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WASHINGTON – I’m still reeling from the House ethics committee’s logic:
1. Lobbyists try to increase their chances of getting non-bid contracts for their clients by making contributions to the re-election accounts of lawmakers who can influence which no-bid contracts (earmarks) are approved.
2. It is widely believed by corporations and lobbyists that campaign contributions provide enhanced access to lawmakers or a greater chance of obtaining earmarks.
3. Lobbyists who don’t get what they think they paid for are bullies who use strong-arm tactics such as threatening to reject future requests for campaign contributions or even encourage their clients to move their businesses outside a lawmaker’s congressional district.
4. Lawmakers are utterly ignorant of 1, 2 and 3. They decide to support a no-bid contract for no reason other than its merits: the number of jobs it will create or the value of the project to the taxpayers or the military.
5. Thus, lobbyists and their clients who donate to a lawmaker’s campaign are almost certainly doing so to try to get close to and influence his or her decision. But the member of Congress never, ever would base earmark requests on who’s donated what.
Is the House ethics committee made up of the 10 most naïve people in Congress? Chances are they are not. So it is difficult to come up with a charitable interpretation of this group’s ridiculous and Polly Pure explanation of the connection between campaign donations and the favors that are made with taxpayer dollars.
The committee acknowledges there is a pay-to-play system on Capitol Hill but insists that the paying and playing is one-sided: only lobbyists and their clients participate. Members of Congress are unaware of it or, if they recognize it exists, are not influenced by it. And they certainly do not participate.
The fact that a lawmaker holds a dinner in his own honor, solicits campaign donors to attend and then within weeks submits earmark requests totaling millions of dollars for the companies and their employees that donated – well, this is mere happenstance, the ethics committee says.
“Simply because a (House) member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on those two facts alone, support a claim that a member’s actions are being influenced by campaign contributions,” the five Democrats and five Republicans on the ethics committee wrote.
Yes, the House is under Democratic leadership now, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has some responsibility for allowing this culture to continue. But the 10 members of the ethics committee are equally divided between the parties, and they were unanimous in concluding that in the seven cases they investigated, there is “no evidence that (House) members or their official staff were directly or indirectly engaged in seeking contributions in return for earmarks.”
Let’s be clear: I have frequently said lobbying plays a valuable role in our system of government, and everybody deserves to make their best case to the folks who make decisions about public policy and the public purse.
And, frankly, you can make a good case that members of Congress should have a say in how tax dollars are allocated. All earmarks are not evil. Besides, the amount of money allocated through earmarks is a pittance in the overall federal budget. (The ratio of earmarks to the part of the budget Congress allocates is this: $16 billion in the $1 trillion discretionary budget. That’s the equivalent of $1.75 a day for a family with a $40,000 yearly income.)
House Republicans have decided they won’t submit any earmarks for next year’s budget, and Democrats have said they won’t ask for earmarks for for-profit businesses.
But the use of earmarks isn’t really the issue. The issue is that the House cannot police itself. The ethics committee thinks House members can do no wrong, so even when it appears that wrong occurred, the ethics committee concludes that some outsider did it.
Pelosi patted herself and her fellow Democrats on the back for creating the Office of Congressional Ethics – the independent panel that investigates allegations of ethical misconduct. But they gave the panel no teeth. It cannot subpoena, and it can’t punish.
All it can do is investigate, turn its files over to the ethics committee and recommend that the committee drop the case or make a deeper inquiry. (Republicans, I might add, were perfectly fine with this.)
It stinks.
Count on Republicans to use ethics and earmarks as a campaign tactic this year – and gleefully so. The GOP lost its House majority in 2008 in no small measure because of the Mark Foley-Tom Delay-Jack Abramoff-Duke Cunningham scandals.
So if Republicans win a majority this fall, will the system be sterilized? Not at all. Ethical misjudgment occurs with regularity in both parties.
What’s needed is an improvement in the system. As long as the Office of Congressional Ethics is toothless, all decisions about whether there was an ethics violation will remain with the ethics committee. And as we saw, the ethics committee members think so highly of their colleagues that even an e-mail trail clearly showing the path from solicitation to donation to earmark is not evidence of “campaign contributions as a factor when requesting earmarks.”
