House Republicans Plan to Investigate Chamber of Commerce If They Take the Majority – The Intercept

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On Thursday, 14 state treasurers issued a joint statement condemning Republican efforts to combat investor advocacy, which has led multiple states, including West Virginia, Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida, to restrict state treasurers from doing business with funds that deploy ESG screens.

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The Chamber announced recently it would devote $3 million toward the election of Mehmet Oz who goes by Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, and funneled it through the Senate Leadership Fund. The move was generally seen as an olive branch to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who is linked to the super PAC. They have so far made no similar contribution to the House Republican super PAC.

Todays GOP war onthe Chamber of Commerce represents a stunning turnaround from just a few years ago, when House Republicans and the Chamber were aligned on just about everything. And it comes in the wake of the collapse of the National Rifle Association, leaving two of the GOPs most powerful outside armies largely disarmed. But as the Republican Party and the Chamber have polarized to opposite sides of the conservative movement, a deeper disagreement between the two dating back to the movement that formed around Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and 60s has been reawakened.

At the height of the New Deal era after World War II, Democrats and liberal Republicans were united in the belief that cooperation between big business, big labor, and government was the secret to the eras economic boom. John Kenneth Galbraith, the nations most famous economist and later President John F. Kennedys adviser, dubbed it The Affluent Society in a 1958 book that was both a cultural and a political sensation.

Arrayed against this coalition was an aggrieved and increasingly well-organized network of small and medium-sized businesses that felt they were getting squeezed by the big guys. What was good for General Motors, they said, was not necessarily good for them.

Big Labor and the New Deal coalition thought that they were living in a time of peace between capital and labor, but capital always knew that they were engaged in a strategic ceasefire, having been crushed by the Depression and unable to compete against the rising strength of the modern government.

But there was no real peace, and big business launched its counterattack on both labor and government in the 1970s, ushering in the neoliberal era. The Chamber, this time allied with small and medium-sized businesses, played a major role in the counterattack, with the heir to the Goldwater movement, Ronald Reagan, enacting a wish list of big business policies, deregulation, and tax cuts.

Jamie Galbraith, who followed his father into the economics profession, served as an aide to the Joint Tax Committee in Congress and recalled the Chamber at the time as an ultra supply-side, ultra Reagan revolution organization with essentially no compromisers. The Chamber was just down-the-line for the lowest possible taxes and most complete deregulation and privatization.

But the Chamber started drifting back to the center in the early part of the Clinton years, endorsing the administrations health care proposal known as Hillarycare,for the first lady.All of a sudden, the Chamber just became something wholly different than whatever I perceived them to be. And I know we were very upset about it, said former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, theNo. 3 Republican at the time.

In the wake of the endorsement, recalled one Republican operative, a member of House Republican leadership asked to meet with the Chambers board. Instead of delivering a standard political speech, he began by asking all the staff to leave the room. He just ripped them a new asshole, said the operative. How could you possibly go down this anti-free enterprise, left-wing trail, the GOP leader demanded. (The operative recalled it was Armey, but Armey said it may have been Tom DeLay.I couldnt track down DeLay in time for this story.)

The dressing down worked. Richard Lesher had run the organization since 1975, but after Republicans took power in 1995 after the Gingrich Revolution in 1995, Lesher was eased out.When we took the majority, of course, they came over, reminding us that we were the best friends we ever had yakety yak, Armey said. When you come into the majority, you have no shortage of newfound friends. The Chamber was a reliable Republican ally for the next roughly 20 years, up until just the last few.

(DeLay later launched what he dubbed the K Street Project, which was an effort to bring all of Washingtons lobbying industry under Republican authority, dictating that firms fire Democratic lobbyists or lose access to the GOP. That was a boneheaded idea, and you can quote me if you like. I mean, who in the hell did he think he was, telling people who they can hire and who they cant? said Armey. I objected to it in a leadership meeting. And my objections were not well received.)

The tensions between big and little businesses never fully subsided, and the same network of smaller businesses that aligned themselves with Goldwater, forming the more conservative wing of the GOP, organizing behind Donald Trump in 2016 and beyond. The small and medium-sized businesses, particularly manufacturers, have also long been opposed to free-trade policies, as they lack the capacity to offshore their own production and cant compete with cheaper products from overseas.

The conservative Republican member of Congress said that he didnt begin as an active opponent of the Chamber, but didnt see them as a natural ally either. Frankly, as a business guy, I couldnt join some of the efforts nationally, because they were at odds with small companies, he said. They were really pushing for a long time this pro-China trade policy, which was great for General Motors, but it was bad for everyone in the supply chain. And it was really gutting domestic manufacturing. And it was the same with NAM the National Association of Manufacturers a lot of their members had had an organization that was working against their interests. And the biggest, biggest members have certainly benefited from a lot of this stuff. And I think thats a big part of why Trump was so well received by the small and medium business community.

The Chamber is among the biggest spenders on lobbying activities in the country, but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and leading Senate Republicans like John Cornyn of Texas regularly take public shots at them. The Chambers top lobbying job, typically one of Washingtons plummest K Street assignments, sat open for several months until it was filled by two-term, back-bench former Rep. Evan Jenkins, who, like many Republicans from West Virginia, began his career as a Democrat. He was most recently a judge in West Virginia, having left the House to pursue an unsuccessful run for Senate in 2018.

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House Republicans Plan to Investigate Chamber of Commerce If They Take the Majority - The Intercept