Thieves fall out; Abramoff scandal lifts lid on corporate bribery [View All]

[formercia]

See how DeLay and Norquist fit into the equasion. Grover Norquist was Abramoff's connection to White House meetings arranged through Norquist and Karl Rove.


http://www.workers.org/2006/us/abramoff-0112/

The K Street Project was initiated by DeLay and Norquist in 1995 after the Republicans got control of the House and the Senate in the mid-year elections. The aim was to get right-wing Republicans to take complete control of the vast lobbying apparatus that is housed on K Street in Washington, near the Capitol.

According to Nicholas Confessore, writing in the July/August 2003 issue of the Washington Monthly, Tom DeLay “famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay’s office and shown their place in the ‘friendly’ or ‘unfriendly’ columns. (‘If you want to play in our revolution,’ DeLay told the Washington Post, ‘you have to live by our rules.’)” The rules were to oust Democrats from their lobbying firms and trade associations.

A year later, according to Confessore, Haley Barbour, who was chair of the Repub lican National Committee, “organized a meeting of the House leadership and business executives. ‘They assembled several large company CEOs and made it clear to them that they were expected to purge their Washington offices of Demo crats and replace them with Republicans,’ says a veteran steel lobbyist. The Repub licans also demanded more campaign money and help for the upcoming election. The meeting descended into a shouting match, and the CEOs, most of them Republicans, stormed out.”

In 2000, when Bush was elected and the Republicans got control of Congress, Norquist accelerated the K Street Project. Working outside the government, he compiled a database “intended to track party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town.” (Washington Monthly)