Privatizing American Policy: Race, Class, and the Explosion of Lobbying in the United States

There has been an explosion in lobbying over the last 25 years, which has had critical consequences for socioeconomic inequality in the United States. Scholars often link this explosion to a decline in the legislative capacity of Congress — defined as the organizational resources that are necessary for Congress to perform its constitutional role. In particular, they point to the election of Newt Gingrich, the Republican takeover of the 104th Congress, and 1995 H. Res. 6 “Contract with America: Bill of Accountability" — which reduced Committee staff by one-third — as a critical moment in the decline in legislative capacity. Overlooked in this discussion, however, is the political context in which the ‘Bill of Accountability’ was introduced. Drawing on a textual analysis of a mix of 40 speeches and Congressional records from key designers of the Contract With America, we argue that ‘Bill of Accountability’ was part a larger Republican movement to stop the growth of government and privatize American policy making. We show that the Bill was not only contemporaneous with other privatization bills of the 1990s, it was also framed through the use of deeply racist and classist rhetoric that obscured it's real goal: for the complete reconstruction of American Government into a less effective, less capable entity, and the empowerment of the private sector.