Former Rep. Barbara Comstock has returned to K Street. The Virginia Republican who lost her seat last cycle has joined the lobbying shop of Baker Donelson as a senior adviser.
“I am excited to join Baker Donelson,” Comstock said in a statement, “and bring my decades of policy experience in the legislative, administrative, and private sector arenas, as well as a lifetime of relationships, to provide strategic guidance on building winning coalitions and strategies.”
Comstock will put that experience to work advising individuals hauled before the House Oversight Committee, where she once served as chief counsel. On the other side of things, she will be coaching industry and individuals before their “high-stakes oversight hearings.”
Comstock will also guide businesses through the legislative process. A sort of special-interest sherpa, she will “be an advocate for the business community” and continue on her work past work of passing “legislation that created jobs and advanced business priorities.”
She has experience as a lobbyist. After working on the George W. Bush campaign and after working on the legal defense of former White House adviser Scooter Libby, Comstock had signed on as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America to lobby the administration.
And in Congress, the two-term member helped produce her share of congressional corporate welfare. When fiscal conservatives went to war against the Export-Import Bank, Comstock was there to defend the right of the institution to subsidize business, picking winners and losers from among the buyers of American exports. She voted to reauthorize the bank because it bankrolled industry in her wealthy congressional district.
“It is estimated that between 2007 and 2015,” Comstock bragged in a press release, that “the Export-Import Bank financed or insured $2 billion of exports for 125 companies within the Commonwealth.”
Comstock also pushed for renewable fuels legislation which, as the Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions noted, would “create good Virginia jobs.” At a time when then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., regularly condemned government picking winners and losers, Comstock was looking out for a favored few industries in her own backyard. Of course, she was not and is not alone in this practice.
All of this makes Comstock a good hire for a lobbying firm. She has gone back to the swamp.
