Just one day after terrorists hijacked and crashed four commercial jets, lobbyists for the airline industry were already at work, laying the groundwork for a multibillion-dollar plan to rescue the industry.
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This time, a mere 24 hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, with the nation still shocked and grieving, the airlines moved quickly on the ground, if not in the air. By the evening of Sept. 12, the carriers had joined in a unified effort to persuade Congress they needed federal aid.
The airlines had plenty of resources to draw on: 27 in-house lobbyists, augmented by lobbyists from 42 Washington firms. The lineup included former White House aides and transportation secretaries, retired members of the House and Senate, and a former Republican National Committee chairman, Haley Barbour. The airlines also had at their disposal a Continental Airlines lobbyist, Rebecca Cox, who is a former Reagan administration official and the wife of Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican.
And in the front lines were the airlines' own chief executives, well known in the halls of Congress, and corporate board members -- many of whom were Bush campaign contributors. Among them were Donald J. Carty, the chief executive of AMR, the parent of American Airlines, and Gordon Bethune, chief executive of Continental, both of whom are based in Texas and have known Mr. Bush well for years, and Leo F. Mullin, chief executive of Delta Air Lines.
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Not everyone approved of the industry's aggressive tactics in seeking more money than it lost in the three-day shutdown while excluding its own employees from the bailout.
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As a result, on the night of Sept. 14, at a time when House members had been told to go home for the day, a two-page bill that would have authorized Congress to give the industry $12.5 billion almost passed by unanimous consent in a nearly empty House chamber around midnight.
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Many of these board members were also big campaign contributors. American's board members alone gave $148,200 to Republicans in the last presidential election, while the boards of four airlines -- Delta, United Airlines, Continental and American -- gave a total of $712,569 in soft-money donations to both parties. And, American gave another $100,000 to the Bush inauguration.
A United board member, Richard McCormick, gave Republicans $98,000, A Continental board member, Richard W. Pogue, gave Republicans $40,000 and David Bonderman, also on the Continental board, gave $110,000 to the Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group.
The airlines also benefited from the push for the bailout bill provided by airline executives, like Mr. Carty of American and Mr. Mullin of Delta, who routinely work the halls of Congress themselves and made personal visits throughout Washington. One reason they were well received: since 1998, the industry over all has given $7.4 million to Republican candidates and committees, and $4.6 million to Democrats.
In what some lobbyists called a master stroke, the airline industry was able to double the amount of direct aid it had initially sought by agreeing to forgo loan guarantees, which they ultimately got anyhow.
Meanwhile, even in a Democratic-controlled Senate, the pleas of organized labor to protect airline employees were pretty much ignored. ''We are upset that the crisis with the airline workers was not addressed along with the crisis with the airlines,'' said William Samuel, a lobbyist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O.