It’s amazing that Newt Gingrich has been able to depict himself as a “Reagan conservative” and surge to the top of the Republican field. After all, soon after he left public office he began to do “consulting” work for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant at the center of the housing crisis that crippled our economy. Freddie Mac paid Gingrich’s consulting firm at least $1.6 million from 1999 to 2008. It’s not the kind of resume that you would expect to find in a Tea Party favorite, given the Tea Party’s disdain for the cash-soaked, insiders culture of Washington, D.C.
Gingrich’s firm has now released one, but only one, of its contracts with Freddie Mac. The contract covers only one year, which is curious. Has the Gingrich Group really misplaced the other lucrative contracts? If so, what does that tell you about Gingrich’s managerial abilities? And if he really has misplaced the other contracts, why not just get copies of them from Freddie Mac and produce them all, so we can see what the entirety of the arrangement was?
The article linked above reprints the one contract that Gingrich’s firm produced. It’s not scintillating reading — few contracts are — but it reveals that Gingrich’s firm reported to the Freddie Mac Public Policy Director, whom the Post article identifies as a registered lobbyist. The firm was paid a retainer of $25,000 a month, which means its compensation wasn’t tied to how much work it actually did. The description of what Gingrich’s firm was supposed to do is found in Exhibit 2, which states only that the firm was to provide “consulting and related services, as requested by Freddie Mac’s Director, Public Policy.”
However, Section 2(b) of the contract says that Gingrich’s group was to submit “an invoice that includes a detailed description of the Services performed” in order to get paid. I hope a reporter somewhere is using public records requests and other methods to try to get those invoices, which might shed light on whether Gingrich really acted as a historian, as he states, or as a lobbyist and influence-peddler, as his opponents contend. Interviewing the people that Gingrich reported to, and who requested the “consulting and related services,” would be a good idea, too.
I suppose it is possible that Freddie Mac paid more than $1.6 million for Gingrich to serve as a kind of historian. After all, Freddie Mac was not exactly a paragon of fiscal responsibility, so it may well have spent $25,000 a month for unspecified historian duties even though its business involved mortgages, not histories. Or, perhaps, Freddie Mac paid the former Speaker of the House to do other things. It would be nice to know where the truth lies.
Alas, my hopes were promptly dashed. According to 
This should not surprise anyone. Even by Washington standards, $1.5 trillion is a lot of money. AARP, farming interests, NPR, corporations, hospitals, colleges, state and local governments, and all of the various special interests who could lose part of their federal funding or their special tax breaks will be willing to do whatever it takes to protect their turf and make sure the cuts come out of somebody else’s hide. Lobbyists who have good relationships with any of the Joint Select Committee members will be in high demand. Lobbyists who don’t will be sucking wind. And for the special interests, it’s not a bad deal — instead of having to lobby 535 Senators and Representatives for years at a time, they only need to influence the decisions of 12 people who must submit their recommendation within a few months.
Judge Henry Hudson concluded that the individual mandate “exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power.” He found that the commerce clause, which gives Congress the authority to regulate interstate commerce, does not permit Congress to regulate a person’s decision not to purchase a product. Although there are other court rulings that have upheld the “health care reform” legislation, Judge Hudson’s decision is significant because it reflects an interesting approach to skirting the broad powers afforded Congress through the commerce clause. In effect, Judge Hudson is saying that if individuals choose not to purchase a good or service they are not engaged in commerce, and therefore they necessarily are beyond Congress’ regulatory power under the commerce clause.
Representative Kilroy’s negative harping on Stivers’ service as a “banking lobbyist” is weird because lobbyists, of course, routinely interact with legislators — like Kilroy. If the notion is that lobbying is some intrinsically corrupt job, it is because the legislative process of which Kilroy is a part is corrupt. What kind of message is that for a Member of Congress to be sending?
