Bad Baucus

There's no doubt that Joe Lieberman is the most loathsome Democrat on foreign policy issues. But unfairly little attention is paid to his domestic counterpart, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Thankfully, Ari Berman is picking up the slack:

A study last year by Public Citizen found that between 1999 and 2005 Baucus, along with former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, took in the most special-interest money of any senator. He tops the list of recipients from business PACs. And only three senators have more former staffers working as lobbyists on K Street (at least two dozen in Baucus's case). Now that he's chairman, "former aides of Baucus, in particular, have been in demand on K Street by companies that hope to limit damage to their business interests," reports Congressional Quarterly.[...]

In recent years Baucus has not been shy about reaching out to K Street for campaign contributions. In February 2005 he asked fifty lobbyists to raise $100,000 each for his 2008 re-election campaign. Two lobbyists who attended told CNN that they "have never gotten such an aggressive pitch from a senator." In 2006, as the Abramoff scandal heated up, Baucus removed lobbyist William Oldaker as treasurer of his PAC. But his longtime fundraiser, Shannon Finley, recently left to join other former Finance Committee staffers at a new firm, Capitol Counsel, which principal John Raffaelli said will give corporations "the best opportunity to present their case."

Since becoming chairman, Baucus has sent out three invitations to upcoming big-ticket ($2,000 per person, $5,000 per PAC) fundraisers for his Glacier PAC, including "skiing and snowmobiling in Big Sky" and fly fishing and horseback riding at "Camp Baucus" in August. Baucus says that raising money from lobbyists at such gatherings "has no effect, none whatsoever, on my thinking."[...]

Baucus is off to an inauspicious start as chairman, beginning with his handling of minimum-wage legislation. On the day the House of Representatives passed a federal wage increase by a vote of 315 to 116, Baucus held a hearing on Tax Incentives for Businesses in Response to a Minimum Wage Increase. Of the five testifying witnesses, only one expert, Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, advocated a "clean" bill without the tax breaks. "I've been on minimum wage panels for years," says Bernstein, "and this was no better than the ones during the Republican era." The Finance Committee subsequently attached $8.3 billion in tax breaks for small business to the legislation. "People like to vote for tax cuts," Baucus told me afterward.

And this guy chairs what is inarguably the most important domestic policy committee. There's talk of mounting a progressive primary challenge to him in 2008, which would be a very worthwhile endeavor, if only because it would remind him that lobbyists aren't his only constituents. But the end truth is that there's relatively little that can be done to rein in a popular Senate chairman. The question, for Democrats, is how to work around one of their own worst enemies.