Best seat in the house

Here’s a question: Is the business of paying someone to wake up obscenely early to secure a place in line for a lobbyist who wants to attend a congressional hearing quintessential American capitalism or a cynical swipe at populist democracy?
So it was that a freshman Democratic senator from Missouri-Claire McCaskill-threatened last week to upstage Amy Klobuchar, who was holding court over a Commerce Committee hearing on a wireless consumer-protection bill.
In other words, one helluva show, easily justifying a lobbyist to invest $60 or so per hour in a line-stander to gain entry.
But that’s not the point, according to McCaskill, befuddled when she saw those lines of folks holding signs with names of Washington’s finest-law firms and lobbying outfits-doing best by their clients in telecom and other sectors where the big money resides.
“This is not a private enterprise; this is not a concert; this is not an entertainment venue. This is a democracy,” said McCaskill. “And if we don’t make sure that every part of it is equally available to every American, then I think we have failed.”
However, McCaskill did concede wireless technology and professional line-standing is a winning combination in a cottage industry spawned by lobbyists paid to change hearts and minds in official Washington, not to schlump around congressional corridors and stairwells before the sun rises.
“The technology-thanks to the wireless industry-is so good that [line-standing companies] will even tell you when you need a linestander. You just tell them your areas of interest and your clients, and they will inform you by text message or e-mail who you need to be hiring to make sure you have a spot at the hearing,” exhorted McCaskill.
There you have it: The mobile-phone industry an ally has in the line-standing business in the epic battle against heavy-handed government regulation.
But it’s a bit more complicated than a simple ideological struggle in the name of free markets. McCaskill wants to outlaw what she calls the ‘pay-to-play’ practice of line-standing. Violators can face up to a $200,000 fine and up to 5 years in jail.
I’m not sure wireless carriers can pay lobbyists enough to wake up in the middle of the night and hang around for hours for a seat at a hearing? Perhaps carriers could give bonuses to bleary-eyed lobbyists and offset the expenditure by adding a legislative-recovery-fee line item on bills of wireless subscribers. OK, scrap that idea.