Making small-talk over the Christmas break, I asked one of my friends, a senior at Louisiana State University, what he plans to do with his life. “I’m going to be a lobbyist,” he said. At first I thought he was expressing a hope of lobbying to close the achievement gap in America’s public schools or for some other noble cause. But my assumption was idealistic. All he seemed to care about was making money.
Soon after this conversation, I heard the news that former Sens. John Breaux, D-La., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., have opened a lobbying firm together. Some people applaud the fact that the former senators are working across party lines. That might be good news if they were human rights activists, but they’re more like corporate rights activists. Hooray.
Lott’s history speaks to his selfish career move. The former majority leader resigned from the Senate just two weeks before the implementation of a law that extends the lobbying ban for former senators from one year to two. His denial of any correlation seems a little unbelievable, given that his son Chet Lott registered the Web domain of the new Breaux-Lott Leadership Group six weeks before his resignation.
Sen. Lott had more than five years left in his term.
In case you were wondering what else Lott is known for, I’ll give you a brief rundown. In 2002, he was forced to step down as Senate majority leader after saying he was “proud of” voting for the 1948 presidential candidate Sen. Strom Thurmond R-S.C., who ran on a platform of racial segregation. In 2006, Lott defended “the practice of secretly inserting special projects into spending bills at the behest of lobbyists.” In 2007, federal authorities indicted his brother-in-law, Richard Scruggs, on charges of offering a $50,000 bribe to a Mississippi state judge.
OK, enough of the Lott bashing. Breaux – whom I’m not directly related to, by the way – isn’t totally without fault. While working as senior counsel to Washington, D.C. lobbying firm PattonBoggs, Breaux’s Louisiana residency became ambiguous, hampering a possible gubernatorial campaign. Maybe he can redeem himself by lobbying for the restoration of our wetlands and levees. Maybe I’m too optimistic. He deserves credit for his efforts toward health care reform.
On the other hand, lobbying solely for monetary gain – such as with my LSU friend – is ethically questionable as a career ambition and even more so as a retirement incentive for former legislators, such as Trent Lott. Positions of public service should not be parleyed into positions of personal gain.
