Roy Blunt Used Highway Bill To Punish Anti-CAFTA Votes

Last week, Fired Up! reported that Rep. Roy Blunt (R-K Street) acknowledged using taxpayer dollars as a form of political piggybank, to buy votes for unrelated measures.

But it is only now becoming clear just how extensively Blunt used that tactic.

This weekend, the Danville (Va.) Register Bee, carried a report that says Blunt used the highway bill to punish those Republican members who didn't tow the party line on the recent CAFTA vote.

U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode’s vote against the Central American Free Trade Agreement may have nearly cost Danville $5 million for replacing Robertson Bridge - roughly one sixth of the project’s $30 million price tag.

More:

The National Journal also reported that Farmville, N.C., U.S. Rep. Walter Jones and Rochester, Minn., U.S. Rep. Gil Gutknecht saw similar cuts in funding for their local projects. Both Republicans were also staunch CAFTA opponents.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri told the National Journal last week that “the highway bill had been effective as leverage for CAFTA,” but neither Goode nor National Journal reporter Darren Goode could get a definitive answer connecting the transportation funding cuts with opposition to CAFTA.

Submitted by Roy Temple on August 8, 2005 - 9:39am
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Blunt seems none too shy about copping...

Submitted by Jeff Mazur on August 8, 2005 - 10:56am.

...to this sort of thing, which is equally disturbing.  In the days immediately following the CAFTA vote, the Washington Post quoted Blunt about the transport-pork-for-trade-votes scheme, sounding unconcerned:

Meanwhile, House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican responsible for rounding up party votes in the House, told reporters "it didn't hurt" that Congress was putting the finishing touches on a federal highway bill at the same time that the House was voting on CAFTA.

"It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility" that lawmakers would tie their votes on CAFTA to getting certain projects in the highway bill, Blunt said.

"But we don't do near as much of that as people think," he added.

Other coverage of the CAFTA vote just reminds us further of the close-knit relationship between Roy Blunt and corporate industry lobbyists.  A story in Roll Call (subscription only) describes the scene in Blunt's office leading up to the vote:

It was perhaps fitting that on the night of the vote, many of the lobbyists, including Hellmann and Wenk, camped out in Room 326 of the Capitol — part of Blunt’s suite of offices — which had been the location, in the weeks leading up to the vote, of many meetings between the Whip operation and outside lobbyists.

Lobbyists who were there on the night of the vote described it as a war room atmosphere, packed with more than 30 lobbyists who watched C-SPAN and devised last-minute strategies.

In the months leading up to the vote, a small group, known as a steering committee, would meet every week in Blunt’s office to strategize and gather intelligence about where Members stood on the issue. Those meetings generally took place mid-morning on Mondays. The lobbyists who attended included Hellmann, Wenk, Kirsten Chadwick, the lead vote counter for Republican Members and her Democratic counterpart, Steven Champlin of the Duberstein Group.

Fitting, indeed.  Ought we not expect Roy Blunt's Capitol office to look like the lobby of Barbour Griffith and Rogers for the months approaching a big vote?  Little wonder that his office is full of big-business arm-twisters when we consider that even his boudoir is stocked with its own tobacco-industry lobbyist. 

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