K Street in Brief

Tough sell 

With gas topping off at over $4 a gallon, now may not be the best time to launch a campaign to convince Congress to raise the price even higher by increasing the gas tax — a fact that advocates of more road and bridge construction acknowledged on Monday during a press conference.

Tom Donahue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said at the launch of the Americans for Transportation Mobility Coalition’s FasterBetterSafer campaign that a tax hike isn’t realistic in the near term given how much of a strain current gas prices are having on families.

{mosads}But the coalition, which includes transportation officials, business executives and union leaders, is pressing forward anyway, arguing that lawmakers will eventually have to face the reality: A gas tax hike is necessary in order to maintain the United States’ economic competitiveness.

“I sometimes think politicians look out the window and see an airplane fly by or see a truck on the highway and think we’re doing great,” Donahue said.

The coalition believes that the country is not doing great, or even very good, at addressing glaring transportation needs. It launched its campaign to highlight the nation’s infrastructure deficiencies that create congestion, delaying the delivery of goods and wasting nearly 3 billion gallons of gasoline annually. The campaign is intended to soften public resistance to the gas tax, with lawmakers scheduled to debate another highway bill next year.

Investing in infrastructure is necessary to stay competitive internationally, advocates argued. If the United States continues to shortchange transportation, countries like Russia, China, India and those in the European Union are “going to eat our lunch, our breakfast and our dinner in the marketplace,” said Peter Ruane, president and CEO of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

Despite what they see as glaring transportation needs, so far Congress and presidential candidates have ignored the problems, they argue. Or worse.

Asked what he thought of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s (Ariz.) proposal of a gas tax holiday for the summer, the blunt-speaking Donahue didn’t disappoint. He called the idea “stupid.”

Rebecca Brown

Air wars 

Airlines are fighting the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan for them to start collecting fingerprints from foreign travelers exiting the United States.

In comments filed Monday, the Air Transport Association (ATA), which represents U.S. airlines, said the proposed DHS rule would greatly increase costs for a troubled industry already struggling with higher fuel prices. DHS estimates it would cost airlines $3.5 billion over 10 years, but some airlines have said it will be much more expensive.

ATA also argues that collecting the fingerprints of travelers is a responsibility of the government, and not private industry. It charges that Congress never intended for airlines to do the work, and that DHS should take on the responsibility.

“DHS seems intent on ignoring Congress’s clear direction that the department be responsible for fingerprint collection, and DHS continues to unfairly try to shrug this responsibility onto the airlines,” said James May, the CEO and president of ATA.

DHS’s mandate is to implement the program by June 30, 2009, although a spokeswoman said it could implement it earlier. Spokeswoman Anna Hinken said DHS would consider ATA’s comments, and that a final rule would be issued in the fall.

Ian Swanson

Opening the books 

Oxfam America and other nonprofit human-rights groups are pushing a bill that would require oil and gas and mining companies to disclose more information about the contracts they enter into with foreign governments.

The House Financial Services Committee is holding a hearing on the legislation, which has been pushed by Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), this Thursday.

Ian Gary, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on extractive industries, said the bill would shine more light on how much governments collect for allowing access to their countries’ resources. That added transparency will help show if revenues are being “squandered, siphoned off for corrupt purposes or poorly managed,” Gary said, and could pressure governments to clean up their act.

Under the bill, any company that registers with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including those based overseas, would have to provide more information in SEC filings on the value of the contracts they enter into.

Jim Snyder

K street awash in drug money 

Big Pharma spent an eyebrow-raising $168 million on lobbying last year, according to research conducted by the Center for Public Integrity .

That sum represents a 32 percent increase over 2006 and brings the pharmaceutical industry’s tally for lobbying spending to more than $1 billion over the past 10 years, the watchdog group reported Tuesday.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America , a trade group, led the way with $22.7 million in lobbying expenditures in 2007. The drug or biotechnology companies Amgen , Pfizer , Roche , Sanofi-aventis , GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson followed with spending ranging from $16.3 million to $7.7 million. The sector’s second-largest trade group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization , was next with $7.2 million spent.

The report says spending rose because of the Democratic takeover of Congress after the 2006 elections, which elevated to power lawmakers more hostile to the industry than were their Republican counterparts.

The results, the report concludes, speak for the themselves. The Democratic Congress considered numerous bills strongly opposed by the industry but did not pass them; examples include permitting the importation of prescription drugs from abroad and changing patent law. The industry also achieved some of its major objectives, such as a Food and Drug Administration reauthorization law and considerations in international trade agreements.

“The central point is that their massive spending has been highly successful, largely producing the political results the drug industry wants,” said Bill Buzenberg, the executive director of the center.

Jeffrey Young

Taking the Internet’s temperature

Internet viewers seeking healthcare horror stories won’t go to Michael Moore’s website but to a new one launched by a conservative think tank, if the organization has its way.

BigGov.com , founded by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, is packed with articles, videos and other material designed to show the darker side of the government-run healthcare systems in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom.

“Healthcare reform must improve medical care. With a government-run system, we’d be getting exactly the opposite,” lobbyist and former Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) said in a statement from the center.

The website is positioned as a counterweight to Democratic policymakers and liberal activists who favor increasing the government’s role in the provisions of health coverage to reduce the number of uninsured people.

“Socialized medicine” is anathema to free-market conservatives, and the right wing has been increasingly aggressive in recent years at trying to halt what they see as the creeping encroachment of government into the healthcare system.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest also has been highly critical of the healthcare reform proposals of presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and other Democrats. The group’s vice president, Robert Goldberg, recently described Obama’s plan as “medicine by bureaucrats” in an op-ed in the Washington Times.

J.Y.