Revolving Door: Chuck Grassley aide cashes out to ethanol lobby after mandate win

I remember that when I first went to Capitol Hill right after college (2000, It was a brief stay) I was struck by the number of Republicans who had no interest really in shrinking the state. Most seemed, like their Dem compatriots, more interested in working the system to fatten their wallets. I should have known. I shouldn’t have been so naive. But I was. I was a child of the Reagan Revolution and I actually thought, even in 2000, that the GOP was actually “the party of small government.”

I learned.

(From The Washington Examiner)

To the victor goes the spoils, and to the winner of a protracted policy battle between legislators and administration bureaucrats over mandated levels of biodiesel usage goes a lucrative gig at a biofuels trade association.

The National Biodiesel Board announced Monday that Kurt Kovarik, a legislative director for Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, will join the group in the new year as vice president of federal affairs — that is, the top lobbyist…

…To keep the Environmental Protection Agency from effectively cutting a mandate forcing biofuels on Americans, Grassley recruited Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Deb Fischer of Nebraska to bully the administration. While Kovarik was legislative director, the trio from corn producing states held up Trump’s EPA nominees. You’ve got a nice little agency here, they wrote in so many words to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

And it worked.

Click here for the article.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/