The Buying Of Congress. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1998 by Peter Overby

THE BUYING OF CONGRESS by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity New York, Avon Books, $25

When Kenneth Starr sent his report to Congress this summer, President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only one he deemed noteworthy.

In what Starr labeled the "President's Day [February 19] Break-up," the intern was worried about the relationship. She went, uninvited, to the Oval Office. The president tried to call it quits. She argued; he insisted. As she left, she later told the grand jury, Clinton was on the phone with "a sugar grower in Florida whose name, according to Ms. Lewinsky, was something like `Fanuli.'" Starr tells us it was Alfonso Fanjul, of the sugar-baron Fanjuls of Palm Beach, and that Clinton and Fanjul talked for 22 minutes. Alfie Fanjul and his brother, Jose, have a soft-money tag team: Alfie is one of the Democrats' top donors; Jose gives hundreds of thousands to the G.O.P.

Even for a president, some relationships are less expendable than others.

These kinds of lasting relationships are the stuff of The Buying of the Congress, the latest and most comprehensive work from Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis is the Clark Kent of the money-and-politics beat--modest, dogged, and with the Center's investigators backing him up, able to leap the Federal Election Commission building in a single bound. Buying is the center's first book since Lewis was blessed as a genius by the MacArthur Foundation. It's further evidence that in today's Washington journalism, nobody else works as hard at investigating the twin roles of money and influence.

The Buying of the Congress does have a few shortcomings. Four hundred pages can hold a lot of sordid episodes, but not enough detail to capture Congress in all its glory. Compared to Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft (revised edition: Washington, D.C., Farragut Publishing Co., 1990)--the tale of how Tony Coehlo and the Democrats pursued campaign funds straight into the S&L crisis, and still, I believe, one of the best on the subject--this isn't a story with a strong narrative. Potential investigations, potential books zip by as Lewis rattles off case after case of Congress' attentiveness to its benefactors' needs. One of the book's most intriguing features, an appendix of "Top Ten Career Patrons of Congressional Leaders," cries out for a chapter of its own.

That said, The Buying of the Congress does its job more thoroughly than anything that's come before. Lewis succeeds where most money-and-politics reportage (including my own) fall short: showing the link between Capitol Hill and ordinary life. As Lewis writes, "You literally cannot go to your supermarket, the local drugstore, the hospital emergency room, or the nursing home where your loved one is being cared for without being directly affected by decisions made in Congress. You cannot watch TV, take a flight on an airplane, pay your taxes, or eat dinner without being affected by laws enacted by Congress. You simply cannot tune out or escape the fact that Congress is a significant, relevant force in your life."

A contrarian thought for the '90s, but one well documented. One chapter dissects the grocery bills of a Massachusetts family to show how crop insurance, dairy price supports, and agricultural marketing programs prop up the prices. Lewis notes that the government's depression-era sugar policies cost consumers about $1.4 billion a year, that Congress regularly votes to maintain those policies, and that the Fanjul family has made political contributions of $2.6 million or so since 1979. It's a nice illustration of the imbalance between politics and commerce: a large chunk of the $1.4 billion each year, versus $2.6 million spread over 10 years. Lewis says the Massachusetts couple gave the '92 Clinton campaign 25 bucks. In a world of Fanjuls, Archer-Daniels-Midland and the rest, that's not the kind of gesture that makes a president pick up the phone.

Without saying so directly, Lewis also takes on one of the pet theories in political science. Some academics like to argue that because they can't show a statistical correlation between campaign contributions and recorded votes, the whole money-and-politics business is wildly exaggerated. No specific quid pro quo, no harm, no foul. It doesn't take a political wizard to see the logical flaws. Capitol Hill runs on long-standing relationships that are facilitated with money and all manner of other things. On the lobbying side, only a fool would hold back contributions until the bill was coming up for a vote. Lobbyists are there when bills are conceived, drafted, and especially when they're killed. Up-or-down votes reflect only a fragment of what Congress actually does.

In sum, the crafts practiced by the legislative branch vigorously resist quantification. One example: this fall's 4,000-page omnibus appropriations bill, its contents a mystery to most who voted on it. Another example: A 1994 letter to Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, from 34 senators and 124 House members, warning him to back off regulating tobacco. No legislation here, but the letter's signers averaged three times as much tobacco money as non-signers. There's an argument that most of those signers came from tobacco country, or had some other non-monetary interest. But Kessler, in an interview with the Center, said those interests paled next to big tobacco's money: "The money was so powerful, and it was money all over Washington ... The financial influence clouds everything"