When Senate Democrats chose their new leader, they selected the favorite senator of K Street and Wall Street, Chuck Schumer, an unparalleled expert at blending policymaking and fundraising.
Schumer’s new job, Senate Minority Leader, will mostly involve holding together the Democratic majority to filibuster GOP measures in the Senate, along with raising money to stave off further GOP Senate gains in 2018.
Campaign finance data show Schumer as the favorite Senator, in either party, of lobbyists, bankers, and hedge funders.
Schumer raised more from lobbyists than any U.S. Senator or senate candidate, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. (This excludes Marco Rubio’s presidential fundraising.)
Schumer’s also the top Senate recipient of money ($1.97 million) this election from Wall Street. Schumer was number one among hedge funds and private equity.
Schumer has more former staffers in CRP’s revolving-door database than any member of the House and 98 other Senators. Only Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has more.
Schumer’s fundraising from lobbyists, bankers, and hedge funders has always been tied to his policymaking in their favor. Episodes throughout his career show how shrewdly Schumer mixes policy and campaign cash.
In Schumer’s first days in the Senate majority in 2007, wile serving as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he hosted a dinner with the wealthiest hedge fund and private equity moguls. His message to them, in the words of the New York Times, “If you want Washington to work with you, you had better work better with one another.”
Translated: You guys need to lobby more and give more to politicians. The industry responded. From $6.3 million in the previous election, executives, employees, partners, and PACs from the industry tripled their giving to $21.1 million the next election, with two-thirds going to Democrats. Hedge fund lobbying exploded at the same time: from less than $1 million the previous year to nearly $7 million the next year.
Some of that money basically came right back to Schumer. He deployed his “banking person” (as he described her) to K Street firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, and Schreck, where she immediately attracted hedge-fund lobbying clients. Then she became a bundler for Schumer. At least four hedge-fund lobbyists were Schumer bundlers that election.
The Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008 provided Schumer with a perfect opportunity to raise money from Wall Street. Schumer was an early champion of a massive Wall Street bailout, and he spent one weekend in September helping craft the $700 billion-dollar deal.
The Times reported: “The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives … he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.”
Again, it worked: “The next week,” the Times reported, “executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.”
To recap: Schumer advocated a bailout, crafted a bailout, hustled to raise money from investors he was bailing out, and then pocketed big donations from the investors he was bailing out.
It’s not all bankers and hedge-fund billionaires for Schumer, though. The Center for Responsive Politics in 2014 noted that Schumer, who helped kill caffeinated alcoholic beverages, was a top recipient of campaign cash from the large breweries at risk of losing money to the upstarts who sold such concoctions.
Also in 2014, Schumer saw a fundraising opportunity in a fight over corporate welfare. Conservative Republicans were fighting to kill the Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes U.S. exporters and their foreign partners. Schumer led a Democratic “united front in support of the bank,” Politico reported, “seizing on an opening to appeal to the hearts and wallets of the business community ahead of the November elections.”
This is Schumer’s method: blend policy fights with fundraising to pry big business and K Street away from Republicans and bankroll Democratic efforts. He’s done this well from secondary roles in the party, as when he headed the DSCC. Now that he’s the party’s leader, we can expect a Democratic Party more explicitly grounded in K Street and Wall Street.
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.
