Charles Town resident Matt Lewis pens book on money in politics – Parkersburg News

Matt Lewis (Photo Provided)

CHARLESTON — West Virginia is no stranger to rich politicians running for office or lawmakers getting rich while in office.

But a new book by Jefferson County-based political writer Matt Lewis takes aim at the most egregious examples nationwide and how to bring reform.

Lewis, a senior columnist for The Daily Beast, a MSNBC contributor and host of the podcast “Matt Lewis and the News,” is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing in on America.” The book is available for pre-order and will be out on July 18.

“Filthy Rich Politicians” takes a look at the national phenomena of millionaires, and in some cases billionaires, who are recruited to run for office, as well as the career politicians who use their perches to get rich themselves.

“It’s about how the rich get elected and the elected get rich,” Lewis said in a phone interview from his home in Charles Town. “Although I think both parts of the story are interesting and important, obviously I think the most important and probably the most concerning is the fact that people who get elected tend to get richer.”

According to a 2018 review of the income and assets of members of Congress by Quartz, the median congressional lawmaker was worth approximately $1.1 million, or more than 12 times that of the typical median household in the United States. According to OpenSecrets, which tracks congressional political donations and financial reports, the top 10% of the richest members of Congress in 2020 have three times the wealth of 90% of the remaining members of Congress.

“For many, many years, politicians have been richer than the rest of us … and that gap has been widening for about the last four decades,” Lewis said. “I think the trend is actually for members of Congress: the people’s house, the lower chamber. And that is where we have seen in the last several decades this gap. Now it’s the case that the average member of Congress is a millionaire, while the average American salary is something like $56,000 a year. I’m sure it’s lower in West Virginia.”

In “Filthy Rich Politicians,” Lewis makes the case that the growing wealth of members of Congress is adding to the perception among a restless electorate that the system is a rigged one, leading to more extreme politicians, such as former president Donald Trump and others.

“It speaks to why Donald Trump’s message has really resonated,” Lewis said. “He talks about the game being rigged and draining the swamp. Part of the reason that resonates is that I think there really is a sense that the game is rigged and that people who are in powerful positions are able to leverage those positions to get richer, to get wealthier. I think that is really the part of the story that’s toxic and feeds the perception that the game is rigged.”

One of the ways Lewis says in “Filthy Rich Politicians” that members of Congress grow richer is by playing the stock market, sometimes using information they learn through the course of their work on committees and other meetings to make trades perfectly timed to make them money.

According to a 2022 New York Times article, 97 congressional lawmakers reported making trades in companies they interact with in committees or other work on Capitol Hill.

No law prevents members of Congress from insider trading, though there have been efforts, including the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (E.T.H.I.C.S.) Act led by U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

“The insider trading stuff is the most egregious and the most concerning,” Lewis said. “Obviously the first thing is to ban stock trading for members of Congress and their families.”

Another avenue for making money includes book deals. Congressional lawmakers have been prohibited by law since 1991 from giving paid speeches. But there are no rules for accepting book advances, which can sometimes be tens of thousands of dollars, or the royalties from book sales. According to Insider, there were 26 members of Congress in 2020 who took advantage of lucrative book deals.

“There are a lot of politicians now who have gotten filthy rich by writing books,” Lewis said. “In some cases, these books are subsidized by either their campaign or a political action committee or supporters who do bulk purchases. They buy lots of copies, basically putting money in the pockets of politicians.”

“Someone asked (U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.) how he became a millionaire and he said, ‘I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too,’” Lewis said. “So, there’s just a lot of ways that politicians are able to use their perch to cash in.”

Politicians are not the only ones cashing in, Lewis said. Sometimes they help their friends, family and campaign team cash in by getting jobs on the campaign and collecting large paychecks. And even when a member of Congress retires or loses an election, they can keep getting rich by becoming a lobbyist and influencing their fellow congressional lawmakers.

Lewis includes a number of solutions to curb the ability of members of Congress to get rich while in office. These include banning insider trading, prohibiting earning wealth from book sales while in office, congressional term limits, a 10-year prohibition on lobbying after leaving Congress; and increasing the annual salary of members of Congress.

“Even though your average member of Congress is making $174,000 a year, I realize that’s a lot more than the average American or certainly more than the average West Virginian, I would actually give them a pay raise,” Lewis said. “We do want to attract the best and brightest and we want to pay them an amount of money. Instead of having to cut off their ability to bet on the stock market and to write these bestselling books, we could pay them a little more and have them focus on taking care of we the people instead of feathering their own nests.”

Lewis grew up in Western Maryland and graduated from Shepherd University. He spent his young adult years working for Republican political campaigns, including that of a Maryland state lawmaker named Alex Mooney. He is married to political fundraising consultant Erin Delullo, a Jefferson County native, and they moved to Charles Town just prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic with their two sons.

“I have to say it has been a complete blessing for us to be out here,” Lewis said. “My first summer out here when people in Washington, D.C., were having COVID lockdowns and they were stuck inside, I was coaching Little League baseball here in Jefferson County Little League, for one of my son’s teams. It’s just this incredibly beautiful place to be.

“On top of that, my wife’s granddad lives near us and he just turned 101 years old in May,” Lewis said. “On top of the beauty of the state, being able to be around family is special since I have two little boys. It has just been amazing for us, so we are very happy to be here.”

After leaving the campaign trail, Lewis wrote for AOL’s “Politics Daily” and “The Daily Caller” before becoming a senior columnist at “The Daily Beast” where he writes about national politics and the conservative movement.

“Filthy Rich Politicians” is Lewis’s third book. He wrote “The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words” in 2011 and “Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went from the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump” in 2016.

While not an expert on the intricacies of West Virginia politics, Lewis has written about U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and how West Virginia’s influence in Congress has grown over the last few years. Working from home, Lewis said it helps inform his writing about politics by keeping himself outside the D.C. bubble.

“West Virginia is obviously a very important political state. We are right in the thick of it, it’s a great place to be,” Lewis said. “As a political columnist who covers conservatism and the Republican party in America and who writes about politics and culture, it’s very helpful to live in a place like West Virginia. It is really helpful for my job to be in a place where people go to the shooting range and go fishing, and that wasn’t always the case when I lived in the D.C. area.”

Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.