Secrecy as a Spoil of Victory

NY Times
Jan. 25, 2006

Never mind the golf junkets and poolside seminars. One of the rawest displays of lobbyists' power in the Capitol occurred beyond the sight of the public last month, when Republican Congressional negotiators tweaked a budget-cutting bill in order to provide the health insurance industry with a $22 billion windfall. The circumstance of this victory by insurance lobbyists is particularly relevant now that the same Congressional leaders are feverishly vowing to enact lobbying reform. The bill change, dearly sought by the H.M.O. industry, was written by House and Senate lawmakers and staff members in closed-door, Republican-only bargaining sessions - one of the "conference committees" for settling differences in final legislation that are themselves becoming part of the Capitol's influence-peddling scandal.

The current version of this deal-setting routine entirely excludes Democratic lawmakers, who are in the minority but still represent significant numbers of Americans. Rather, the lobbyists who successfully worked for a whopping fix in the Medicare reimbursement formula were far more clued in by cooperative Republicans. This is business as usual in Congress; no one is promising hearings about secretive behavior, skulking about in a black hat or hiring defense lawyers.

The bill change might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was doing its job in parsing out the last-minute gutting of a formula that was originally intended to produce a $26 billion savings for taxpayers across 10 years. Instead, the final bargainers reduced the projected savings to $4 billion and handed the H.M.O.'s a $22 billion gift by protecting the inflated reimbursements they currently reap through Medicare.

Republican lawmakers insist that nothing nefarious was transacted, and that a minor formula change was grossly miscalculated in the budget office report. It's nice to see the lawmakers coming out of the shadows, if only to make excuses. But their credibility problem lies in the deep secrecy and partisanship that shroud the conference committees.

If the tables were reversed, Democrats might indulge the same hegemony. But right now, some are proposing that the forthcoming attempt at lobbying reform include a rules change to at least open the conference committees to the public and allow minority party lawmakers votes in committee on the final wording of legislation. It remains to be seen whether such an advance in participatory democracy can survive the inevitable assault by dissatisfied lobbyists and their allied incumbents.