Now that Jack Abramoff has plead guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the federal corruption probe, which may involve as many as two dozen members of Congress and congressional staffers, the National Review Online reports that Republicans have decided to "get ahead of" the Abramoff story by proposing lobbying reform. And who has Bill Frist put in charge of lobbying reform? Mr. "K Street Project" himself, Rick Santorum.
If you're still not familiar with the K Street Project, it was conceived of by Tom Delay and is run by Rick Santorum with the help of people like Grover Norquist and lobbyists like, drum roll please... JACK ABRAMOFF. The main goal of the K Street Project is to use the power of Republican control of Congress and the White House to convince lobbying firms to hire Republicans, often former congressional staff members, for positions of power. The K Street Project has been extremely successful in accomplishing that goal.
Once those Republicans took over control of the lobbying firms, where do you think their clients' political donations went? Recently, Santorum told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he considered the K Street Project "a good government thing."
So now the GOP wants to put the man who has spent years building the Republican lobbying machine, in conjunction with Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff, in charge of cleaning up the lobbying industry. We'd call it ironic, but it seems to be just plain moronic.
Here's an excerpt from the NRO:
Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to "get ahead of" the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership "decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session," and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online.
Santorum's efforts will be apart from the work of Senator John McCain, who has already introduced a proposal for lobbying reform.
