New Corporate Clout in the Capital

"I've been lobbying the House for seven years and I haven't seen the business community this organized before," says John Motley, congressional representative of the 500,000-member National Federation of Independent Business. With smoothly coordinated pressure, business lobbyists have managed to win exemptions from congressional committees on taxes on oil and gas use, and to defeat organized labor's bid to pass a common situs picketing bill that would have allowed a single union to shut down a construction site. Now the lobbyists are on the verge of their biggest victory: sidetracking the proposed Agency for Consumer Advocacy. A bill to set one up squeaked through a House committee last month by only a single vote, and the word is out in Washington that the agency is dead. Says Representative Benjamin Rosenthal, a New York Democrat: "This bill is the victim of the most intense lobbying campaign in the 15 years I've been here."

Kiwanians and Lions. The new business effectiveness is the product of a new cohesion among the main lobbying groups (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the N.F.I.B. and the elite Business Roundtable), new tactics and a new awareness by executives that they need to make their voice heard on Capitol Hill. Though some experts trace the speedup in business lobbying efforts to 1973, when AFL-CIO President George Meany's call for election of a "vetoproof Congress prodded corporate leaders into action, all agree that the biggest spur was the election of Jimmy Carter. Says the N.F.I.B.'s Motley: "With Ford in there we could count on vetoes. Now we can't."

The sense of urgency has prompted business lobbyists to use more aggressive tactics. On the common situs bill, explains Forrest Rettgers, executive vice president of the NAM, "we overlooked nothing." Rettgers even lobbied black Congressmen, whom business groups previously had ignored, telling them that minority contractors, who employ mainly nonunion workers, would be hurt by the bill's passage.

In both that campaign and the one against the consumer protection agency, business lobbyists also roused the folks back home to put heat on Congress. They formed Southern businessmen's groups to exhort Dixie House members, and some corporations sent letters to stockholders urging them to write to Congressmen in opposition to the consumer agency. Says Andrew Biemiller, chief AFL-CIO lobbyist: "One thing they can do is flood that goddamned Hill with letters." Motley adds that the N.F.I.B. can turn out "local auto dealers, local accountants and dry cleaners, hardware dealers, dairymen--Kiwanians, Lions, church people. When we tell a Congressman, 'we've got 600 members in your district'--that's different."

A good example of the new coordination of business lobbyists is the battle against the consumer protection bill. It is being directed by the Consumer Issues Working Group, which represents some 130 trade associations and corporations. Strategy is crafted by a 20-member steering committee headed by Emmett W. Hines Jr.. Armstrong Cork's Washington representative, with assistance from Bryce Harlow, Procter & Gamble's shrewd lobbyist and onetime legislative aide to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon. The Chamber of Commerce and NAM are working more closely together than ever before: some of their members lunch regularly with President Carter's domestic affairs counselor Stuart Eizenstat and Commerce Secretary Juanita Kreps.

Job for Jaworski. A final reason for business's new political clout is that chief executives of the giant corporations, rather than leaving the job to lower-echelon aides, are taking a personal hand in the lobbying through the Business Roundtable. It now consists of 180 chief executives, including such luminaries as Chairmen Thomas Murphy of General Motors, Reginald Jones of General Electric, John deButts of A.T. & T. and James Ferguson of General Foods. Besides personally buttonholing Congressmen on the consumer protection bill, the Roundtable members hired former Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski to write opposing letters to members of the House Government Operations Committee. The group has task forces at work developing policy on energy, taxes and the environment, and Roundtable Chairman Irving Shapiro, DuPont's chief executive, helped frame legislation limiting the involvement of U.S. corporations in the Arab boycott of Israel.

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