Saturday, June 1, 2019
AOC Calls for Ban on Revolving Door as Study Shows Two-Thirds of Recently Departed Lawmakers Now K Street Lobbyists
"No lawmaker should be
cashing in on their public service and selling their contacts and expertise to
the highest bidder."
One of Capitol Hill's most
popular new Democrats on Thursday called for a total ban on the revolving door
that allows lawmakers to jump from Congress into K Street lobbying firms as
soon as they leave office.
In a tweet, Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that former members of Congress "shouldn't be
allowed to turn right around and leverage your service for a lobbyist
check."
"I don't think it should
be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in
Congress," said Ocasio-Cortez. "At minimum there should be a
long wait period."
After the Democratic wave in
the 2018 midterm elections, 44 federal lawmakers left office. A Public Citizen
analysis, released Thursday, found that of those 44, 26 "were working
for lobbying firms, consulting firms, trade groups or business groups working
to influence federal government activities."
Among those that made the
switch are former Rep. Joe Crowley, the Democrat who Ocasio-Cortez unseated,
and former Rep. Mike Capuano, a Suffolk County, Massachusetts Democrat whose
progressive credentials weren't enough to stop now-Rep. Ayanna Pressley from
besting him in the 2018 Democratic primary.
Former legislators like
Crowley and Capuano came in for criticism from Public Citizen president Robert
Weissman. In a statement, Weissman took
aim at what the revolving door does to Washington politics.
"No lawmaker should be
cashing in on their public service and selling their contacts and expertise to
the highest bidder," said Weissman. "Retired or defeated lawmakers should
not serve as sherpas for corporate interests who are trying to write federal
policy in their favor."
"We need to close the
revolving door and enact fundamental and far-reaching reforms to our corrupt
political system," Weissman added.
In the study, Public Citizen
provides a path toward fixing the problem.
Several pieces of legislation
would strengthen these ethics laws for former government officials. The For the
People Act (H.R. 1), which passed the House of Representatives in March, enacts
sweeping reforms that would raise ethics standards at all levels of government.
Importantly, H.R. 1 would define "strategic consulting" as lobbying
for former members of Congress, subjecting this activity to the existing
revolving door restrictions. The legislation would also bar former executive
branch officials from doing "strategic consulting" on behalf of a
lobbying campaign as well as making direct lobbying contacts for two years
after leaving government service.
But, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed
out in a series of tweets, there's more to consider than just banning—or at the
least delaying—lawmaker entrance into lobbying firms. The nature of
congressional pay and the necessities of the work, Ocasio-Cortez said, make the
easy money of lobbying very attractive to members of Congress.
"Keeping it real,"
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted,
"the elephant in the room with passing a lobbying ban on members requires
a nearly-impossible discussion about congressional pay."
Asia's glaciers provide buffer against drought
A new study to assess the
contribution that Asia's high mountain glaciers make to relieving water stress
in the region is published this week (29 May 2019) in the journal Nature.
The study has important economic and social implications for a region that is
vulnerable to drought. Climate change is causing most of the region's glaciers
to shrink.
British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
glaciologist Dr. Hamish Pritchard found that during droughts, glaciers become
the largest supplier of water to some of Asia's major river basins. This
melt-water is important for the people living downstream when the rains fail
and water shortages are
at their worst.
Each summer, glaciers release
36 cubic kilometres of water—equivalent to 14 million Olympic swimming pools—to
these rivers. This is enough water to fulfil the basic needs of 221 million
people, or most of the annual municipal and industrial needs of Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
This supply is unsustainable,
though, because climate
change is causing the region's glaciers to lose 1.6 times more water
than they gain each year from new snowfall.
The high-mountain region of
Asia, known as the Third Pole, encompasses the Himalayas, Karakoram, Pamir,
Hindu Kush, Tien Shan, Kunlun Shan and Alai mountains and has 95,000 glaciers
in total. About 800 million people are partly dependent on their meltwater.
Dr. Pritchard analysed
estimates of the glacier contribution with the amount of precipitation in
average years and in drought years. He used climate datasets and hydrological
modelling to calculate the volume of glacier water entering and leaving the
region's major river basins.
Dr. Pritchard says:
""This study is
about answering the question—why do glaciers matter? Even in high-mountain
Asia, they are remote and cover quite a small part of the region. It turns out
that they are particularly valuable to society as a natural store of water that
keeps the rivers flowing through summer, even through long droughts.
"Against a background of
increasing drought-related water and food shortages and
malnutrition, which have been predicted with high confidence for the coming
decades, Asia's glaciers will play an increasingly important part in protecting
downstream populations from drought-induced spikes in water stress—spikes that,
without mitigating changes in the way water is stored and used, are the
potential trigger for a sudden jump in the price of water that could be profoundly
destabilising for this region."
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