The law is littered with abuses like the bankruptcy bill: measures that benefit a narrow economic interest at the expense of the broader public good. Most Democrats, like Biden, are smart enough to oppose most of them. But there's almost always a Democratic senator or two willing to shill for their home state industry's favorite abusive privilege.
When the Enron scandal broke, for instance, it came out that a few Democrats had joined Republicans to help the accounting and financial industry stave off sensible regulations during the 1990s. New York's Charles Schumer helped fight off efforts to bar accounting firms from receiving lucrative consulting deals from the same firms they audit -- a practice whose inherent conflicts were made notorious by the misdeeds of the firm Arthur Andersen. Connecticut Democrats Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd shamelessly do the insurance industry's bidding.
On the other hand, Northeasterners like Lieberman and Schumer staunchly impose tougher mileage requirements on the auto industry. Alas, the auto industry staunchly opposes such requirements, and therefore so does Carl Levin of Michigan, normally a supporter of such liberal causes as a clean environment.
There's plenty more. Rural Democrats can always be relied on to support giveaways to agribusiness. Washington Democrat Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an old New Deal liberal, was known in his day as "the senator from Boeing."
The trouble here is that the relationship each Democrat has with his home-state business interests is the relationship every Republican has with every business interest. The bankruptcy bill enjoys unanimous GOP support in the Senate. It's a familiar pattern: Noxious laws enjoy support from a coalition of all the Republicans plus a rotating handful of Democrats who have ties to interested parties. Almost all the Democrats are on the side of the angels on almost every issue. But it doesn't take many Democratic defectors to give the Republicans a majority.
The ultimate problem is that even liberal Democrats consider being in the pocket of a home-state industry an acceptable indulgence. A little bit of shame might go a long way.
