Embedded Lobbyists....to me this is criminal!

The whole GOP is a bunch of crooks. Yes, I said crooks, guided by the 2 biggest crooks of all.....Bush and Cheney. It's going to take a decade or more just to undo all the terrible and unjust things they have done so far. I'm glad that the American people are starting to wake up to what's going on, albeit a little late. The thing that really gets me is this....they (the GOP) are getting bolder and bolder in what they are doing. The GOP thugs think they can get away with it all, so why hide it? Where are these so-called Christians in all this? Thou shalt not steal, isn't that one of the 10 Commandments? It was the last time I looked. So where are these Religious Right Christians? I'll tell you....some of them are right there participating in all this immoral and possibly illegal activity. Christians helping Christians....right? I guess that's the way they look at it.

It's time to take America back!! Howard.....let's get to work!

Editorial
June 17, 2005
Lobbying From Within

It was no surprise to learn that Philip Cooney, who resigned last week as chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, will soon take a job at Exxon Mobil. His yeoman work in fighting against limits on greenhouse gas emissions, first as a lawyer for the oil industry's main lobbying group and then at the White House, where he sanitized reports to play down the link between emissions and global warming, clearly earned the reward of a cushy job with Exxon, a leading opponent of curbs on emissions.

Yet it is surely a cause for dismay that the Bush administration has seen fit to embed so many former lobbyists in key policy or regulatory jobs where they can carry out their industry's agenda from within. Whereas the word lobbyist once connoted those who hung around in lobbies to buttonhole powerful politicians when they emerged from the inner sanctums, these modern-day lobbyists occupy the inner sanctums themselves.

Take William Myers III, another former lobbyist who is now being promoted for a high-level judicial post by President Bush. Mr. Myers, a longtime lobbyist for the mining and cattle industries, served as the top lawyer at the Interior Department in Mr. Bush's first administration. In that job, he issued an opinion opening Indian lands to mining degradation and was criticized by his hometown newspaper for acting as an apologist for the cattle industry. Now he has been rewarded with the president's nomination for a seat on a federal appeals court that has a major voice in environmental law in Western states.

Still deeply entrenched is Mark Rey, the under secretary for natural resources and environment in the Agriculture Department, a longtime lobbyist for forest-related industries who has used his post to weaken protections for the national forests. In the past four years, the administration has undercut agreements to preserve old-growth trees and wildlife in major West Coast forests, overturned a roadless rule protecting the most remote areas of forests and announced an overhaul of planning rules governing all national forests. Based on the Myers precedent, it looks as if Mr. Rey may be campaigning for a Supreme Court nomination.

A slightly different, but equally worrisome, kind of conflict emerged last week when the Justice Department prematurely scuttled much of its own case in the final rounds of a civil racketeering trial against the tobacco industry. The decision to reduce the amount of money demanded of the industry from an expected $130 billion to a mere $10 billion was made by Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum Jr. over the strenuous objections of the career lawyers running the case.

Mr. McCallum, a close friend of President Bush from their days as Skull & Bones members at Yale, had not been a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, but he was a partner in a law firm that did legal work for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and his own legal work included medical malpractice defense, among other specialties. As Eric Lichtblau showed in yesterday's Times, the career lawyers complained in a memo that Mr. McCallum had made a preliminary decision without even reviewing their evidence. They suggested that the department's cave-in stemmed from "sticker shock" over the amount the industry might have to pay.

The "revolving door" in which people shuttle back and forth between jobs in government and industry is a sad fixture of Washington life. There are rules, albeit weak ones, that seek to limit what government officials can do when they first return to the private sector. But the public has little protection against the machinations of lobbyists who are invited into government and given the levers of power. In an administration that saw fit to put Vice President Dick Cheney, a former oil industry executive, in charge of drafting its closed-door energy policy, there is little prospect for reining in the special interests. The public will be the loser.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company