Turns out $15-billion bailouts just don't go as far as they used to. Witness the airlines trying to fly in under the radar to Capitol Hill last week, pleading poverty and looking to taxpayers to again provide the wind beneath their financially tattered wings.

Let's hope our elected officials remember the old saw about not throwing good taxpayer money after bad. But don't count on it, especially if Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) is in a romantic mood. Y'see, the Senate minority leader's wife, Linda, is one of the airline industry's top lobbyists -- her clients, Northwest and American Airlines, raked in a combined $1.1 billion from the post-9/11 bailout.

The persuasive Mrs. Daschle has proved very effective in helping her high-paying clients get what they are after. In 2000, L-3 Communications had a big problem: The Federal Aviation Administration had given the thumbs down to the firm's line of baggage scanners, preferring a more accurate bomb-detecting device made by a rival company. In 2001, L-3 Chief Executive Frank C. Lanza acknowledged that the reliability of its scanners was "less than we wanted." A responsible company would have gone back to the drawing board. Instead, L-3 became the latest in a long line of federal vendors who preferred to hustle the referees rather than play by the rules -- and turned to Linda Daschle to plead its case.

This "pillow talk strategy" proved remarkably effective: Soon after Linda was put on the L-3 payroll, her spouse helped broker a deal in Congress that forced the FAA to purchase one scanner from L-3 for each one it bought from InVision, the rival company. Lucky Linda's lobbying firm, Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell, was the recipient of close to $500,000 from L-3. The rest of us are saddled with subpar scanners.

The Daschles are far from an anomaly; the last few years have seen a surge in registered lobbyists with blood or marital ties to our nation's leaders. Among those lobbyists making friends and influencing family members in our nation's capital are: John Breaux Jr., Scott Hatch, Key Reid and Joshua Hastert, the sons of Sens. John Breaux, Orrin Hatch and Harry Reid and House Speaker Denny Hastert; Anne Bingaman, Debbie Dingell and Doris Matsui, the wives of Sen. Jeff Bingaman and Reps. John Dingell and Robert Matsui; and Phyllis Landrieu, Sen. Mary Landrieu's aunt.

The silliest symptom of this epidemic of nepotism on the Potomac has to be Chet Lott, the son of the erstwhile Senate majority leader, Trent Lott. Before getting into the lobbying game, Chet worked as a Domino's pizza franchisee, that training ground for Beltway power brokers. Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Domino's. Now instead of taking orders for extra cheese, he pushes the piping hot agendas of clients like BellSouth, munitions maker Day & Zimmerman and the National Thoroughbred Racing Assn.

None of whom, I'm sure, hired young Chet because his dad is an influential U.S. senator. Of course, Chet and his dad, like Linda and Tom, vehemently deny any impropriety. Chet swears he and his father have agreed in writing never to discuss his clients. Gee whiz.

Well, maybe it was all those years playing catch in the backyard or just a father's intuition, but something caused Trent Lott to craft a piece of legislation last fall that could benefit, to the tune of $300 million, Edison Chouest Offshore, a small, untested shipbuilding company that just happened to have paid Chet $50,000 to do its bidding.

Now, I'm all for family values, but not when they are devaluing the public interest, which these "all in the family" interactions clearly do. Let's just remove the temptation to put family first and simply make it illegal for elected officials to have spouses or children who are lobbyists. And I don't really care which half of the improper pairing -- leader or lobbyist -- steps down, just so long as the new sign hanging over the roadway to Capitol Hill reads: "Limit One Per Family."

Arianna Huffington writes a syndicated column.

Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times

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