White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Faces Its Own Guns

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s building on H Street in Washington glowers across Lafayette Park at the White House. It is a impersonal building, austere even, reminiscent of a British colonial post office.

 

With 3 million members, and the largest budget of any trade group in Washington, the chamber is a political force to be reckoned with, as is its hard-driving chief executive, Thomas Donohue.

 

Its stance is that American business is a kind of Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian strings of regulation and regressive public policy. Under Donohue, the chamber has relentlessly sought out threats to business, real and hypothetical. It opposes unions; regulation; government intrusion into markets; expansion of programs that cost tax dollars, which is all social programs; and raising the minimum wage. It is more ambivalent these days about health care. And Donohue can be quite capricious; for example, he has called for normalizing relations with Cuba.

 

Now the chamber is roiled as it seldom has been. The casus belli is climate change, and what a storm it has produced. Three large electric utilities have withdrawn from the chamber, accusing it of extremism in its stance on climate change. Sneaker giant Nike has resigned from the chamber’s board of directors in protest, but is still a member.

 

The utilities include Exelon, by some measures the largest utility; Pacific Gas & Electric, a giant in California; and PNM, the largest utility in New Mexico. As a percentage of membership, they do not affect the chamber much; but strategically, their rebuke means a great deal. They are the very constituency the chamber and Donohue are out to help. They burn coal as well as other fuels, and they are critically affected by what is to happen in climate legislation or regulation.

 

The utilities want Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. If Congress fails to pass the legislation, they fear Environmental Protection Agency regulation. The stakes are high. The chamber is opposed to the present cap-and-trade legislation before Congress, and has challenged the science that would be used by the EPA.

 

“If Congress does not act, the EPA will and the result will be more arbitrary, more expensive and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution,” said John Rowe, Exelon’s chairman and chief executive officer.

 

Two of the big rebel utility CEOs are national business figures: Rowe of Exelon is revered as a prince-philosopher inside and outside of the electric industry; and Peter Darbee of PG&E, who wrote a strongly-worded letter of resignation to Donohue, is a major corporate friend of the environment.

 

All three utilities, along with their Washington trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, favor cap-and-trade legislation now being considered in Congress. Another utility savant, James Rogers of Duke

Energy, is pulling his utility conglomerate out of the National Association of Manufacturers, because of its opposition to cap-and-trade.

 

Darbee hit hardest at the chamber. In a two-page letter he wrote: “We find it dismaying that the chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored. In our view, an intellectually honest agreement over the best policy response to the challenges to climate change is one thing; disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of these challenges are quite another.”

 

The chamber has opposed not only the EPA’s plans to regulate carbon emissions in the absence of legislation, but also has attacked the scientific basis put forward by the agency. Yet Donohue insists that the chamber is neither denying the carbon emissions problem, nor is opposed to a legislative solution. Instead, it wants one tied to a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to protect U.S. companies from onerous conditions.

 

Friends of Donohue–who applaud much of what the chamber stands for–say that it is caught in a position where it has to say what it is for, not just what it is against. The chamber has always been at the barricades, not facing its own guns. The experience is novel and unpleasant for those on H Street. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

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Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,

You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.

For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.

If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)

Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.

The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.

Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.

Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.

The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.

Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.

You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.

 

The Swamp in Washington That Awaits

by 1 Comment

 

 

Dear John, Barack, Sarah and Joe,

You have come a long way, gang, and two of you are going all the way. Congratulations. All four of you say you are going to change Washington. Here in the nation’s capital, we are not convinced.

For starters, let us take earmarks. They run in the thousands. They may be dented by a new administration, but they will not be stopped. Bringing home the pork is largely why we, as voters, send our senators and representatives to Capitol Hill. Earmarks have become a clumsy redress for the indifference of the central government to local need. They have become the palpable evidence of our tax dollars at work. We cannot sense the value of a missile shield in Eastern Europe, but we can measure the stop-and-go traffic on our way to work.

If all politics are local, so are all earmarks. The courts have said that the president is not entitled to a line-item veto. Ergo John McCain, unless you can substitute a funding initiative that Congress will agree to, or you are prepared to shut down the government often, your promises will go unfulfilled. (Check the shutting-down-the-government option with Newt Gingrich,)

Then, friends, there is the permanent alternative administration: the think tanks. These are the intellectual halfway houses where ambitious public servants park between tours of duty in government. Their influence is pervasive, subtle and continual. Every administration leans on think tanks which agree philosophically with it. And here is always a think tank which is particularly close to every administration. For Ronald Reagan, it was The Heritage Foundation; for Bill Clinton, it was The Brookings Institution; and for George W. Bush, it was the American Enterprise Institute.

The epicenter of neoconservatism, The American Enterprise Institute provided the Bush administration with ideas, personnel, moral support, and rationales for the invasion of Iraq and the formulation and promotion of the troop surge. Vice President Cheney has been especially close to AEI. His wife, Lynne, is a fellow there and many old colleagues inhabit its halls on 17th Street. They include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Lawrence Lindsey and David Frum. You have to admire the place and its initiative in seducing an entire administration.

Growing in influence on the conservative side, and waiting for a friend in the White House, is the Cato Institute, which has been strengthening its roster of libertarian/conservative thinkers.

Meanwhile, the liberal Brookings Institution is churning out policy papers on everything from education reform to Pakistan. A team of powerful liberals is ready to take Barack Obama by the hand and lead him down the path of liberal righteousness. Already Brookings experts are advising the Obama campaign, including Susan Rice, Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Of course Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, is president of the think tank and the nation’s leading liberal columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., hangs his hat there.

The point is not that the think tanks are bad but that they are powerful, and they generate the ideas of government. Remember you may not be interested in them, but they are interested in you. The press tends to point to the lobbyists of K Street as controlling Washington. The lobbyists influence Congress, but the think tanks influence an administration.

Finally, White House hopefuls, there is the bureaucracy: permanent, entrenched and bloody-minded. The civil service approaches each new administration with skepticism and often hostility. With every administration, the bureaucracy gets a new senior management team in the form of political appointees (secretary, deputy secretary, assistant secretary, etc.). Often, the bureaucracy frustrates these appointees from the get-go. Many a cabinet secretary has had to bring in a small group of loyalists in order to wage war on the larger staff. One agency head told me that she felt she could only confide in her chauffeur and her secretary.

You two lucky victors in this presidential contest will learn that it is easier to invade a faraway country than it is to reform the Washington establishment. Orthodox or maverick, liberal or conservative, Washington is waiting for you.