Mick Mulvaney, one of President Trump’s close and important advisers, is in hot water for comments he made this week to the banking lobby. As is usual when reporting on the Trump administration, major media outlets distorted Mulvaney’s words to cast his approach to lobbyists, donors, and access as extraordinarily corrupt.
Mulvaney, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told the 1,300-member American Bankers Association that when he was a member of Congress he created a “hierarchy” of access among people who wanted to talk to him.
At the top were his constituents. They always got meetings, no matter what. Immediately beneath them were lobbyists who contributed to his election campaigns, who sometimes got a meeting. At the bottom were lobbyists who did not contribute. They never got meetings.
Reports of the speech, notably in the New York Times, did not mention the constituents until later in the story, but put the paying and nonpaying lobbyists right up top. The initial impression created was that Mulvaney made a binary distinction in which contributors sometimes got time and noncontributors were left out in the cold. Pay for play, ugly, bad.
But the hierarchy looks so bad because the nonpayers who actually always got time with the congressman were not mentioned in the report until after the bad first impression had been thoroughly created. Referring to them in passing after six paragraphs makes it possible to deny bias, but not plausibly. In truth, gerrymandering the hierarchy for news impact stinks.
So the New York Times doctored the facts to make a Trump official look bad. So far, so normal.
But just because Mulvaney’s hierarchy was not reported honestly does not mean it should not cause concern. His comments reflected not egregious and particular corruption, but the perfectly ordinary corruption that is standard operating procedure in Washington.
Mulvaney admitted that campaign contributions buy access to policymakers, as everyone knows. He underscored that politicians and government want to be lobbied, and K Street is often more about business influencing the government than the other way around.
Now, to be fair, lobbying is covered by the First Amendment’s protection of petitioning. It’s a right. It is also true that law made without input from the people it affects is likely to be clumsy and damaging, and could also be said to be undemocratic. But those truths, taken to an extreme, have created what Trump calls, and everyone else recognizes as, a swamp.
Every night, Washington hotel ballrooms are filled with industry lobbies hosting their annual dinner as part of “lobby week.” Trade groups headquartered in Washington fly in member companies for a couple of days of lobbying and a speech from a federal official who has the power to subsidize them and regulate them.
No one pretends that the lobbyists are there uniformly or primarily to improve a law. They are there to boost their bottom lines, to carve out exceptions that help them, to seek rent, making themselves clients of the federal government and, in turn, making the federal government their client, as much as they can.
Mulvaney admitted the central truth about lobbyist donations, missed by both those who exaggerate the corruption (“contributions are bribes”) and those who deny the corruption (“companies fund congressmen they happen to agree with”). Campaign contributions don’t typically buy votes, but they do help buy access.
Bigger than the cash-for-access problem, though, Mulvaney revealed that politicians and policymakers love being lobbied. The bankers association, one of Washington’s largest lobby groups, had brought small businessmen into town, and Mulvaney was there to tell them to lobby more. The message, invest in Washington, is one that bankers and businessmen hear constantly from lobbyists and politicians who run Washington.
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., the largest recipient of banker money this election cycle, spoke last April to subsidy-seeking bankers and manufacturers assembled at the Export-Import Bank Annual Conference and told them to lobby harder for subsidies.
Retired Republican House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had a similar message for bankers in 2010, imploring them to work Capitol Hill. He famously instructed them not to take guff from “little punk staffers.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, now the Democratic leader in the Senate, met hedge funds in 2007 to tell them to start lobbying more and increase their political giving.
The tech industry, from Microsoft to Apple to Facebook, has received this same demand from Washington that they play ball — moneyball.
More lobbying means more attention for lawmakers. It means more jobs for lawmakers’ friends and for lawmakers themselves once they leave office. It means more volunteer fundraisers, known as “bundlers.” What they’re bundling is money.
How do you measure the impact that all this lobbying and sluicing money has had? Here’s one way. The three richest counties in America are within commuting distance of the Capitol.
Mulvaney was not remotely unusual in making his recent plea. It was a call to help fill the swamp, not drain it. Sadly, there’s nothing extraordinary about Mulvaney doing this. It’s how business is done here.
