K Street blues.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills

We have seen the power of industry lobbyists demonstrated again and again in the last year not just on mortgage reform, but on health reform and airline safety. It also threatens any real reform of the regulation of Wall Street.

The power of lobbyists over Congress has grown dramatically during my forty-eight years in Washington. What's happened is, the reforms made during the Kennedy-Johnson administration and by Democratic Congresses in the early years of the Nixon administration frightened the nation's big shots. In the 1970s, they moved their trade associations to Washington, hired lobbyists, and brought about an explosion of new office buildings on the K Street-Connecticut Avenue axis. The number of outright lobbyists and the number of lawyers, who are mainly lobbyists, has also exploded. And as we all now know, they learned a great secret--that they could do indirectly through campaign contributions what they could not do with outright direct payments to officials.

Officials who would never dream of accepting an outright bribe will gratefully accept campaign contributions and, consciously or unconsciously, be influenced by the access provided to those who...