President Obama used his recess-appointment power to place four former federal lobbyists — representing defense contractors and the agri-chemical industry among others — in top policy jobs. Obama’s maneuver dodges a Senate floor debate and sweeps under the rug an inauspicious milestone: The appointment of the 50th lobbyist to a policymaking job by a president who claims he’s “excluded” them. [Click here for our list of known lobbyists in policymaking administration jobs.]
Isi Siddiqui enters the Obama administration from CropLife America, the D.C.-based lobby for the companies who make and sell agricultural pesticides and herbicides. Siddiqui was a registered lobbyist from 2001 to 2004, and since then he has served as the “vice president for science and regulatory affairs.” Now, thanks to the recess appointment, he is the top agriculture official at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Erik Hirschhorn, appointed to the Commerce Department, was a registered lobbyist at the K Street firm Winston & Strawn, where his clients included military-industrial titan Lockheed Martin and fertilizer giant Sun Chemicals.
Michael Punke, another recess appointee, will head off to Geneva to represent the United States before the World Trade Organization. Previously, at Mayer Brown, he represented agricultural interests and Time Warner. In 2007 and 2008, Punke ran his own boutique lobbying shop.
Jacqueline Barrien, going to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on a recess appointment, was registered in 2005 as a Washington lobbyist for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
These four former lobbyists were among Obama’s 15 recess appointments, which allow the president to overcome Senate holds and appoint officials without a confirmation vote.
It’s important here to set the record straight about what a senator’s “hold” is. A “hold” cannot prevent confirmation or even block a vote on confirmation — that requires a 41-vote filibuster to block cloture or one-man filibuster right out of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” A “hold” is an objection to the unanimous-consent decree that would allow confirmation without debate.
So, most of Obama’s recess nominations were not about circumventing a filibuster — labor lawyer Craig Becker was the only one of the 15 who was being filibustered. The other 14 recess appointments were efforts to avoid debate and discussion. Obama says he just wants to get down to business. But given Obama’s clear desire to portray his administration as lobbyist-free, it’s also good politics to skip a public floor debate over four lobbyist appointees.
A floor debate over Siddiqui would have been especially awkward for the president. His record of subsidizing the agri-chemical industry and using regulation to protect it fly in the face of Obama’s supportive words about local and organic food. During the Clinton administration, before cashing out to the agri-chemical lobby, Siddiqui advanced a rule prohibiting private entities from having a stricter labeling standard for “organic” than the USDA’s standard.
Siddiqui is also a man who has gotten wealthy by monetizing his “public service” by putting his connections at the service of the very industry he had regulated in the Clinton administration. Bringing him back into government is certainly not “closing the revolving door between K Street and the executive branch,” as Obama claims he has done.
The other recess-lobbyists may or may not be troubling on good-government grounds, but they do further illustrate the upsetting chasm between the president’s words and his actions. In his State of the Union address, Obama claimed “we have excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” Appointing 50 earns him a Pinocchio nose.
Last month, when I pressed the White House on the discrepancy, I got a Clintonian response: “As the president said, we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions.”
So the president is left lamely bragging that some of the lobbyists who wanted jobs in the his administration were rejected.
Given the experience lobbyists bring to a job — and that the biggest threat of corruption comes when people pass from government to the private sector, not the other way around — there’s something to be said for placing former lobbyists in policy jobs.
But there’s also something to be said for the president living up to his word.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner‘s lobbying editor, can be reached at [email protected]. He writes an op-ed column that appears on Friday.
