It was a nice story in two parts. In the morning, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar denounced all the tech lobbyists. In the afternoon, Klobuchar’s tech staffer cashed out to become an Apple lobbyist.
But the story of this cash-out goes back a lot further, and it reveals that lawmakers don’t hate lobbyists — they love them. A decade ago, lawmakers and their friends in the Beltway media came after Apple. The crime: not lobbying enough.
Why would representatives and senators want more lobbying? Because more lobbying means bundling donations and more hiring up staffers and ex-lawmakers as lobbyists. Get more money flowing through the system, and that’s a bigger pie for the political insiders.
During the Obama years, Politico and Senate Democrats came after Apple for insufficient dedication to playing the Washington game.
Politico warned in 2010 that Apple’s “low-wattage approach in Washington is becoming more glaring to policymakers.”
Politico warned in 2012: “The company’s attitude toward D.C. — described by critics as ‘don’t bother us’ — has left it without many inside-the-Beltway friends.”
The 2012 Politico piece quoted a Judiciary Committee staffer-turned-lobbyist, Jeff Miller: “There have been other tech companies who chose not to engage in Washington, and for the most part, that strategy did not benefit them.”
Apple didn’t even have a political action committee, and it spent a fraction on lobbying of what Google spent. A year later, Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, dragged Apple before the Judiciary Committee, complaining about the company’s low taxes. The real problem was the company’s low political spending.
So Apple reacted.
As I wrote in 2015: “In September 2013, longtime top lobbyist Cathy Novelli left Apple to join the Obama State Department. Apple replaced Novelli with Amber Cottle, hired from the very nexus of the K Street-Capitol Hill revolving door: the office of former Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., then-chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee.
Apple’s other big Beltway get was hiring former President Barack Obama’s EPA director, Lisa Jackson, to be its corporate “vice president of environmental initiatives.”
Apple has more than quadrupled its lobbying since 2010, from $1.6 million to $6.5 million, and the threats from Congress are getting bigger. In this setting, Klobuchar has invoked antitrust law to go after the Apple Store.
You’ll never guess what happened next.
“April Jones is joining Apple as a senior government affairs policy counsel, according to an email obtained by Emily on Tuesday night,” Politico reported. “She was most recently deputy legislative director and counsel for Klobuchar on tech and telecom issues.”
This news broke hours after Klobuchar seemed to complain about how many lobbyists Big Tech had hired.
Lawmakers like to complain about all the lobbying, but they love it. And they know that more promises of subsidies and more threats of regulation bring all the lobbyists to the yard.
