In the July/August 2010 issue of Washington Monthly, James Verini writes Show Him The Money, about how Tom Donahue and the US Chamber of Commerce raises (from corporations and Republicans, through scare techniques) and spends its huge lobbying dollars.

The “ask” works. In 2009 the Chamber doled out somewhere in the area of $120 million on lobbying alone, five times what its nearest cohort, Exxon Mobil, spent. Much of that money went to an advertising and grassroots blitz attacking the congressional health care legislation, making the Chamber very likely the biggest spender in the debate. In the weeks leading up to health care’s passage in March, it was spending $800,000 a day trying to defeat the Democratic legislation. Livid that the law went through, the Chamber has now pledged to funnel $50 million—more than twice as much as the entire cash holdings of the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee put together (as of late May)—into an estimated forty House races and ten Senate races this fall. About eight of every ten dollars of Chamber political donations go to Republicans.

With such torrents of Chamber money raining down on the political process, it’s rather ironic that many Americans believe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be part of the government. But, in a way, it’s also fitting. With its legions of lobbyists, policy analysts, economists, and attorneys, its own rapid-response media center and law firm, its hundreds of international chapters and steady stream of officials, legislators, and foreign potentates flowing through its immense bronze-relief doors on H Street, the Chamber does act like a federal agency—or like a third political party on permanent campaign. “The Chamber views itself as a shadow-government policymaking body,” a former Chamber economist, Lawrence Hunter, said.

Such policy, of late, has consisted of mounting major battles against regulatory initiatives emanating from the Obama White House. In addition to doing its best to block health care legislation, the Chamber also tried desperately to fend off the financial reform bill passed by the Senate on May 21. Meanwhile, its campaign to influence environmental legislation has relied in part on casting doubt on the exigency, even the existence, of climate change. …

I asked Donohue what, exactly, the Chamber does. “Two fundamental things,” he replied. “We’re advocates. Sure we do studies, sure we do events, sure we do meetings, sure we have all kinds of stuff, but we’re advocates.” And then he surprised me again with his candor. “The second thing we do is really more interesting,” he said. “We’re the reinsurance industry for individual industry associations and state chambers of commerce and people of that nature.” An example, said Donohue, was when Wall Street found itself on the defensive in opposing new banking regulations. “They can’t move forward, they can’t move back, or maybe they’re being overrun, and they’ll come to us and say, ‘Can we collect our reinsurance?’” he explained. “And then we build coalitions and go out and help them.”

-RichardH