DeLay not DeOnly One

The front-page of the Wall Street Journal screams something everybody has always know: Congress is corrupt.

One thing in particular stood out:

"Members of Congress have the potential to legislate you out of business, so we want them to have as much information about local broadcasting as possible," says Dennis Wharton, spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters. The broadcasters will host seven lawmakers at their annual convention next week in Las Vegas.

The increase in business-sponsored travel is also an unintended consequence of the 2002 law changing campaign-finance rules. When enacted, the law banned individuals, corporations and interest groups from donating more than $25,000 to the Republican or Democratic national parties.

That closed "a huge point of entry" for corporations seeking to win over politicians, says Mark Glaze, director of government ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group. "It's natural to expect that some of those interests would be looking for another way to curry favor with lawmakers. Travel and associated perks are one way to do that."

This is why any attempt to end corruption by any means other than limiting government is doomed to fail. As long as Congress has the power to shut your business down, you will do pretty much anything to change their mind. While we'd like to believe that the only reason companies lobby government is for handouts, often times they do so because ignoring them is done at their peril. For more on this, see the excellent article that also ran on the front-page of the WSJ earlier this week:

Kris Engskov, head of Starbucks Corp.'s fledgling lobbying effort, won his first real victory last October: a tax break worth millions to the company. His boss had mixed emotions.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz was glad to win the tax break, but he was disturbed by a wave of editorials and news reports labeling his hip and fast-growing company a money-grubbing special interest and referring to the provision in the 2004 tax bill as the "Starbucks footnote." Mr. Schultz recalls promptly tracking down Mr. Engskov at the company's headquarters and, waving some of the articles, pressing him for an explanation. "Tell me about this," he said.

Mr. Schultz's discomfort offers a glimpse at the uneasy transition a group of cutting-edge entrepreneurs of the 1990s face as they take their first steps into Capitol Hill lobbying. They saw explosive growth in recent years but now realize the road to future prosperity runs through Washington.