CHAMBER TERRORIZES VULNERABLE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

“The chamber [U.S. Chamber of Commerce] often wins. Among legislators it helped to defeat were South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle, former leader of the Senate Democrats in 2004, and three senators in 2014, giving control of the Senate to the Republicans. It also helped elect Scott Brown in 2010 to replace Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy after his death. [Alyssa] Katz writes that the Brown victory made the chamber the ‘undisputed kingmaker of congressional campaigns.’ But Elizabeth Warren, who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the chamber had vigorously fought in court, defeated Brown in the 2012 election despite the chamber’s efforts, and the bureau she advocated is still with us. American democracy is not completely subject to lobbying dollars. Sometimes we must be reminded of this, which Katz infrequently does.

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 “ ‘The Chamber of Commerce holds members of Congress in vulnerable seats hostage and terrorizes them with threats of removal,’ she [Katz] writes.”

Jeff Madrick, “How the Lobbyists Win in Washington,” a review of Alyssa Katz’s, The Influence Machine: The US Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life, April 7, 2016, in The New York Review, April 7, 2016, pp: 50-52.