Congress makes the mafia look tame

A very reveling and believable book, written in 2013 by Peter Schweizer who does a very convincing job of presenting a very “out-of-the-box” analysis on how our elected politicians and their staff extract your money, buy votes and line their own pockets; instead of doing what they were sent to congress to do.  Conventional wisdom had it just the opposite with all the special interests buying the politicians votes on pet legislation with campaign contributions. After reading this book you will see how very wrong that concept was.

The concept that Schweizer presents to us is that it is the politicians themselves that have concocted a legislative system designed not to produce good and beneficial laws but to use the legislative process to extort money from the private sector. The grid lock and what we think of as a dysfunctional system is intentional, it’s the means that the leaders in congress use to generate a cash flow of contribution to their various campaigns and to their personal accounts.

“It’s one of the oldest and most effective forms of extortion: the protection racket,” he writes in one chapter. “Pay me money and I will promise not to make your life miserable. Fail to pay and bad things will happen to you.” This sounds like the syndicated crime “protection” game that has been the “bread and butter” of organized crime for centuries, but that “the Permanent Political Class in Washington now plays the protection racket, too. Failure to pay will not get you killed—but it could kill your business.”

Schweizer describes various maneuvers throughout his book sighting multiple examples to make his case that politicians engage in a form of legal extortion (they make the laws after all) to extract campaign contributions from business or other special interests. He identifies the colorful terms he uncovered that the politicians use for these maneuvers, such as “toll-booth” requirements, “milker bills,” “double-milker bills,” and “juicer bills.”

Each of these methods is designed for one purpose only to extort money from some group or industry.  The methods that the politicians use take many forms but two are easy to explain. The first involves past legislation such as Medicare and Medicaid where doctors are paid a certain amount for a particular service that they provide to their patents. The reimbursement over time becomes too low to provide the service so during budget negotiations the various committees in congress hold “Fund Raisers” for the various lobbyists representing doctors for the purpose of getting contributions so they can fight the opposition to raising the fees. Once they collect what they need they put in a one year fix so they can use the same ploy the next year.

The other method is to introduce a piece of legislation in a committee for some purpose, the purpose is not important but it will be designed to adversely affect some industry.   The members of the committee will then hold “Fund Raisers” where they invite that industries lobbyists and they tell them they need contribution to stop the legislation.  Even if the lobbyist knows they are being played, just like in the mafia protection racket, what choice do they have but to go along.  However, unlike the protection racket this is much worse as it is perfectly legal.

Although at first it’s hard to believe that this process could not be true, and what I just described is only the tip of the iceberg, but it all makes perfect sense when you think about it. The way the process in congress works would make no sense if what is described in this book were not true.

This book is a must read if you are interested in how and why congress actually works and it goes a long way to explaining why some bills are thousands of pages long. But don’t take my word buy the book and find out for yourself.