Washington went into one of its periodic hysterias recently when it was reported that the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that had been gouging the public was the daughter of a U.S. senator. Not that there is anything wrong with that. No laws broken and it was just business, more or less, as usual.
Still . . . the thing was unseemly. Or must have been, otherwise it wouldn’t have been at the top of the news for three or four days before other things came along to distract the attention of the herd. One of the elements that made the story attractive was the fact that the company had lobbied hard to make its signature product—the EpiPen—something that schools all over the country would have to keep on hand.
The EpiPen is a standard, and standby, emergency treatment for people experiencing severe allergic reaction to, among other things, bee stings and in danger of dying from anaphylactic shock. The device saves lives, which is, manifestly, a good thing. Not so good, however, is the fact that the company that makes the EpiPen—Mylan, it is called—enjoys a kind of Washington-enforced monopoly, thanks to the FDA’s failure to approve competing devices (the drug itself is generic; the spring-loaded needle in the “pen” that injects it is a device requiring FDA approval). The company spent some $4 million lobbying Congress on something called the “School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act.” And, finally, with its monopoly secure, the company raised the price of the product by some 400 percent.
The company’s CEO, as it happens, is Heather Bresch, daughter of Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Both still have their jobs and don’t appear in danger of losing them any time soon. The family will have interesting things to talk about when it gathers for Thanksgiving.
The EpiPen story faded, but then two similar stories appeared over the last few days. (Interesting how these things so often seem to come in threes.)
One of these stories involves former senator and current secretary of state John Kerry and his daughter, Dr. Vanessa Kerry. Seems that she set up a nonprofit foundation that, as reported in the Daily Caller, received “more than $9 million of Department of State money . . . funneled through the Peace Corps.”
The Peace Corps! Is nothing, one thinks, still pure and inviolate? And, even if the whole thing is on the up-and-up, one wonders why the Peace Corps needs to serve as a conduit for public money distributed to a private foundation? Isn’t the corps itself supposed to be doing the good works and not farming them out to foundations run by heiresses who happen to be offspring of men who went from the Senate to running the State Department, which, if you haven’t noticed, can’t seem to get out of its own way or dodge all those oncoming nonprofit foundations barreling down on it?
State spokesman John Kirby, who has been busy on the Clinton Foundation front these last few weeks, responded to the Daily Caller, saying, “there is absolutely no conflict of interest here. Secretary Kerry played no role in this decision-making while in the Senate or subsequently while at the State Department.”
Take him at his word, and you more or less have to. But not because the thing is so clear cut as Kirby’s statement makes it appear, but for exactly the opposite reason. The path traveled by that $9 million is absolutely tortuous. Just for instance, from the minutes of one meeting, we get this:
And then we learn, “Officials in that meeting also assured Kerry that she would not have to compete with other groups for Department of State funds.”
All this while her father was “chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which oversees both the Department of State and the Peace Corps.”
There may be no scandal here. Just business as it is done in Washington these days.
And there is no business anywhere that doesn’t need to court Washington and stroke those whose hands are on the levers of power. And who better to soften up a senator than his daughter?
Which is, more or less, the question asked by a nonprofit online news operation called Vermont Digger. The Digger finds it interesting that the daughter of Vermont’s senator, Patrick Leahy (he is the less famous but more powerful one), is a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America.
Leahy has been in the Senate longer than anyone, so it is safe to say that he knows his way around. And while he is in his seventies, he has a kind of youthful fascination with the movies. He has done several cameos in the Batman films. And in the time that his daughter has been a lobbyist for Hollywood, he has also, says the Digger, “received more than $400,000 in support from the entertainment industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”
Leahy’s daughter, Alicia Leahy Jackson, declined an interview with the Digger. However, her employer issued a statement asserting that, “as a matter of policy, and consistent with Senate rules, Alicia does not, has not and will not lobby Sen. Leahy’s office, staff, or the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
And if that isn’t good enough for you, there is this, from the senator himself: “She is an absolute straight arrow on anything to do with ethics. I think she would quit before she would ever seek to influence me.”
But what about that old “appearance of impropriety” business we used to talk about so earnestly? What if you are a colleague who has been lobbied by Mrs. Jackson on some issue and you haven’t been willing to play ball? No tickets to the next Batman premiere for you. And, perhaps, worse.
Among the many distressing trends in American public life is the one toward a kind of dynastic politics. “Public service,” as it was once called without a smirk, is more and more a sort of family business through which one networks and advances and makes a pile, or at least a good living. And it can be done without the usual dealmaking and favor-swapping and arm-twisting when you can count on Dad.
Most fathers would do just about anything for their daughters. Ask Senator Lear.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
