Lobbyists in Love

(2 of 2)

The glare of Jack Abramoff's indictment has highlighted many of the capital's more unsavory habits, and members of Congress have been eager, in an election year, to make a show of throwing away their perks. No junkets; no booze cruises; they will take a lunch only if it's a Happy Meal. But politics stops at the bedroom's edge. Post-Abramoff Sudden Virtue Syndrome has yet to result in a ban on the world's most obvious conflict of interest, one that is, in the words of Public Citizen director Frank Clemente, "way up there on the unseemly scale." "We live in a different world than we did 30 or 40 years ago, and people should recognize it," a would-be reformer told the New York Times.

The spectacle of lawmakers niggling over lunch guidelines and those surprisingly entertaining "educational trips" illustrates how much easier it is to spout rhetoric about honesty in public life than it is to live an actual public life in a city where conflicts of interest are just what make people interesting. Outlaw lobbying by spouses, and you'll greatly restrict the options for those who want to marry inside the Beltway but don't ever want to be "the wife." Marriage is a contract, but in Washington no less than anywhere else, it can't survive under conditions of full disclosure.

Ana Marie Cox is the author of the Washington novel Dog Days