Word: congressmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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House Republican Whip Trent Lott of Mississippi and a delegation of GOP congressmen met with Reagan to discuss how to marshal votes for the aid package. Lott said Reagan promised to provide details on negotiating efforts with the Sandinistas...
...bring top Government officials together with private businessmen. "Facilitator" Canzeri puts on charitable events to burnish corporate images, like a celebrity tennis tournament that drew scores of Washington lobbyists and netted $450,000 for Nancy Reagan's antidrug campaign. Lobbyists, not surprisingly, work hard not just at re-electing Congressmen but also at befriending them. Congressman Tony Coelho of California describes the methods of William Cable, a former Carter Administration aide who lobbies for Timmons & Co. "Three out of four times," says Coelho, "he talks to you not about lobbying, but about sports, or tennis--I play...
...Congressmen often find themselves being lobbied by their former colleagues. More than 200 ex-Congressmen have stayed on in the capital to represent interest groups, sometimes lobbying on the same legislation they helped draft while serving in office. Former Congressmen are free to go onto the floor of Congress and into the cloakrooms, though they are not supposed to lobby there. "Well, they don't call it lobbying," shrugs Senator Pryor. "They call it visiting. But you know exactly what they're there...
...Congressmen became more independent of committee chairmen and party chieftains, they have tended to listen more to the folks back home. Predictably, however, lobbyists have skillfully found ways to manipulate so- called grass-roots support. Direct-mail outfits, armed with computer banks that are stocked with targeting groups, can create "instant constituencies" for special-interest bills. To repeal a 1982 provision requiring tax withholding on dividends and interest, the small banks and thrifts hired a mass-mailing firm to launch a letter-writing campaign that flooded congressional offices with some 22 million pieces of mail. The bankers' scare tactics were...
With Congress facing painful cutbacks in domestic spending, assistance to "freedom fighters" halfway around the globe is not the most popular issue on the Hill. In addition, many Congressmen feel that the President has been unable to muster much popular enthusiasm for his Central American policies in particular and the Reagan Doctrine in general. House Speaker Tip O'Neill called the President's Grenada visit "a Hollywood kickoff to a greater military involvement in Nicaragua." He warned, "Equipping (the contras) and sending them into battle will lead to nothing but slaughter and humiliation. The shame of that defeat will bring...