Jeb Bush Takes Aim at Revolving Door in Washington

Republican presidential candidate, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, speaks at the Florida State University Conference Center in Tallahassee, Fla., Monday, July 20, 2015. He said the problems in Washington were similar and would be unacceptable if he were president. “The overspending, the overreaching, the arrogance and sheer incompetence has been accepted for too long”.

He kicked off what his campaign is calling a series of domestic policy speeches about how he will change the culture of what he calls “Mount Washington”, over which his father and brother presided for roughly half of the last quarter-century when they were president. When he was governor Bush referred to state government as “Mount Tallahassee”. Congress authorized presidential line-item vetoes in 1996, but the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled the law unconstitutional. “No more doling out raises across the board”, he said.

He wants to prohibit former members of Congress from engaging in lobbying activities for six years following the end of their term.

Bush also said he cracked down on lobbying in Florida and would do the same if elected president.

The changes would have an adverse affect on Washington’s $3.2 billion lobbying industry, and several former lawmakers-turned-lobbyists dismissed Bush’s ideas as unworkable.

“It doesn’t matter who’s the cause of all this”, Bush said. He suggested that online reporting requirements would violate the constitutional right to petition the government.

A Democratic National Committee spokeswoman called Bush’s “talk of government reform nothing but thin air”.

“It sounds good – just like President Obama’s proposals sounded good not to hire former lobbyists – but then he ended up depriving his administration of some very good talent”, he said.

“Should I win this election, you will not find me deferring to the settled ways of “Mount Washington”, Bush says in excerpts released early Monday”. It looks like Bush is trying to counter the anti-establishment claims of Republican rivals like Donald Trump, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz.

[Raising money is a Jeb Bush family business for Jeb Bush – even for the next generation].

Also in attendance were longtime Republican political consultants Rich Heffley and Marc Reichelderfer, who made headlines recently after their emails were cited by the Florida Supreme Court as evidence the state’s congressional maps violated anti-gerrymandering provisions. He’s also garnered support from lobbyists at major companies, such as Microsoft, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, and Hewlett-Packard, the Post reported.

The Republican also said he wants a law that would increase the amount of time between lawmakers leaving the House and Senate and becoming lobbyists. Aides said they were “crunched for time”, but would not discuss where the campaign is headed after the Tallahassee stop.