate side. Bill Frist, the most recent former Senate majority leader on the GOP side, is the least tied to K Street. He merely runs “Frist Capital” which invests in health care companies, and he publicly supported Obamacare, and he petitioned governors to create Obamacare marketplaces in their state.
Democrat Tom Daschle, Harry Reid’s predecessor as Democratic leader, lost reelection in 2004 and then cashed out to K Street lobbying firm Alston & Bird. He spent many years at various K Street firms before registering as an Aetna lobbyist in early 2016. While Daschle was party leader, his wife ran her own lobbying firm.
Daschle’s Republican counterpart was Trent Lott. Lott, you may recall, resigned early — Dec. 20, 2007. That happened to be 11 days before Section 101 of the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007” went into effect. That section barred former senators from lobbying the Senate for two years.
Lott ducked into K Street just under that ethical wire, and he was a registered lobbyist, with his own firm, within two weeks. His clients included AT&T, Delta, Chevron, Northrop Grumman and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The Breaux-Lott Leadership Group, which Lott co-founded with former Democratic Sen. John Breaux, was later bought out by Squire Patton Boggs, which just hired Boehner.
Lott’s predecessor, Bob Dole, is a lobbyist, too. So was Dole’s Democratic counterpart George Mitchell. Dole’s predecessor, Republican Howard Baker was also a lobbyist at the family firm Baker Donelson, where Daschle now works.
Since 1977, then, the only two former Senate floor leaders to not have become lobbyists were financier Bill Frist and Democrat Robert Byrd, who died while still in the Senate.
So Boehner’s move from the speakership to K Street is perfectly normal. And that’s the problem.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
