Mo Brooks, Mo Money, Mo Problems
How congressional lawmakers realistically get their assigned committee seats, and the costs to attain it.
Left-leaning populist political Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski spoke in his recent video on his show Secular Talk about Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) in a leaked video by Under Current saying out loud what happens inside congressional fundraising via committees. Kulinski views this event as a ‘colossal bombshell’ calling for news outlets to report on this story, that is “if they took their job seriously, and their outrage meter wasn’t broken...”
He provides a basic bare bones summary that the Beltway is manufactured in the following, “The general idea is that everything is implied in DC. ‘Hey when I give you a campaign contribution, you know, you look out for me and forget your constituents, like first and foremost represent me.’ Whether it's a billionaire or a corporation, or some lobbyist.” In general context, it should come to no surprise how Congress doesn’t care much about their constituents. To add, James Li made a short video released by Breaking Points hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, (with Kulinski being a guest host on occasion), suggesting there is a “malaise and dysfunction of America’s top legislative body… whose members are supposed to represent the needs of their constituents, but in practice falls significantly short of that promise with studies that show the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule near-zero statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”
Returning back to Kulinski’s segment, there are instances in the day-to-day realm of politics, “what’s called a quid pro quo… which is all vocalized, ‘If I do this for you, you do this for me,’ now that is actually illegal.” Logrolling, for example, is when one lawmaker may tell a colleague that he’ll support his bill on x-issues, if they do the same in return on y-issue down the road. But this is not legislation Kulinski was talking about, rather, its favors being brought to politicians in essence to pursue a political career trajectory. Furthermore, he states that we have legalized bribery of a certain kind, and the videos from Books have shown, “there actually are many instances of legit quid pro quo’s, and it’s like part of how the system works. This is astonishing.”
Mo Brooks unbeknownst to him that he was being recorded at his campaign event said, “I'm sure that you are very much concerned about why our Congress is so unresponsive to the regular needs of American citizens, why some of these policies that come out are so bizarre, so unfair; so skewered against regular Jane and Joe Citizen. The reason is simple. Special interest groups run Washington, and I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean literally.” What he references is very identical to what Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY), Ken Buck (R-CO), and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have said in the 2020 HBO documentary film The Swamp.
When Buck was interviewed, he said he felt the right thing to do was, “expose what goes on in Congress, and make sure the American public knows about it.” For many lawmakers see their job as a position they don’t want to give up on, and that instead of solving the problems many Americans are facing that should happen in DC, their re-election is seemingly more important. Once elected into office, leadership tells many of those starting out, “right from the beginning, ‘Here are all the goodies that you can enjoy if you play the game the way we want you to play the game. Agreeing with leadership, special interest groups on how to vote, and how to govern.”
Brooks, using the House of Representatives as a personal example since that is where he is currently employed, goes on to educate those in attendance:
“If you want to be the chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it. And the purchase price for a major committee, say like Ways and Means, minimum bid is a million dollars. I’m talking literally here. I’m not talking metaphorically, okay?! We have committees broken down by A group, B group, and C group. C are the cheapest, B… are middling, A is the most expensive. It’s the most expensive because those are the committees that the special interest groups care the most about. So where does a congressman come up with $1M to be chairman of one of these eight committees? You can’t get it from Joe and Jane Citizen because Joe and Jane Citizen back home, they’re not going to be contributing that kind of money. They don’t have it. They need that money for their own families…”
In Massie’s interview for the film, he goes on to say that many Americans would be surprised to learn that lawmakers have to pay their own political party to be assigned towards certain committee seats just about every election cycle at the rate of $200k to $500k. “Now where are you going to get that money? You’re not gonna go back home and have a fundraiser in somebody’s living room. That just doesn't work. The people that fund your purchase of the committee seat are the people who have interest in the work product of that committee, DC lobbyists.”
To put committees into a better in-depth perspective, Gaetz brings up a similar context to Brook’s statement, whereas every congressional committee has their own assigned letter A, B, and C. The reason why the letter grade was made was to be, “soley lashed to that committee's ability to generate campaign cash for its members.” If one was to be on the Ways and Means committee, an A-grade committee to be exact, that lawmaker would have a better overhead amongst the entire tax code. “There’s no lobbyist in this town that would not swim across the Potomac to deliver you a $5k back check,” Gaetz claims. But if one were to serve on a C-grade committee such as Veteran Affairs, “you just don’t have the same bevy of special interests thirsting for your attention with donations.”
Going back to Brooks, he tells his audience that to get funding from the committee assignments are to be from the special interest groups, forming a quid pro quo. “If you don't do what they tell you to do, they won’t give you the money that finances your chairmanship.” He recalled a time when there was a gentleman who ran for chairman of the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee), where Republicans members pay their party dues and money for these committee assignments and chairmanships. For the Democrats it’s going to the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee). “And this guy who wanted to be chair of the NRCC actually had a brochure. And that brochure had price listings written on it, and his argument for getting elected was, ‘Elect me. I will charge you less.’”
When it comes to electing members for party leadership positions, Buck gives reason that there’s a slight misunderstanding towards the general public how this really works. “But people misunderstand that somehow we’re choosing people [leadership], you know that we think are the best at articulating our positions. That’s not true. It’s who can raise the money, and the special interest groups control the money. So the hierarchy of power in Washington DC is special interest groups, leadership, rank-and-file.” This correlates to Massie’s observation that it’s not just committee seats that have price tags stuck to them, it is leadership positions, which also includes the Speaker.
Brooks once again, shining light into just how the public policy debate is being undermined by following what the special interest groups want you to do, furthering the realm that public policy can show its corruption colors, “The money now is triumph,” he insists.
In a second example, he brings up a story from his colleague Thomas Massie, although it’s unclear as to why Brooks said, “but there’s no evidence to back this up,” when there was a written story that further developed, let alone himself speaking about it in this video.
Per Brooks’ account as he tells the story:
“He had a lobbyist just come up to him, and the lobbyists said, ‘Look, I will pay your $500k to be on Ways and Means if you will sponsor this patent bill.’ Thomas is brilliant. He has patents, MIT grad, and Thomas said, ‘Okay. I’ll look at it.’ And he looked at it and he said, ‘No, this hurts the small inventor.’ The people with the power and the money are going to use that power and money to steal the patent rights from the person who actually had the idea who should be reading the rewards of that idea. And so Thomas went back to the lobbyist and said, ‘No. I’m not going to do it.’ The lobbyist said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to pay that $500k.’ Thomas Massie got that published on the front page of USA Today that story. And I saw it, and I’m going, ‘Finally somebody else in the House of Representatives who is honorable, who is ethical, and sees the corruption associated with this process.’ And I went to Thomas and said, ‘Thank you for doing that.’ And Thomas responded, ‘Well. I made one big mistake… Well, I talked about it in terms of buying committee assignments when really it’s a rental agreement. You have to pay it every two years.’ Now the national media knows about this, both political parties do it. So neither party rises to the occasion and makes this a major public policy issue that would increase exposure about what’s getting done. But if you want to know why our government is not properly facing the challenges that are in front of the United States of America, that more than anything else, is the reason.”
After the video of Brooks concludes, Kulinski continues his segment, bringing up further details into the USA Today piece by Massie, claiming that the lobbyist who interacted with the Kentucky congressman, “was pissed about the fact that Massie was blowing the whistle on this… That lobbyist comes out a little later on and explains to everybody… that actually Thomas Massie the very week after that, ‘was calling me and asking me to give him more money, and was meeting with me and a bunch of other lobbyists, and was asking for more money for doing more fundraising for his campaign.’”
Kulinski goes on to act in his small example how those who do blow the corruption whistle tend to act as if, “‘I mean at the end of the day, it’s the way the system works. Like what do you want me to do? I got to do what I got to do, I gotta play ball.’ So even the guys that are kind of messed up are also like, ‘Can you please give me some money for my campaign and then I’ll serve you?’”
Because lawmakers aren’t able to raise the amount of those funds from Jane and Joe, they have to rely on funds from a corporation to pay for their committee seat. As Kulsinki points out, those who achieve the status of being committee chair of a strong-standing committee, or just to be on the committee itself, have a new question to purpose in life: Now that I am seated upon to this assigned committee, how would I be able to serve the people who paid me to get on this committee? Those who got you in tend to become #1 on your list of priorities.
In essence to Brook’s first story about the guy with the brochure running for NRCC chair, Kulisnki notes, “he even says he saw politicians literally shopping around with their price tags saying, ‘Look, I’ll do more for less! So, I’ll represent you to the max for even less money, so that’s why you should pick me to try to be head of the committee or whatever.’ It’s astonishing!”
Not only are there quid pro quo’s, but also the establishment party institutions that raise funds such as the NRCC and DNC are institutions who launder corporate money:
“The whole point is, let’s put a veneer of respectability on what we’re doing here, and you know have a middleman, where the corporate money, and billionaire money, and lobbyist money goes to the DNC and NRCC. And then they give it to the politicians, and it looks like, ‘Well I took a contribution from the DNC because I have democratic politics, and the DNC is all about democratic ideas.’ No, they are really there to launder the money from like Pfizer and Blue Cross Blue Shield… fill in the blank with whatever corporations, right?”
Part of treating corruption, he says, is to treat corruption as if it were the same as other worse crimes, but to bring some reverence of an optimistic hope, he adds that he has more faith in American people than politicians, because even if he may disagree with Steve down the street, “at least I know Steve is not swimming in cash from Lockheed Martin.”
In a different approach to battling corruption, Matt Gaetz said during his part of the film interview, that special interest doesn’t have the best interest to get anything done in Washington, because if lawmakers started to actually work together to seek out change, the people getting rich off of the current system would eventually stop getting rich altogether. “That is why I think the greatest challenge we face is not Republicans versus Democrats. It’s reformers against those who want to maintain the status quo.”
Near to his conclusion, Kulinski states if ever in a perfect world where the media would do its job and not be broken, this generally would be huge news. “It would lead to a week’s long coverage, ‘Well how are we going to change, we got to change this, this is crazy. These people are betraying us, the American people. They’re betraying their voters.’ This is a cesspool of corruption, but none of them are going to talk about it, there’s not going to be a peep on any of the outlets.” He further explains that the mainstream media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and others won’t give a crap to cover the corruption topic because, “The same corporations that are paying these politicians for favors and legislation in their favor, are the same corporations that are advertising on mainstream media…”
The reason why there are media personality figures such as Wolf Blitzer and Brian Stelter for many hours a day is because the news corporations know that whoever they hire won’t rock the boat, nor are they going to look under the hood of the current status quo. There won’t be a development of receiving real news, let alone receiving good information and facts. “You’re gonna get, you know, a very conventional, calm, status quo supporting way of discussing things…”
Clearly Congress has to break away from their prolonged continuation of adversarial clientelism that is still apparent today in the current Gilded Age 2.0 era. But there’s more to it. If people want to have a better educated and informed society in politics, throw away the old school approach of the textbook Congress, and teach the cold hearted reality. Your member of Congress is most likely bought and has to pay dues to their party, each committee is organized in a priority letter-graded system, and they care more about their special interest stakeholders on K Street who show up to committee meetings than they do on Main Street.
If you want to be the change you wish to see in the world, start getting the courage to run for office instead of running away from it, and hold your damn party leaders accountable for continuing to push elite nonsense. But if you personally don’t like the public spotlight, become a lobbyist instead. Just don’t become that scumbag who makes the profession a burden for the many good-working people who truly want to get rid of corruption, and help bring a populist approach towards their country.