One Man's Ethics Is Another Man's Campaign Contribution

Let's give health care reform a rest and talk about good old-fashioned Congressional greed. The following post reviews an article by Washington Post writer Carol Leonning with a dateline of October 30, 2009. Please remember when reading the following that none of the mentioned Congress people have been accused or found guilty of any ethics violations.

Ms. Leonning reports that seven Congressional members of a powerful Pentagon appropriations subcommittee are under investigation by two different Congressional ethics entities regarding the potentially shady relationships between themselves and a powerful lobbying business, PMA. The concern is that these subcommittee members helped steer taxpayer funds to PMA clients' companies in exchange for donations to their campaign funds. These Congressmen and Congresswoman were identified by a document obtained by the Post and include:

• Chairman John Murtha - Democrat from Pennsylvania
• Peter Visclosky - Democrat from Indiana
• James Moran - Democrat from Virginia
• Norm Dicks - Democrat from Washington
• Marcy Kaptur - Democrat from Ohio
• Bill Young - Republican from Florida
• Todd Tiahart - Republican from Kansas

The document also outlines an allegation that PMA threatened a California Republican Congressman who did not support funding for a PMA client. The threat involved moving jobs out of the the Congressman's district. According to the article, PMA had been under Federal investigation for a while and had been raided by the FBI over a year ago.

According to the document, the Office Of Congressional Ethics was looking into allegations that these subcommittee members were "accepting contributions or other items of value from PMA's PAC in exchange for an official act." These "acts" apparently involve having these seven Congress people steer more than $200 million in taxpayer funds into earmarks for PMA clients over the past two years. In exchange for this alleged steering, these seven members of Congress received $6.2 milion in campaign contributions. The article believes that PMA's influence over the panel has caused it to become one of the top ten lobbying firms in the country, generating $114 million in lobbying fees, according to the article which cites the Center For Responsive Politics.

Again, no one has been accused or proven guilty of misbehaving in this matter. However, some of these names are not new to those who read this blog and the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government":

• John Murtha has been in the news any number of times over the years, mostly for steering taxpayer funds into pork barrel projects in his home district. A previous post discussed how hundreds of millions of dollars had been used to build a local airport named after Mr. Murtha in the middle of nowhere in central Pennsylvania, an airport that handles just a handful of flights each day and only to and from DC.
• Marcy Kaptur is mentioned in the Appendix in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Last year as the economy and financial system were collapsing, the St. Petersburg Times reported that Ms. Kaptur was in a Congressional Budget committee meeting that was hearing testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Ms. Kaptur did not know who Mr. Bernanke was, confusing him with Treasury Secretary Paulson. The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the Congresswoman did not know who the main government players in the federal government were relative to the economy.

Four things to ponder

1. Do you really want these kinds of people controlling the health care in this country? If one lobbying firm can theoretically influence seven Congress people this easily, imagine how many lobbying firms will influence trillions of dollars of health care spending.
2. This would never happen if Step 6 in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" was implemented. Step 6 would restrict campaign donations to only those individual citizens who are affected by the election. No companies, no PACs, no unions, and no lobbying firms would be allowed to contribute anything to any election campaign fund.
3. Apparently the Post found the document when a low level Congressional employee accidentally left the investigation document on a file sharing network when working from home. The poor employee was fired for his or her oversight while members of Congress who may have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds continue to be paid their relatively plush salaries.
4. If these allegations are true, it is sad how cheaply Congress people can be bought. According to the document, lobbying expense is only 3.1% of the value of the earmark ($6.2 million in campaign donations divided by the $200 million in earmark value).