Chamber Gears Up for Battle

With Democrats in control of Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will have to play defense on most issues this year.

But Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s CEO and president, made it clear today that the Chamber will use all of the weapons in its gold-plated arsenal to elect pro-business candidates in this fall’s congressional elections.

“This year, we plan to organize and carry out the largest, most aggressive voter-education and issue-advocacy effort in our nearly 100-year history,” Donohue said during his annual State of American Business address.

Even though President Barack Obama and his aides took some pot shots at the Chamber last year, the Chamber has no plans to get involved in presidential politics. It hasn’t done that in the past and won’t in the future, Donohue said.

“We have people from the administration in this building almost every day,” Donohue said. “We get along with them fine.”

Congress, however, is a different story, politically.

“As Americans choose a new House and new senators this fall, the Chamber will highlight lawmakers and candidates who support a pro-jobs agenda and hold accountable those who don’t,” Donohue said.

In most, but not all, of these cases, the “pro-jobs” candidates will be a Republican, based on the Chamber’s past record.

“We aim to create a new dynamic in this country so that every time a lawmaker is prepared to take a position or cast a vote, he or she first stops and considers—is this going to strengthen free enterprise and create jobs?” Donohue said. “Or will it undermine economic freedom and destroy jobs?”

Despite some improvement in the economy, businesses are hesitant to hire again because of uncertainty created by Congress, he said. Here’s what America’s “job creators” face, in Donohue’s words:

“They see massive tax increases on the horizon—not just the expiration of the tax cuts passed over the last decade, but also hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes. They see health care legislation that contains a burdensome mandate on employers and virtually no meaningful reforms to quality or control costs."

“They see a climate-change bill and potential EPA regulations that could significantly raise energy prices and impose new layers of bureaucracy on their organizations. They see financial-services legislation moving forward that could choke off their access to capital at a time when lending is already very tight.”

Donohue could go on—and did—citing the Chamber’s usual villains: union leaders seeking labor-law changes so they can “control the workplace,” trial lawyers looking to “expand opportunities for new litigation,” and trade isolationists threatening companies’ export markets.

He could have added bailed-out Wall Street firms that award outrageous bonuses to their executives after being rescued by American taxpayers, but no, Donohue doesn’t have much of a problem with that.

“There are numbers that seem obscene to the average person and maybe me,” he conceded, when asked about these bonuses. But executive compensation should be up to a company’s board of directors, not the U.S. government, he said. Plus, these are “unique individuals” who are “very mobile” and could take their talents elsewhere.

Bonuses are just one issue, but the Chamber’s “business right or wrong” stance demonstrates why its political efforts often come up short, as they did in 2006 and 2008. Republicans may be poised to gain seats in the House and Senate because of voter anxiety about big government, but defending Wall Street bonuses is not going to get them there.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.