Who's pulling the strings?

If you were hanging with CSpan with most of the health care reform debate  in the House, you probably noticed that whole gangs of members of Congress used the same language. 

They did.  Who was pulling their strings?  Guess!

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans...

...Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists.. 

Here's the machinery that distributed the talking points.

It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.The e-mail messages and their attached documents indicate that the statements were based on information supplied by Genentech employees to one of its lobbyists, Matthew L. Berzok, a lawyer at Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok who is identified as the “author” of the documents. The statements were disseminated by lobbyists at a big law firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

Here are some members of Congress who played Genentech's game, according to the Times.

Joe Wilson, R, South Carolina; Blaine Luetkemeyer, R, Missouri;  Philip Hare, D, Illinois;  Robert Brady, D, Pennsylvania; Yvette D.Clarke, D, New York;  Donald Payne, D. Missouri;  Michael Conaway, R, Texas;  Lynn Jenkins, R, Kansas; Lee Terry, R, Nebraska.

As the Times notes, there is nothing very unusual about this -- just the fact that this time these representatives and dozens more did little if anything to hide the fact that lobbyists were not just hanging over their shoulders but actually putting words in their mouths.

At least it's a nice clean country like Switzerland making our legislative sausage.