Curb speaking fees? - congressional speaking fees - column

National Review, July 14, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE UPROAR about congressmen and speaking fees is difficult to understand. That it should focus on the saleability of our legislators is discouraging, as also it is discouraging that our legislators are in the position they are to do financial favors for individual industries. In a well-run world, there wouldn't really be any point in trying to bribe a legislator because there wouldn't be anything he could do for you.

USA Today published on Thursday, May 25, a list of senators and congressmen, indicating how much each gave to charity from his speaking fees, and what that came to as a percentage of his speaking income. For instance, Congressman Gallo of New Jersey gave 100 per cent of his $4,600 speaking income to charity, as did Senators Boschwitz ($15,900), McCain ($33,635), and Metzenbaum ($100). By contrast, Senators Domenici and Garn and Leahy and Packwood gave none of their income from speaking to charity-but then none earned more than $100. It isn't easy to see how you can bribe Senator Metzenbaum for $100, but if it were possible to alter his vote, I would pay him $200, cash, to vote other than the way he is inclined to vote, any day, on any issue.

Now it isn't only trivial figures we are dealing with. Dan Rostenkowski is the head of the Ways and Means Committee, which is the most important in Congress affecting taxes, and he reported an income last year for appearances of $222,500, which is a considerable income. We must assume that the people who paid to hear him were eager to influence him. But that is the business of lobbyists, whether lobbies arguing in favor of abortion rights, or lobbies in favor of textile tariffs. Their job is to attract the attention of legislators to hear their arguments, and the subtle question arises-are such lobbies putatively engaged in bribing a congressman by paying him a substantial lecture fee?

An issue was made of the question in the race last year in which Joseph Lieberman successfully challenged Senator Lowell Weicker. Lieberman made heavy weather over Weicker's having missed a number of votes because he was out of town speaking. Now the presumption is reasonably indulged that anyone who paid money to hear Lowell Weicker speak had in mind getting him to vote for something. On the other hand, Mr. Lieberman failed to take into account the benefit to the public interest by Mr. Weicker's absence from the roll call in the Senate.

What seems to upset the Manichaean notion that our legislators are for sale is the sums of money involved. The highest of the lot is the Tobacco Institute, which paid out a total of $104,000 to congressmen. That simply isn't very much money, when you think in terms of 535 legislators, General Electric paid $22,000-what is GE going to get for $22,000? They'd have done better to send an electric toaster to every senator, surely.

The kind of real graft that goes on is in two forms. One is contributions to election campaigns, from which, one notes in passing, Democrats are the prime beneficiaries. There are miscellaneous laws governing corporate giving, but there are ways to circumvent these laws, and PAC money goes in great quantities to congressmenwhich is a reason why the incumbents win 98 per cent of the time. It is an affront on representative government that election to the House these days is something on the order of a tenured appointment.

BUT YOU GET BACK to the basic question, which is that of government spending. Professor Milton Friedman said a while ago that he wouldn't care if the deficit were equal to 100 per cent of the budget-if the budget were as low as budgets ought to be. Why should the Tobacco Institute be interested in legislation? Because it wants a continuation of high subsidies which it ought never to have had in the first instance. And this isn't a point made at the expense of nicotine: farmers growing corn and wheat shouldn't have subsidies, even as manufacturers shouldn't have tariffs. Congress is increasingly thought of as primarily an instrument of the redistribution of wealth. If Congress smiles on wheat, then the taxpayers send their money to farmers. If they smile on Detroit, then quotas are laid down to prohibit taxpayers from buying the incremental automobile made in Japan.

The rule of law had no such idea in mind for the well-governed republic. A government can and on occasion ought to act as the final agent for helping the truly destitute-but only after lower echelons of government have reached the point of exhaustion. Governments should pass basic laws, which have nothing to do with the redistribution of wealth. It would be worth it to pay our legislators much more than they earn from public speaking to persuade them to read, oh, The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek.