One Sure Way to Petition a Grievance : Congress: Savings & loan executive Charles Keating pried the doors of five senators off the hinges with more than $1 million in contributions.

Imagine looking around for a priest to baptize your child and prevailing upon Pope John Paul II to perform the sacrament and then getting His Holiness to hang around for brunch? How about getting Lee Iaccoca to supervise the installation of a muffler on your Chrysler?

That’s about what banker Charles Keating was able to pull off when he prevailed upon five U. S. senators to meet personally for a period of two hours (four senators attended a first meeting; five were at a second) with the head of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to get the federal regulator to back off on his plans to shut down Keating’s troubled Lincoln Savings & Loan Assn. Keating’s success in securing this high-level intervention tells less about him--a garden variety Sunbelt thimble-rigger--than it does about what it takes to get the attention of senators.

The image that members of Congress like to foster is that they are accessible to their constituents. One member has even gone so far as to remove the door from his office in order to allow the unimpeded traffic of citizens. And although most Americans are not aware of it, lobbying members of Congress is an activity protected by the Bill of Rights. It’s right there in the First Amendment--the freedom to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Well, Charles Keating had a grievance against the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, but he didn’t pave the way to the Senate Office Building with neatly written petitions--he pried the doors of five senators off the hinges with more than $1 million in contributions.

What makes the Keating case so remarkable is that most Americans who need to enlist the help of a senator never actually have any personal contact with him or her. Because there are only 100 senators who have to cover the same turf as 435 House members, they are stretched much thinner than their counterparts on the south end of the Capitol.

Ask senators what single improvement they would want in their lives and they will tell you: more hours in the day. So, in effect, they clone themselves by hiring hordes of staff members who are vested with considerable authority to act in the senator’s stead. Even the highest paid Washington lobbyists are content to deal with Senate staff.

What lobbyists will tell you is that to get a personal meeting with a senator, your client needs to be a important person--the chief executive officer or chief operating officer of the corporation you represent. Vice presidents can only hope to meet with staff. These CEOs and COOs, moreover, had better have plenty of plants and offices in the senator’s state and lots of voters on the corporate payrolls.

Charles Keating’s choice of senators was dictated less by his rights as a citizen then by the strategic placement of the lawmakers in the power structure of the Senate. It might be argued that as an Arizona resident, Keating ought to have access to his two home-state senators, Democrat Dennis DeConcini and Republican John S. McCain III. You might even stretch the home-court analogy to California Democrat Alan Cranston because Lincoln Savings & Loan operated in California. But the explanation for the involvement of Ohio Democrat John Glenn and Michigan Democrat Donald Riegle has nothing to do with home folks. Riegle is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and Glenn heads the Committee on Governmental Affairs. Riegle’s committee has oversight responsibilities for S&Ls; and Glenn’s oversees the operations of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.

Keating’s gifts to the senators, which ranged from almost $900,000 to Cranston to $14,000 worth of Bahaman vacations to McCain and his wife, were evidently made before the senators met with the regulators to get them to ease up on the S&L.; So, strictly speaking, there was no quid pro quo involved.

There was no vote-buying and there was even an effort on part of some of the senators involved to return the gifts. But what is at issue here is not $1 million--pocket change in the context of the $190 million spent by Senate candidates in 1988--but the larger question of who gets access to our elected representatives. What Keating was after and what he ended up getting was not just an outsized form of constituent casework, but the personal attention of four U.S. senators on one occasion and five on another with only the flimsiest case that that the troubles of his S&L; had any impact on the citizens of their states. Indeed, in the case of Cranston’s constituents, they may have been placed in prolonged financial jeopardy by Lincoln’s continued operations.

It is very difficult to urge citizens not be cynical about their government when elected representatives who would not dream of involving themselves personally with the problems of ordinary citizens devote disproportionate time and effort to the case of a free-spending fast shuffle artist. They cannot even claim to have been led astray by well-meaning friends, as in the case of former Speaker Jim Wright. Charles Keating could not have cared less about these senators except their ability to take the heat off a financial humbug for which ordinary Americans will have to foot the bill.