Chrysler and General Motors plan to keep lobbying the federal government, no matter that the feds are one of their biggest shareholders.
Chrysler renewed its lobbying contracts with two high-priced firms last month, new federal filings show. The automaker says it has no intention of suspending or retrenching its lobbying effort.
Meanwhile, General Motors, which has announced it will cancel all its outside lobbying contracts, is keeping its in-house lobbying operation running, maintaining its lobbying budget at perhaps 80 percent of its pre-bankruptcy level.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., has chastised these wards of the state for lobbying on the taxpayer dime. Specifically, he has assailed their continued membership in a business coalition advocating the type of energy constraints and subsidies in the Waxman-Markey climate change bill currently before Congress.
Taxpayers own 8 percent of Chrysler and 61 percent of General Motors, both of which have recently emerged from brief bankruptcies.
On June 3, the day after this column reported on General Motors’ continued lobbying of the federal government, that automaker announced it was canceling all of its contracts with outside lobbying firms, but would maintain its in-house lobbying operation.
GM paid outside firms $500,000 in the first quarter of 2009, which amounts to 17 percent of all its lobbying expenditures in those months. GM officials told me they expected some downsizing of the internal lobbying shop, which cost about $2 million in that same quarter.
Chrysler, meanwhile, still has hired guns on retainer. Venable LLP and Timmons & Co. both filed lobbying registrations in recent days listing Chrysler as the client. Timmons has represented Chrysler since at least 1999, and Chrysler originally retained Venable in April 2008.
A Chrysler lobbyist at Timmons told me his firm needed to file a new registration effective June 11 because the Chrysler that emerged from bankruptcy that day was a new corporate entity. Venable, similarly, terminated its representation of the old Chrysler — legally “Chrysler LLC” — June 10 and registered as a lobbyist for “Chrysler Group LLC.”
Asked about its lobbying, a Chrysler spokeswoman replied in an e-mail:
“There continues to be significant demand for education and information regarding Chrysler from legislators and government officials. These include responding to government requests for plant visits, explaining significant company decisions and preparing for various congressional hearings. All of this is lobbying under the law.”
Chrysler’s lobbyists at Timmons & Co. include veteran Republican operative William E. Timmons, who was a top staffer in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and was tapped last year to lead Sen. John McCain’s transition effort (which, of course, never happened). Larry Harlow, also a Republican lobbying for Chrysler at Timmons, was named one of the top 50 lobbyists this year by Washingtonian magazine.
Chrysler retained Venable last April to add Democrats to its stable. That account is headlined by Thomas Quinn, a Democratic operative going back to the days of Hubert Humphrey.
Quinn and Timmons have long left public service, but through Chrysler they are once again drawing a paycheck from taxpayers.
For Sensenbrenner, the top Republican on the House Select Committee on Global Warming, the automakers’ great lobbying offense is their continued membership in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business coalition lobbying for a cap-and-trade scheme on greenhouse gases.
Sensenbrenner has written to the Justice Department, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, asking whether any law or administration policy prohibited government-owned companies from continued lobbying.
Sensenbrenner voted against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill, which US-CAP helped draft, and which amounts to a tax increase because it would raise costs on all consumers. “Why should taxpayer dollars go towards a lobbying effort that advocates raising taxes?” Sensenbrenner wrote in a news release last week.
When told Tuesday of Chrysler’s renewing of its K Street contracts, Sensenbrenner replied in a written statement: “Taxpayers didn’t toss that lifeline so Chrysler could lobby the very government that saved the company from bankruptcy.”
Sensenbrenner added: “Chrysler should end its K Street lobbying contracts, pull out of other lobbying contracts like the US Climate Action Partnership, and focus on the business of building great American cars.”
Chrysler has made it clear it doesn’t intend to end these contracts. The upside: You, the taxpayer, now have your very own lobbyists.
