Congress needs ban on lobbyists’ gifts

By JOHN CRANGLE

Guest columnist

On March 29 the U.S. Senate passed a fake lobbyists’ reform bill, allowing lobbyists and special interests to continue to give corrupt gifts and campaign contributions to members of Congress. The bill does nothing to stop the millions of dollars that lobbyists raise and donate to congressional candidates. The bill has no effective enforcement provisions.

Congress and the president need to follow the good example of the 1991 South Carolina Ethics Act to clean up the current lobbying scandal triggered by Jack Abramoff in Washington. There is only one way to deal with lobbyists who corrupt members of Congress with so-called gifts and campaign donations — a flat ban identical to that found in our Ethics Act passed by the General Assembly in 1991.

In fact, our Legislature is on record for a congressional flat ban. The General Assembly, at the request of Common Cause/South Carolina and with the leadership of Speaker David Wilkins, several years ago passed a concurrent resolution asking Congress to follow South Carolina’s example and ban lobbyists from giving gifts and campaign money to federal candidates and officials.

In response to the Operation Lost Trust scandal in 1990, which exposed massive lobbyist bribery in the General Assembly, the South Carolina House and Senate concluded that only a drastic remedy could match the disease of out-of-control lobbyists who were giving state legislators unlimited amounts of money for their campaigns and personal uses as well as unregulated free trips, free liquor and free merchandise.

At the time the scandal broke, there were those in the Legislature who tried to minimize the embarrassment by saying that only a few bad apples were to blame. The argument was that little reform was really needed. However, when the federal grand jury indicted 10 percent of the Legislature, and more than two dozen people, for bribery and other crimes, it became obvious that the unregulated and unlimited lobbying and campaign finance systems in South Carolina were not only out of control but inherently corrupt. An apple tree that produced so many bad apples needed to be cut down completely.

The General Assembly, acting on an ethics bill introduced by the late Sens. Marshall Williams and Ed Saleeby, took drastic action by nearly unanimous vote in 1991. The Ethics Act banned lobbyists from giving anything of value to state legislators and executive branch officials. The act allowed no free gifts, no free trips, no golf clubs, no free liquor, no free food and no campaign contributions. Since then, there have been no scandals involving South Carolina lobbyists bribing state officials.

Some cancers in politics and government are so virulent and evil that only the most radical surgery can cure them. Lobbyists’ gifts and campaign contributions to members of Congress are clearly such a disease.

The timid regulative proposals now being offered in Washington, pretending to reform corruption, prescribe aspirin tablets for cancer. Proposals to merely limit or disclose the amount of lobbyist freebies to senators and representatives will never work. Fake reform bills that still allow lobbyists to give campaign contributions, host fund-raisers and round up campaign money from their clients for officials in Congress would leave untouched the malignant tumors of corrupt payoffs and shakedowns to eat away forever.

Mr. Crangle is the executive director of Common Cause/South Carolina.