That was when Thomas Donohue became its president and CEO and began to seek out major corporate donors and promote an agenda of deregulation. This coincided with two other significant events. One was the tobacco lawsuits, which made major industries very nervous and is why the Chamber has been particularly involved in judicial elections and so-called "tort reform." The other was a combination of scandals and Supreme Court decisions that made the Republican Party less able to look to wealthy foreign donors for campaign funding and more willing to depend on US corporations.
The result has been a kind of perfect storm of corporate interests, partisan politics, and unaccountable campaign cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/business/how-tom-donohue-transformed-the-us-chamber-of-commerce.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
That the head of the chamber would openly relish needling the president of the United States speaks to the wholesale transformation that this 101-year-old trade association has undergone on Mr. Donohue’s very aggressive watch.
Over the last 16 years, Mr. Donohue has used his considerable talent for fund-raising to build the once-struggling chamber into a free-enterprise research outfit, Supreme Court advocacy group and lobbying powerhouse. The chamber’s lobbying operation alone spent $136 million last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; the next-biggest spender, the National Association of Realtors, spent less than a third of that. . . .
Yet, while increasing the group’s influence, Mr. Donohue has also plunged the business lobby into partisan politics. That move has infuriated many Democrats, made some local chambers uneasy and produced an embarrassing flop in the last Congressional elections. The chamber spent millions in an unsuccessful bid to wrest the Senate from Democrats; of 12 chamber-backed Republicans, nine lost.
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