The E-Accountability Foundation: This is either a missprint, or a joke. Betsy Combier

February 9, 2006
DeLay Rejoins House Appropriations Committee
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 (AP) Representative Tom DeLay, forced to step down as the No. 2 Republican in the House after being indicted in Texas on campaign fund-raising charges, was rewarded by party leaders Wednesday with a seat on the Appropriations Committee.

Mr. DeLay, who was a member of the powerful committee until becoming majority leader in 2003, was able to rejoin the panel because of a vacancy created after the resignation of Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California. Mr. Cunningham pleaded guilty in November to charges relating to accepting $2.4 million in bribes for government business and other favors.

Mr. DeLay was also given a seat on the subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating an influence-peddling scandal involving the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his dealings with lawmakers. The subcommittee also has responsibility over NASA, a top priority for Mr. DeLay because the Johnson Space Center in Houston is in his district.

"Allowing Tom DeLay to sit on a committee in charge of giving out money is like putting Michael Brown back in charge of FEMA," said Bill Burton, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, referring to the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who resigned after the flawed federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Burton added, "Republicans in Congress just can't seem to resist standing by their man."

Republican leaders named Representative Howard P. McKeon of California as chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee. The majority leader, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, vacated that post after winning a campaign to succeed Mr. DeLay.

Mr. McKeon is a seven-term conservative who has a generally good relationship with educators. He wrote a 2001 law to remove disincentives for workers who would have lost part of their Social Security benefits when switching jobs to become public school teachers.

February 5, 2006
The Nation
Once Just an Aide, Now a King of K Street
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT, NY TIMES
WASHINGTON

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ONCE, the archetype of the Capitol Hill aide was a humble policy wonk fresh from graduate school who moved to Washington to pursue a gratifying but mostly anonymous life in public service.

In recent years, a more high-flying path for the Congressional aide has emerged: lobbyist-in-training.

The pay in Congressional offices still stinks. The hours are still grueling. But the job, once an end in itself, is increasingly seen as a ticket to be punched and sometimes comes with the almost explicit promise of hitting pay dirt after a reasonably short stint. "It's the new business school," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who formed his own public relations business after serving in the Clinton White House.

Nothing has pulled the curtain back on this trend more than the story surrounding the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. With his help, several young Hill staff members jumped into the private sector after just a few years in public service, tripling their salaries overnight. In return, they used their ties to those still "on the inside" to maneuver on behalf of his business clients.

The spotlight on the case has turned attention to the widespread phenomenon of the aide-turned-lobbyist. Last week, after House Republicans elected John Boehner of Ohio as majority leader, government watchdog groups were quick to note that at least 14 former aides had turned their connections to Mr. Boehner, chairman of the Education Committee, into K Street lobbying jobs.

Democrats pounced on this figure as evidence that he was as inextricably linked to lobbyists as was his predecessor, Tom DeLay, who was forced to resign as majority leader in part because of his connections to Mr. Abramoff. (A former press secretary to Mr. DeLay, Michael Scanlon, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials, and is cooperating in the Abramoff case after earning tens of millions of dollars through his public affairs firm.)

When did the dutiful Hill staffer become a wheeler-dealer with such amazing clout? Members of Congress have long used the revolving door to cycle out into the private sector and make big salaries. But a legislative director? Or a chief of staff?

Paradoxically, new lobbying restrictions being considered in the wake of the Abramoff scandal may only tip the scales further, making a long career on the Hill too onerous for all but the most earnest public servants.

"The first question you get whenever you move on is, 'Are you going to stay on the Hill or go off?' " said Kevin Madden, who left his job as press secretary to Representative DeLay last week and has not yet decided whether to move into the private sector or remain on Capitol Hill.

"I think everybody does recognize it's a timing game," said Mr. Madden, who also worked for another Republican congressman, the Bush campaign and Justice Department before working for Mr. DeLay. "The question is, when is all the experience you're getting on Capitol Hill enough?"

Some of the biggest names in lobbying in recent years have been former aides who emerged from Congress or the White House with extensive contacts and a deep understanding of how legislation moves.

Ed Gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee who started out as a top aide to Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, is perhaps the most visible. Mr. Gillespie's firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, is routinely ranked in the top 10 among lobbying powerhouses; in 2004, the firm had $13.9 million in revenue, according to the magazine Influence, which covers the lobbying industry.

Superlobbyists might earn up to $1 million a year. Newer recruits earn at least six figures, sometimes starting as high as $200,000 a year, a great leap from the Hill, where salaries vary from office to office but where aides are lucky to break $50,000 a year. Only a small percentage of the more than 16,000 Capitol Hill staff members make more than $100,000.

"What's happened is that the disparity in salaries - between what members and staff make versus what lobbyists make downtown - it's gotten so enormous that you could be a medium-high-level Congressional staffer, and you go downtown and the first day be making more money than your boss, the senator, made," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "And I think that's sort of distorted the pecking order."

Democrats say that this disparity worsened with the so-called K Street Project, a moniker for several different Republican lobbying efforts, but generally synonymous with Mr. DeLay's insistence, after his party took control of the House in 1996, that K Street firms hire Republicans. Aides to the party's legislators had more and more access to those high-paying jobs.

But another factor promoting the revolving door was, paradoxically, the effort to reform the campaign finance system. By making it harder for candidates to raise contributions, senators and representatives of both parties relied on others - including lobbying firms that double as fund-raisers - for this purpose. What could make a representative happier than having a former staff member jump to K Street and help raise money?

The revolving door of aides and lobbyists has changed Congress itself, according to John Engler, the former Republican governor of Michigan who is president and chief executive of the National Association of Manufacturers.

There are now many aides, he said, who don't have much of a background in anything. Yet, "the complexity of the issues they're handling has only increased," said Mr. Engler. "You don't walk in in January and become an expert in Medicaid by February. It takes years to understand the intricacies."

Some aides argue that Congressional jobs will lose more luster as lobbying rules continue to tighten, shrinking the number of perks, like travel junkets, that Hill aides can take. Several staff members said that as rules have tightened, the work has become less enjoyable.

Another contributing factor in recent decades is the pension plan: In 1984, Congress went from giving workers a traditional civil service pension, which paid out an inflation-adjusted benefit after retirement, to a savings plan that works more like a 401(k). Congress is also considering a requirement that former aides wait two years before they lobby their old offices.

"For some, the Hill experience is really a ticket to a more lucrative job, so I think there really could be an exodus to beat the new restrictions," Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said.

It was not always thus. Ms. Collins began her career more than three decades ago as a Hill staffer, working for former Representative William Cohen of Maine.

"I ended up staying nearly 12 years, and it never occurred to me, toward the end of those 12 years, to think of becoming a lobbyist," Senator Collins said. Now, she said, she has several longtime staff members as devoted to public service as she was.

But, she said: "What I do notice is for some of the younger staff, the Hill is a place to make a contribution, get some experience, do a bit of public service, but with the ultimate goal of working as a lobbyist. And some of them glamorize what a lobbyist job is going to be like."

NATIONAL DESK
THE DELAY INQUIRY: THE CONTEXT; For Republicans, a Swelling Sea of Troubles
By ROBIN TONER, NY TIMES
Published: September 29, 2005

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - This is not what the Republicans envisioned 11 months ago, when they were returned to office as a powerful one-party government with a big agenda and -- it seemed -- little to fear from the opposition.
The indictment of Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, on Wednesday was the latest in a series of scandals and setbacks that have buffeted Republican leaders in Congress and the Bush administration, and transformed what might have been a victory lap into a hard political scramble. Republicans are still managing to score some victories -- notably, Judge John G. Roberts Jr.'s expected confirmation as chief justice of the United States on Thursday -- but their governing majority is showing signs of strain.

In the House, Mr. DeLay's indictment removes, even if temporarily, a powerful leader who managed to eke out, again and again, narrow majorities on some difficult votes. In the Senate, Republican ranks have been roiled this week by an investigation of Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, who is under scrutiny for his stock dealings from a blind trust.

Moreover, the string of ethical issues so close together -- including the indictment and continuing investigation of the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who was close to Mr. DeLay, and the arrest of David H. Safavian, a former White House budget official who was charged with lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Mr. Abramoff -- is a source of anxiety in Republican circles.

'Even though DeLay has nothing to do with Frist, and Frist has nothing to do with Abramoff, how does it look? Not good,' said William Kristol, a key conservative strategist and editor of The Weekly Standard.

At the same time, the White House is grappling with a criminal investigation into whether anyone leaked the name of a C.I.A. operative, an inquiry that has brought both Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, before a grand jury.

And the administration is struggling to steady itself after the slow response to Hurricane Katrina and defend itself against sweeping accusations of incompetence and cronyism in domestic security.

Joe Gaylord, a longtime Republican consultant and an adviser to Newt Gingrich when he was House speaker, said, 'When you couple Iraq, Katrina, DeLay in the House, Frist in the Senate,' and other ethical flaps, 'it looks like 10 years is a long time for a party to be in power.'

'And when you add to that gas prices and home-heating prices that are going through the ceiling this winter, it shouldn't give much comfort to the Republicans,' Mr. Gaylord said. Such a wave of internal trouble is characteristic of a president's second term, particularly when his party controls Congress.

'We know that second terms have historically been marred by hubris and by scandal,' said David R. Gergen, a former aide to presidents in both parties who is now director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

'We've seen the hubris,' Mr. Gergen added, alluding to Mr. Bush's effort to restructure Social Security, now stalled. 'And now we're seeing the scandals.'

Ross K. Baker, an expert on Congress and a political science professor at Rutgers, argues that the lack of normal checks and balances, with each party controlling part of the government, is also a problem.

'What you're stuck with is oversight as a product of scandal, a product of catastrophe,' Mr. Baker said. 'It requires a blunder of major proportions, a calamity that is poorly addressed, before you get oversight.'

Others say the intense competition of current politics -- the ferocious ideological divisions combined with the narrowness of any majority -- leads to a heightened emphasis on money and, perhaps, a bending of the rules to get it.

'We've constantly had leaders going down in the last 20 years for related issues,' said Julian Zelizer, an expert on Congress at Boston University. 'Those who are successful, there's a high chance they've pushed the boundaries of money in politics as far as they can go.'

In recent months, conservatives have bemoaned the effects of power on their movement, like mounting deficits and ethics problems.

In the 10th anniversary issue of The Weekly Standard last month, Andrew Ferguson lamented the 'ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power.'

'Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well,' Mr. Ferguson said. 'The grease rubbed off, too.'

Eleven years ago, the Republicans took control of Congress -- breaking a 40-year Democratic reign in the House -- by campaigning as reformers out to derail a Democratic machine that Mr. Gingrich described as endemically, irredeemably corrupt. In fact, as the 1994 election approached, the Democrats endured several ethics scandals, including the fall of a speaker, a majority whip and the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Now the Democrats are reaching for the reformers' mantle. More and more, they attack the Republicans as a party riddled with corruption and out of touch with the problems and concerns of ordinary Americans.

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, telegraphed the assault in an interview on Wednesday. 'Their party has run out of both legitimacy and intellectual steam,' he said.

A year before the midterm elections, the polls show Congress with a strikingly low approval rating -- 34 percent in the most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll, conducted from Sept. 9 to 13. One Republican strategist, who asked not to be identified because of his work with Republicans on Capitol Hill, said of the DeLay indictment: 'When you pile it on top of everything else -- Iraq, Katrina, gas prices -- it's pretty grim. We're still waiting for some sign of good news, something our candidates can run on. This isn't it.'

The strategist added: 'The Democrats will make the case that Republicans are too busy dealing with their own ethical issues to care about the problems facing the country. And guess what? That charge worked pretty well for us in '92 and '94.'

Whether Democrats will be able to make that case is another question; they have internal problems of their own, notably their chronic problem in unifying around a clear message , a challenge the Republicans met with the Contract With America.

But for the Republican majority, the problem in many ways is not the challenge from without, but the second-term problems within.

February 3, 2006
Prosecutor Is Sought in Abramoff Inquiry
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

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WASHINGTON, Feb. 2  Most of the Senate's Democrats called on the Justice Department on Thursday to appoint a special prosecutor to take over the department's criminal investigation centered on Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist.

Thirty-five Democrats and Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont, an independent, said in a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that an outside prosecutor was needed because of "Mr. Abramoff's significant ties to Republican leadership in Congress and allegations of improper activity involving administration officials."

Mr. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to conspiring to corrupt members of Congress and other public officials

The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said he signed the letter because "we need an independent investigation, not a whitewash led by Attorney General Gonzales, President Bush's best friend."

Mr. Reid added in a statement, "President Bush has worn out his credibility with the American people yet he continues to stonewall an investigation into his involvement with Jack Abramoff, asking him to trust him without explaining why."

The senator was referring to Mr. Bush's comments last week in which he said he could not recall ever meeting Mr. Abramoff, a major fund-raiser in his campaigns.