To hear President Obama, liberal mainstream media outlets and congressional Democratic leaders tell it, Washington is “still” in the grip of evil special interests like Big Oil, Wall Street and the pharmaceutical drug industry. It’s a familiar line, but when the actual numbers for campaign donations by the top 100 special interest donors are toted up, it becomes quite clear which is the biggest one of them all — Big Labor. The union bosses spent more than $500 billion on campaigns between 1989 and 2009, with well over 90 percent of the total going to Democratic presidential and congressional candidates.

That’s more than 10 times as much as was spent by Big Oil during the same period, according to federal campaign finance data compiled by professor Antony Davies of Duquesne University. In fact, Big Labor gave twice as much as the totals for the Big Oil, telecommunications, insurance, pharmaceuticals and real estate industries combined.