Lawmaker to Lobbyist
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

After an exhaustive fact-finding trip to the beach, this column was absolutely delighted to return to find the following news in its inbox.
Former Representative Jennifer Dunn has registered as a lobbyist with DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary US LLP on behalf of the foil-making company Kurz Transfer Products.
Why “delighted”? Perhaps “reassured” is a better word. This column has never met Jennifer Dunn. Indeed, this column has seldom thought much about her at all, and certainly it has no knowledge of or interest in Kurz Transfer Products.
Yet Dunn’s sudden plunge into the world of lobbying is pleasing in a perverse sort of way because it confirms a favorite theme: The fabled Republican Revolution of 1994 is deader than the dodo. Deader than the mastodon. Dead, dead, dead.
Dunn, from Washington state, was one of the revolution’s twinkliest stars. Smart, able, and very good on TV, she won the confidence of the Robespierre of 1994, Newt Gingrich, and became the highest-ranking woman in the congressional leadership. Together they vowed to change forever the way Washington worked. That bubbling swamp of lobbying, special interests, and big-government favoritism was going to be drained once and for good.
A decade later, the swamp still bubbles, oilier than ever, and if anybody dared to drain it today we know what we’d find: dozens of veterans of the Republican Revolution, sniffing for clients.
How this happened – how the crusaders who vowed to limit government power became the professionals who manipulate government power on behalf of paying customers – is a matter of debate. But the fact that it has happened is undeniable. Dunn’s transformation from revolutionary to rent-seeker is just the latest example.
The trend can even be quantified. This month the “consumer interest” group Public Citizen released a report called “Congressional Revolving Doors: The Journey from Congress to K Street.” (“K Street” is shorthand for Washington’s lobbying industry, the way “Bowery” used to be shorthand for alcoholic insanity.)
Registered lobbyists began posting their registration documents on the Internet in 1998, but Public Citizen is the first group to add up the numbers. Here’s what they found.
Since 1998, 112 Republicans left Congress (House or Senate) to pursue another career. More than half – 52 percent – became Washington lobbyists. The percentage of former Republican senators who became lobbyists is an astonishing 66 percent. Not surprising, the percentages for Democratic legislators, who are less valuable to corporate clients, were much lower.
As a case study, the report cited Dunn’s former colleague Bob Livingston of Louisiana, another Gingrich lieutenant, who left Congress for K Street in 1999.
By law, former congressmen are not allowed to lobby for one year after leaving Capitol Hill. But they are allowed to supervise other lobbyists – a loophole roughly the size of a Humvee.
The Livingston Group thus brought in more than $1 million in its first year, though Livingston couldn’t lobby. Then business really took off. Between 1999 and 2004, Livingston’s firm earned almost $40 million haranguing his former colleagues to do the bidding of his clients.
That’s nice work if you can get it, as they used to say – and of course you get it by first winning a congressional seat.
This puts an illuminating gloss on the term “public service,” which congressmen routinely invoke to describe the sacrifices they make to advance the commonweal. Increasingly for Republicans on Capitol Hill, public service is merely a way to get their tickets punched before qualifying for their true vocation – lobbying.
Public Citizen is no friend to Republicans, and the authors of “Congressional Revolving Doors” could be counted on to draw the least flattering inferences from its findings. But any Republican who remembers the false dawn of 1994 – when term limits and the “citizen legislator” were the revolutionary ideals – will look at the numbers with a sinking heart.
Before Democratic readers flatter themselves with notions of superior virtue (Democrats do enough of this already), they should recall that the revolving door through which Republicans pass today was first spun by Democrats during the 40 years they controlled both Capitol Hill and K Street.
Republicans inherited the system and now, with both Congress and the White House safely in GOP hands, they have brought it to crystalline perfection.
Will voters notice? Sleaziness is a tricky political issue. Short of straightforward venality or outright violations of the law – and no one is accusing Livingston, Dunn, or their cashed-in colleagues of criminal acts – it can seldom have a decisive effect on its own.
Attached to larger public grievances, however, the vague odor of easy money and political privilege can be devastating. Recall the Democratic debacle of 1994. It was heralded more than two years earlier, in late 1991, by a minor scandal involving a credit union run for the convenience of House members.
The actual malfeasance was small change. But with a recession looming, aggravated by exploding health-care costs and runaway federal deficits, the corruption served as a symbol of political sclerosis – a political party that had allowed the advancement of special interests to overtake its pursuit of the public good. The Democrats have yet to recover from the calamitous defeat that followed.
Republicans in Washington might want to ponder this history, when they get back from their own fact-finding trips to the beach.
Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.