WASHINGTON - Just how important were last week's Glass-Steagall hearings?
Important enough that an hour before the start of the House Commerce subcommittee banking reform meetings last Tuesday and Thursday, scores of people were lined up and down the hall and around the corner in the Rayburn House Office Building, waiting to get in.
But not as important as a telecommunications hearing, at least judging by how much people were willing to pay for a spot in the line. A Commerce Committee telecommunications session last month drew four dozen professional line-waiters who showed up outside the Rayburn House Office Building 42 hours before the session was scheduled to begin.
In the line-waiting pecking order of Capitol Hill, banking is big. But it's not huge, as was telecommunications this year or health care last year.
"The Glass-Steagall reform, that's been very, very popular this year," said Chris Van Horne, who pioneered the business of paying people with nothing better to do than to save places in line for lobbyists who do.
Mr. Van Horne said his CVK Group had people waiting outside the Rayburn Building five to six hours before the Banking Committee's Glass-Steagall "markup" earlier this month. John Likens, a former CVK manager who now runs competitor Congressional Services Co., said his employees were in line by midnight before the hearings.
A markup is a time when congressional panels go through bills, section by section, voting on amendments. It is, understandably, when lobbyists feel the greatest need to be on hand.
"Markups are the money hearings," said Ron Ence, director of legislative affairs for the Independent Bankers Association of America. "That's when the pencil meets the paper."
So even at prices of $25 to $32 per hour per person, Mr. Ence and other bank lobbyists have no qualms about paying the line-waiters to make sure they get in.
"They're not exorbitant," said Floyd Stoner, director of federal legislative operations for the American Bankers Association.
Said Mr. Ence: "We have to make a value judgment as to whether it's a more prudent use of a lobbyist's time to be in the office ... or standing in the corridor waiting in line," Mr. Ence said.
Another value judgment - whether it's proper for lobbyists to be able to pay their way into crucial hearings, effectively closing them to the public - is something Congress has wrestled with repeatedly since Mr. Van Horne got into the business in 1990, but never resolved.
Last month's big lines, and a front-page Washington Post story on the phenomenon, stirred renewed criticism of the practice.
The House Republican leadership has made noises about abolishing the practice. And at least one lawmaker took a hard stand against it a few years ago.
That was in 1991, when the House Banking Committee was considering two crucial Community Reinvestment Act amendments, including one that would exempt small banks. A group of community activists rode a bus all night from St. Louis to attend the session and protest the CRA measure.
The group arrived at 5:30 in the morning, but the activists found themselves waiting in line behind the professionals. That was too much for the panel's chairman, Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, D-Tex.
The banking committee chambers, he said, belong to the people and seats are not for sale. To cheers, he led the activists in ahead of the line- waiters.
Mr. Likens isn't worried, however.
"A couple of congressman have mentioned that they want to do something about it," he said. "I think it was just with the large groups camping out outside for the telecom hearing. ... Once that's over it should die down, as it has in the past."
