The National Association of Realtors has 750,000 members, agents who live in dread of Washington doing something really dumb to the housing market. The National Rifle Association has a roster of 2.8 million sportsmen, collectors and gun owners who are anxious about Congress closing more of those proverbial loopholes further restricting the rights of honest citizens to keep and bear arms. The Senate wisely rejected a plan, pushed by the president and other business bashers, to allow patients who think they ve been harmed by the denial of care to sue HMOs for punitive damages. Without a lobby to protect them from this political abuse, HMOs could have gone the way of the nuclear-power industry, reformed out of existence. To avoid this they exercise their constitutional right to petition Congress.
Lobbyists are wicked indeed.
But without them, many of us would be at the mercy of something infinitely worse government. Don Feder is an editorial writer for the Boston Herald and is nationally syndicated. The day before the election, almost the entire staff declared which presidential candidate they would be voting for and why. But it would be tremendously refreshing if all journalists were this honest around election time, and let us know their voting behaviors and rationales. What they do instead pretend that they re utterly nonpartisan and so is their work product is maddening in its perpetual dishonesty.