Revolving Door Politics Needs a Systemic Solution

Eric Cantor, the former House Majority Leader who recently lost his primary, demonstrates a major hole in the current campaign finance reform agenda via his recent actions.

Long accused of being too friendly to Wall Street, Cantor is now being paid very well to work for a boutique investment bank. His contract includes a relatively common provision in which leaving to go back to work in politics is essentially encouraged:

Unvested initial RSUs and unvested incentive RSUs will be forfeited if Group LP terminates Mr. Cantor for cause or if Mr. Cantor terminates his employment other than (i) for good reason or (ii) after the second anniversary of the grant date, to take a full-time elected or appointed position in federal government, state government, or a national political party.

So not only are they monetizing his connections now, but they are paying him millions of dollars and assuming that he will go back into politics after two years. This is a very common practice. Rahm Emanuel also decided to monetize his political connections after his time with the Clinton White House. Then in late 2008 he was part of an incoming Obama team, part of whose job was to determine whether or not the bail out of the financial system should retain the status quo in which too big to fail banks could make the equivalent of "Heads I win, tails you lose" bets. It's hard to imagine that a group of people who know that multimillion dollar jobs are easily available from the companies whose fates are in their hands will be able to remain unbiased. 

More egregiously, Raj Date worked as deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he helped create regulations that drove banks out of an area of the mortgage business and then started a financial company to take advantage of the hole in the market he helped create. Less ambitious regulators might not create business opportunities for themselves quite so directly, but the incentives and opportunities for them to do this are there.

Ideas like the PAC to end all PACs would reform the financing of elections, letting congressmen study legislation more closely if they didn't have to spend as much time fundraising. But this does nothing about where their big pay days come from after leaving office. Even under a revised system, any officials and elected representatives can still choose to spend a significant portion of their time thinking about how they can help the very same people they are soliciting political donations from today. The practice doesn't have to be obvious, they don't even need to get jobs directly from the influentials they help. If the officials/politicians are owed favors they can call in favors while working for their new employer and everything will look above board.

It's difficult to quantify the potential positive impact of campaign finance reform compared to closing the revolving door between business and government, but on a relative basis solutions for the revolving door problem deserves much more attention.

Right now the revolving door is only brought up during partisan high profile nominations (when the partisans will bring up anything that makes a nominee look bad) or when those appointed officials are perceived to be misbehaving (like with Tom Wheeler and the FCC's and net neutrality rules).  And so the US still lacks broad systemic rules to stop those who create or enforce legislation and regulation from immediately getting high profile jobs in the private sector where they can monetize their owed favors and connections. Unless the officials are making decisions directly related to government contracts it doesn't matter where they work. And activists don't seem to be putting actionable solutions on the table - outing the people involved in revolving door politics or trying to block a few nominations seems to be as far as most groups will go.

Partially this is because there is less incentive for people in power on either side of the aisle to bring further attention to a practice that helps themselves or at least helps their friends and colleagues. Finance reform has a natural constuency among legislators - those who aren't as good at raising money and those who dislike the process of raising money can support it or at least be lukewarm about the idea. On top of this, those on the left don't favor revolving door storylines that paint government officials in a negative light when the problem of attracting good people to government work and getting voters to back additional progressive policies is a higher priority. 

And the op-ed writers pushing for campaign finance reform have an extra selfish incentive to do so - if generic rich people have a harder time making their voice heard then the ones in control of the media, such as the writers who have a column every Sunday, will have more impact.  They don't have the same incentive to talk about system wide solutions to revolving door politics. Pushing for policies that would hurt the economic wellbeing of legislators and officials could cause them to lose the access that makes their job significantly easier. 

Like campaign finance reform, the solution to the revolving door issue can get messy and complicated once implementation is considered.  France imposes a three year waiting period between working for the government and working in the private sector. This seems biased towards keeping poor people out of politics, but some version of this rule with exceptions carved out for unrelated jobs such as medical practice or teaching would be an improvement on the status quo. Singapore's solution of paying officials very well, just not quite as well as their private sector counterparts, works well in the context of their political system. Mandatory transparency from former officials in their business dealings after leaving office would also improve the situation.

When it comes to getting money out of politics, it's time to admit that the revolving door is a significant problem that requires a systemic solution.