Duty, Honor, Lobby
Andrew Card challenges America's youth to give something back.
Friday, July 29, 2005 Ask Not: Since 9/11, many of us have criticized President Bush for asking nothing more of the American people than to fly and shop. At last, the administration has responded. As the Washington Post reported earlier this week, Chief of Staff Andrew Card challenged 2,000 interns at a public service job fair to do more: I don't think that everyone who is looking for a job should expect or even want a job with the federal government or one of our agencies. In fact, our economy would not do very well if people just worked for the government. We can't afford to waste the best and the brightest in keeping America safe, finding cures to chronic diseases, or winning the war on terror. Youth of America, if you love your country, set aside your selfish desire to enter public service and heed the private sector's call! Card's career is a testament to that noble sense of duty. All his life, this son of Massachusetts has longed to be a bureaucrat. He studied at the Kennedy School. He spent a decade in the federal government under Reagan and Bush, eventually reaching the bureaucratic pinnacle with a brief Cabinet stint as secretary of transportation. With Card's résumé, he could have qualified for any career job in the federal government. But in 1993, at great personal sacrifice, he left government to serve his country as head of the automakers' trade association. Later, he volunteered to become chief lobbyist at General Motors, where he hoped his inside knowledge of government could help save the nation's ailing auto giant. Card believed deeply in what another generation's role model, former GM CEO Charles E. Wilson, said at his confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower's defense secretary: "What was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Card has returned to government, so his own years of sacrifice for his country are over. Now he wants to pass the torch of private sector service to the next generation. Small-minded cynics have criticized Card for championing the interests of an industry that used to pay him $600,000 a year. As Card showed again this week, he's just looking for a way to give something back. Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden: All of us honor Andy Card's patriotic sacrifice as an advocate for America's auto industry. But as we take up his call to private-sector service, we have to ask: Is lobbying really part of the private sector? Corporate lobbyists advocate for private interests, and arguably create jobs—the more lobbyists one interest hires, the more lobbyists other opposing interests have to hire. On the other hand, a lobbyist's entire job is to influence the federal government—and as Card told the interns, "our economy would not do very well" if everybody worked here in Washington. Yet at $600,000 a year, we can't lump business lobbyists in with non-profit lobbyists for causes like protecting the environment or opposing immigration. You owe it to your country to come up with a name for this booming sector of corporate lobbyists in the seam between private and public. Send your suggestions to thehasbeen@gmail.com. ... 11:45 A.M. (link)
Thursday, July 28, 2005
The Firm:John Roberts may soon become a Supreme Court justice, but he isn't a lawyer. He's "a lawyer's lawyer." Editorialists say so. The Christian right says so. People who should know say so.
As a "lawyer's son" and "lawyer's husband," I've spent enough time around lawyers to know that "lawyer's lawyer" is like "congressman's congressman": not always the compliment that it might seem. When firms can tout themselves as "lawyer's lawyers," such words become cheaper than the hourly rates might suggest. One congressional floor speech went so far as to praise "a lawyer's lawyer's lawyer."
Law students learn early on that "a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client." But a "lawyer's lawyer" isn't a lawyer who represents another lawyer. It means a lawyer so devoted to the profession that he or she can argue either side of any question and take on any fool for a client.
In other professions, even lesser ones like politics, such moral flexibility would be dismissed as an abject lack of principle. In the law, the ability to argue for it before arguing against it is sometimes lionized as the highest form of principle.
The phrase "lawyer's lawyer" has the ring of money, and a rich, ironic history to go with it. In 1930, when Herbert Hoover returned Charles Evan Hughes to the Supreme Court as chief justice, Time's cover profile dubbed him "Lawyer's Lawyer." Like Roberts, Hughes had spent his younger days in Republican politics: In 1916, he actually resigned as an associate Supreme Court justice to become the GOP's presidential nominee against Wilson.
Lawyer's Lawyer is also the title of a biography about John W. Davis, the Democratic nominee who lost to Coolidge in 1924. He earned the label by going on to oppose the New Deal on behalf of big corporate clients and to represent the losing, segregationist side in Brown v. Board of Education.
Echo's Echoes: The phrase isn't new to John Roberts. In 2003, Sen. Orrin Hatch praised Roberts' record at Hogan & Hartson: "He has argued on different sides of a variety of different issues, firmly establishing his reputation as a lawyer's lawyer." By that point, thanks to such nimble minds, Hogan had passed the half-billion-dollar mark in annual revenues—just behind the firm John W. Davis founded: Davis, Polk & Wardwell.
Ironically, the phrase is the subtitle of a 2003 treatise from the right-wing Committee for Justice extolling the virtues of one of the most conservative ideologues Bush has put on the bench: "Jeffrey Sutton: A Lawyer's Lawyer." Before his narrow, party-line confirmation to the 6th Circuit, Sutton took on several cases to weaken federal civil rights and disability laws. The Committee for Justice insisted that "Sutton does what all good lawyers do: subordinate his interests to those of the client, and do everything possible, within the bounds of the law, to win."
Bruce Reed, who was President Clinton's domestic policy adviser, is CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council and co-author with Rahm Emanuel of The Plan: Big Ideas for Change in America.E-mail him at thehasbeen@gmail.com. Read his disclosure here.
Photograph of Karl Rove with Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; photograph of elephant on Slate's home page by Rob Elliott/AFP.