The crime with which federal prosecutors have charged former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., is an obscure, dubious federal banking law that could just as easily be used to go after innocent people.
That is not to say Hastert is innocent. If the the stories that have leaked in the media are true, the true sin Hastert committed is unspeakable, but possibly unprosecutable.
There is one aspect of the Hastert scandal, however, that reflects a problem that is more troubling than “structuring” bank withdrawals, but more easily repaired than whatever Hastert might have done many decades ago. That problem boils down to one question: How in the world could a school-teacher-turned lawmaker afford to pay, reportedly, $3.5 million in hush money?
Hastert had been a high school teacher, a wrestling coach and a state legislator when he was elected to Congress in 1986. Over the next three decades, he became very rich by wielding his power — both while in office and after leaving office. In other words, Hastert monetized his public service into a lucrative lobbying career — largely by increasing government.
One telling episode begins in May 2007. Hastert at that time was a chief cosponsor of the “light bulb ban,” the law that effectively outlawed the traditional incandescent bulb, forcing consumers to buy more expensive fluorescent bulbs and LEDs. Hastert testified in committee that “Polybrite International, a company based in Illinois, makes Light Emitting Diode light bulbs that look and feel the same as bulbs we put in our homes…These bulbs are 100 percent green,” he testified, continuing to lavish praise on Polybrite.
A few months later, in late 2007 the light bulb ban became law. Around the same time, Hastert resigned from Congress more than a year early.
Three months later, in March 2008, Hastert joined Polybrite “as a strategic advisor,” according to a company press release. A year later, after he had joined K Street lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro, Hastert officially registered as a lobbyist for Polybrite — this was nine months earlier than he could have begun lobbying, had he served out his full term.
Hastert’s first lobbying work for Polybrite, according to lobbying filings, was to “monitor legislative and administrative action related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.” In other words, it was his job to try to get stimulus money for Polybrite.
Hastert kept up the “green” lobbying, interspersed with lobbying on behalf of coal giant Peabody. Hastert’s firm, Dickstein Shapiro, also brought in more than $500,000 in 2011 through 2013 from Covanta Energy, which tried to turn waste into energy.
Hastert and his Dickstein Shapiro colleagues lobbied on legislation such as the “Waste-to-Energy Technology Act of 2011,” the “American Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit Extension Act of 2011,” and the “Climate Protection Act of 2013.”
Ethanol subsidies were another Hastert special. In the first three months of 2015, the ethanol industry lobby group, Fuels America, paid Dickstein Shapiro $60,000 for ethanol-mandate lobbying by Hastert and another lobbyist.
All the House members Hastert had rewarded with committee assignments, earmarks and co-sponsorships were now taking phone calls from their former commander on behalf of green-tinted subsidy sucklers. This is part of how Washington turned a school teacher into a millionaire.
But Hastert was wielding his power to enrich himself even while he was in office, it seems. He went from being a modest landowner in 1987 when he entered Congress to a multimillionaire when he left.
How did he work that? As two Washington Post reporters tell it, it was through earmarking money to drive up the value of land he had secretly invested in along with close political allies.
In short, Hastert, along with partners who were Illinois GOP operatives, gobbled up 138 acres of farmland near Plano, Ill. Then Hastert earmarked $207 million to build a highway — the “Prairie Parkway” — which then drove up the value of the land. Four months later, “Hastert’s trust sold the land to a real estate developer,” the Post reporters wrote. “Hastert’s share of the proceeds was worth more than $3 million…”
In both his revolving door lobbying and his self-enriching land deals, Hastert embodied what ails Washington, and what has so much of the country so sick with Washington. In short, Hastert increased government’s role in industry, and then got rich guiding that role to profit the special interests that paid him.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
