Chris Dodd, a confidante of Joe Biden recently named to Biden’s vice presidential search committee, is a revolving-door corporate lobbyist whose time in the Senate was characterized by bailouts, the enrichment of insiders, and coziness with K Street.
Dodd has been a lobbyist for nearly a decade. He cashed out of the U.S. Senate after the 2010 election and immediately took a lucrative position as Hollywood’s top lobbyist — chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Dodd, while at MPAA, called disgraced producer and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein a “very good friend” and led the charge for the notorious “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a censorious corporatist law fought off by a combination of grassroots efforts (Left and Right) and some powerful corporate opponents (such as Google).
Dodd has since left MPAA for a gig as a registered lobbyist at the storied K Street firm Arnold & Porter.
That’s a story in itself — Biden, who is feebly pretending to reject lobbyist influence, has a lobbyist on his vice presidential search committee.
But Dodd isn’t just another senator turned lobbyist. In his days on Capitol Hill, Dodd embodied the incestuous coziness between congressional power and K Street influence.
The Center for Responsive Politics’s Revolving Door database lists how many staffers left for lobbying or other industry jobs from the offices of a given senator. A quick search shows 44 former Dodd aides in the database. For comparison, only three of the 100 current senators have more than that.
After he crafted the Dodd-Frank Act, sinking the provision most hated by big banks, Dodd’s staff migrated to K Street. The bill they crafted was immensely complex and intimately wove the private sector in with regulators. This made the staffers who wrote it become exceptionally valuable when they came out the other end of the revolving door. Also, after the bill passed, banking consolidation increased. Dodd, notably, was a top recipient of Wall Street PAC money in the 2010 election before he dropped out to cash out.
Back during the financial crisis, of course, Dodd had helped protect Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from oversight, while getting VIP loans from Countrywide, the most notorious peddler of subprime loans. Dodd was the top recipient of Fannie Mae money.
In 2008, Dodd introduced a housing bailout bill that congressional staffers called “the Bank of America Bill” because it was written by Bank of America, judging by lobbying documents the big bank was passing around the Hill.
In general, Dodd tied K Street and the Senate closer together. Now he’ll help Biden, also notoriously tight with K Street, pick a running mate.
