Revolving Door Undermines the Democratic Process
The NY Times has been covering the revolving door in Washington, D.C., by which those who are lobbying have recently been serving as members of Congress or more likely as the aides who write the laws the members themselves introduce.
These newspaper articles are worrisome, for as the NY Times notes in the headline for its Monday editorial, “The Capitol’s Spinning Door Accelerates.“ “A new study by the Sunlight Foundation found that the number of active lobbyists with prior government experience has nearly quadrupled since 1998, rising to 1,846 in 2012. Those revolving-door lobbyists, mostly from Capitol Hill, accounted for nearly all of the huge growth in lobbying revenue during that period, which increased to $1.32 billion from $703 million in 1998.”
The in-depth article to which Monday’s editorial refers appeared in Sunday’s paper: Law Doesn’t End Revolving Door on Capitol Hill. Although none of the examples reported relates directly to lobbying in public education, I believe there are implications of the revolving-door culture for the laws that affect public schools.
And it isn’t merely that Sandy Kress, one of the primary authors of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), revolved