David Keene is a man of many hats. He’s best known to conservatives as head of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which describes itself as the oldest conservative advocacy group in the nation. He’s also a columnist for The Hill newspaper. Finally, he’s a managing associate of the Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm.
Recently he’s also been the target of a tough letter signed by 33 House Republicans, including Sue Myrick, chairman of the Republican Study Committee. “The individual actions of Mr. Keene have placed in doubt the ACU’s commitment to” conservative principles, they wrote.
They were objecting to Keene’s endorsement of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, a liberal Republican, over his conservative primary challenger, Rep. Pat Toomey. Keene called Specter a “standup guy” despite his “anemic” 47 percent rating from the ACU. Toomey received a “spectacular” 97 percent, which was still not good enough to garner Keene’s endorsement.
Specter just made that impossible case even harder for Keene to make when he announced his opposition to a bill that would offer $13 million dollars to Washington, D.C.’s public schools and another $13 million towards vouchers. Evidently Specter isn’t willing to stand up for the District’s struggling students (even though California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein, among others, is).
The problem appears to stem from Keene’s work as a lobbyist. As Ramesh Ponnuru recently pointed out, Keene has business before Senate panels chaired by Specter.
This is not the first time Keene’s commitment to conservatism has been called into question. Since 1998, Keene has lobbied on behalf of Citizens for State Power (CSP), a coalition of interests opposed to federal energy deregulation. In the late 1990s, Keene and fellow ACU board members Craig Shirley and Grover Norquist lobbied against federal energy deregulation. With the help of Shirley’s public-relations firm, Citizens for State Power produced a number of anti-deregulation ads that claimed federal involvement violated the traditionally conservative notion of states’ rights.
With billions at stake, lobbyists of every persuasion wanted a piece of the pot. While Keene and Citizens for State Power were lobbying Republicans with their concern for states rights, the Electric Utility Shareholder’s Alliance (EUSA) used populist rhetoric to lobby Democrats against federal involvement. So much money changed hands during the debate that it led one lobbyist to remark in CQ Weekly that it was a “two-Lexus issue,” referring to the number of cars lobbyists could each afford for their efforts.
Most conservatives — including many Republican congressional leaders and experts from conservative think tanks — agreed that federal deregulation was necessary to resolve interstate issues and introduce competition into what many previously considered a “natural monopoly.” They agreed that only federal legislation would foster free market competition and lower energy prices for consumers while state efforts would preserve the utility monopolies. Keene, Shirley, and Norquist quickly found themselves siding with Ralph Nader and liberal organizations like People for the American Way and the Public Citizen.
Even stranger was the fact that Keene involved the ACU in the deregulation debate at all. With other controversial issues — like the compromise between free trade and protectionism — Keene has kept the ACU out of the fray.
“In years past, I did lobbying for The Limited, which is a free-trade company,” says Keene. “There was always the possibility that the ACU would be charged that I was coming down on one side because of my client. So the ACU just didn’t do anything about it.”
“This is not an issue of federal versus state regulation. It’s the government versus consumers,” says Adam Thierer of the Cato Institute. “Both sides are partially right on energy deregulation, but you quickly lose sight that the real enemy is government regulation on any level. What I’m more concerned about is when these groups make states-rights arguments and seem to have another agenda in mind.”
Months later, after deregulation efforts failed, the Washington Post reported that a secret coalition of nine state electric utilities funneled $17 million dollars into Citizens for State Power, and its liberal counterpart, the Electric Utility Shareholders Alliance. The campaign, which was known as “The Project,” created front groups in an effort to garner public opposition to deregulation.
At the height of the legislative battle, CSP ran radio ads attacking former Republican Representatives Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Rick White of Washington after they spearheaded the deregulation debate in the House. A memo obtained by the Post claimed that “For the first time in this debate there were palpable political consequences for appearing to support [deregulation]…In the case of Rick White, those consequences were direct and career threatening.” White, in fact, went on to lose his reelection bid.
“In my seven and a half years in Congress, that was the most unusual alignment I ever saw,” says Largent. “I saw people at the ACU, who are typically very conservative in their views, basically prostitute themselves to a monopoly. My experience is that there are few people in Washington that are pure, and David Keene is surely not one of them. To hide behind the moniker of the ACU and then hold some of the positions that he holds is wrong.”
While Citizens for State Power was attacking Republican legislators and opposing free market legislation, Keene used his position as chairman of the American Conservative Union to endorse the CSP agenda. Keene, who was actually working for CSP and the Carmen Group, signed a number of public letters as chairman of the ACU.
Keene explained that he was signing letters and lobbying as a private individual and that his role as chairman of the ACU was used only as a means of identification, not endorsement. But fellow ACU board member Steve Moore disagrees: “I think it’s impossible for him to have a separate political identity from the ACU.”
“Whatever issue you are on, there is a great deal of lobbying money on both sides,” says Keene. “The problem is that if you run an advocacy group, your greatest value is to someone you don’t agree with.”
That’s especially true when you’re willing to hire out your services. CSP paid Keene’s Carmen Group more than $160,000 in fees from 1998 to 2002, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms. Keene denies that he received any of CSP’s money directly, but admits that he is a salaried employee of the Carmen Group.
Keene and the ACU’s opposition to deregulation is not confined to energy. On a number of occasions Keene has lobbied against federal telecommunications deregulation using the same states rights mantra. Most recently, he wrote a letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell — on ACU letterhead — pressuring him to preserve states rights in telecom deregulation. Keene’s employer, the Carmen Group, had a $100,000 contract with AT&T, the deregulation proposal’s principal opponent. It is almost a certainty that Keene doesn’t describe these activities to his grassroots donors.
Finally, regarding Specter, nearly half of Keene’s clients in 2002 — and over $900,000 in income for the Carmen Group — involved lobbying in front of Specter’s various Senate committees. Little wonder he chose to endorse the Pennsylvania liberal, even at the expense of a conservative.
Perhaps Keene really does agree with CSP and AT&T on deregulation. If so, he is virtually alone among conservatives who have studied the issue closely. The trouble is that Keene’s public identity as a prominent conservative who runs the ACU is not separable from his other life as a lobbyist. Whenever Keene advocates against conservative principles on behalf of a client, many assume he represents the views of the ACU as a whole rather than the for-profit interests of the Carmen Group. On numerous occasions he identified himself as the ACU’s chairman, not as a representative of the Carmen Group or CSP, when writing about an issue of interest to his clients. Even his column in The Hill hasn’t consistently mentioned his affiliation with the Carmen Group, which happens to be a frequent advertiser in The Hill.
Keene risks permanently tarnishing the reputation of the ACU. Perhaps he put it best in his own newspaper column when he described the problem Larry Klayman created for Judicial Watch when he began to attack fellow Republicans: “The question is whether [Klayman] can get conservatives or others to continue to write checks to his operation while he attacks DeLay rather than Clinton. Whether one likes him or agrees with him, Larry Klayman has now put his future and that of the organization he founded on the line.”
So has Keene.
— James Justin Wilson is an NR intern.