Suit, flag, and original thoughts paid for by Airlines For America. Please have them back by Thursday.
The news that House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) is dating Shelley Rubino, a vice president for lobbying group Airlines For America and therefore a powerful lobbyist for the airline industry
caused a bit of a stir last week. Not to worry, Shuster said: he had drafted a "formal document" declaring that Rubino would not be lobbying either him or anyone on his staff because of their relationship, thus dodging the obvious concerns about, well, that happening. Not an ideal situation, to be sure, but DC has many "power couples" with similarly overlapping careers and nobody is very keen on the idea of policing which Washington adults can date which Washington adults. So it caused a wee stir, but not much in the way of true controversy.
That said, Politico now reports that a top priority of Rubino's lobbying firm was just-coincidentally resurrected from near-dead state to rapid passage after Shuster and Rubino began their Washington romance. And coupled with other coincidences, that looks pretty damn odd.
The bill had gone nowhere under Graves (R-Ga.) — it didn’t even muster a hearing in committee. Once the Pennsylvania congressman took over, though, it moved at lightning speed: He introduced a revised version of the bill in March of last year, the same day he met with an airline industry group that supported it. A month later, Shuster shepherded the measure through his transportation panel in roughly 10 minutes. It sailed through the full House three months later without a roll call vote.
This was before Shuster and Rubino went public with their relationship, and a few months before Shuster signed his "document" saying golly gee, we can't have that happening ... anymore. And there's, sigh, other problems:
The ties go beyond Shuster and Rubino: The wife of Shuster’s chief of staff is a top executive for Airlines for America, which is known as A4A. And the congressman recently hired an A4A lobbyist to run the committee’s aviation panel.
Both Shuster and Rubino moved swiftly last spring to get the revised Transparent Airfares Act of 2014 across the finish line. The industry group worked with Shuster on tweaking the bill. Shuster and A4A used nearly identical graphics to promote the legislation. And Shuster’s verbiage on the House floor was strikingly similar to A4A’s talking points.
(Emphasis added because c'mon, now.)
Head below the fold for more.
I do not like this story, I do not like anything about this story, from the presumption that two people ought to be barred from a relationship due to career status to the conflicting suspicion that indeed, some of our nation's laws may be directly influenced by who is having the sexytimes with who. Ick and ick. Even without the relationship it appears Shuster's office is run as part-subsidiary of an airline lobbying group, which confirms every rotten thing anyone ever suspected about how the "chairmen" of powerful congressional committees conduct the nation's business. I do not like this story because it makes us all feel like little Lisa Simpson learning that her flag-waving essay has been a waste of a perfectly good sheet of paper. I do not like this story because it suggests that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington should have been a porno.
This is one of those stories that makes you feel like the whole of government is just an elaborate put-on, a show staged so that the rubes going into the voting booths feel they have a stake in things when they most clearly do not. It makes you feel stupid for ever having presumed it would operate any other way. Why yes, the congressman is crafting policy decisions using the precise language of powerpoint slides delivered to his office by the top lobbying firm whose vice president he is humping—why the hell would you have ever thought government would work otherwise?
Now let's have the good congressman put a Constitution in his pocket and talk about what the Founding Fathers mean to him. But make it quick, you pecker, because lunch today is an all-you-can-eat affair catered by a company that needs your vote to prevent its workers from making a living wage, and you do not want to miss out on that.