Party For Sale

Paul Waldman
November 08, 2005

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.

With all the goings-on in Washington over the last couple of weeks, from the withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination to the indictments of Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby, the story that may reveal the most about the nature of Republican power has been advancing along with little notice. But the Jack Abramoff scandal— about which even more questionable behavior was revealed last week through hearings in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee—is indispensable for understanding just how Washington works under GOP rule.

No one can blame the Indian tribes who retained Abramoff to do their lobbying for thinking he was the guy who could get things done in Washington, with his extraordinary friendships among the Republican ruling class. But in the process of buying access and influence, Abramoff, with the help of a supporting cast of sleazy operators, also appears to have swindled the tribes out of tens of millions of dollars.