“Dumb And Dumber”: Congress Is Awful Because Members Spend All Day Long Talking To Rich People
Members of Congress don’t know anything about “the issues” and they spend all their time fundraising, according to both a new Huffington Post story and “an easy inference to make after observing Congress for almost any length of time.”
The HuffPo’s Ryan Grim and Sabrina Siddiqui obtained a PowerPoint presentation given to incoming Democratic freshmen legislators by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the DCCC’s recommended schedule for House members includes four hours spent on the phone begging rich people for money and one hour spent begging rich person for money in person. This is the daily schedule.
As Kevin Drum notes, this leaves no time for studying or homework. Members rarely know much about anything, policy-wise. An unnamed member confirmed to HuffPo that these guys basically are exactly as ill-informed as you feared:
One member of Congress said that the fundraising takes up so much time that members don’t even have time to become experts on bills they sponsor. “One thing that’s always been striking to me is even the members playing a leading role on specific issues actually could not talk about the issues,” said the member, who didn’t want to be quoted by name. “They didn’t have enough knowledge on their own issues to talk about them at length. I’m probably guilty of that.” He recalled one meeting early in his career, where he brought several members together to try to hash out a compromise, just as he had done earlier as a state legislator.
“Staff members were all twitching at the discussion, because their principals were saying things that were just flat-wrong or uninformed or wondering aloud about what the industry practices really were,” he recalled. “The staff members of course had a pretty good idea. … The members were sitting around the table having a remarkably uninformed and unproductive discussion.”
This, as much as anything else, is why our Congress is both dysfunctional — legislators have no clue what they’re voting for or against most of the time — and so attentive to the priorities of the very wealthy.
Newt Gingrich completely dismantled the internal institutions that used to provide Congress with objective information and research, both because that information frequently contradicted conservative dogma and because he knew that doing so would force Congress to rely on outside (ideological) organizations for information, which would strengthen the corporate-funded policy shops and think tanks that powered the conservative movement. Now nearly everything Congress “knows” about policy comes directly from self-interested, industry-funded groups. Simultaneously, as Lorelei Kelly recently wrote, congressional staff began shrinking, which means expertise was, once again, outsourced — now, increasingly, lobbyists perform the educational function that well-versed staffers used to.
So: the constituents members of Congress have the most direct contact with, and the ones they see themselves as reliant upon to remain in office, are the ones who have the ability to write massive checks. And the people the members talk to to understand the issues are either think tank ideologues or paid representatives of industry or both.
The result is Congress as it’s been since the second Clinton term: Hundreds of dim bulbs, a couple of brilliant-but-evil guys, and a handful of dedicated and intelligent people who frequently do weird and inexplicable things like “voting for the horrible 2005 bankruptcy bill.”
The annoying thing is that the solutions to these problems are incredible simple: public financing of elections and huge increases in congressional staff budgets. But you might notice that both of those solutions involve spending more money on the government, making them non-starters in our age of bipartisan agreement that government spending is unseemly.
The alternative to constant fundraising by the members is for outside groups to take care of it for them, which is a model conservatives already sort of practice. In their “Behind the Caucus” column on Rep. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas freshman who will vote against raising the debt ceiling because he explicitly wants the United States to default, Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei explain that Cotton won his primary because the ultra-conservative Club for Growth simply sent Cotton “a FedEx envelope full of checks that he didn’t ask for.” And that certainly saves some time. Allen and VandeHeil also note that Cotton, and his peers, explain why we are probably about to induce a recession for no reason:
Many in the media — us included — often underestimate just how conservative and how impervious to criticism and leadership browbeating these members are when appraising the chances for change in the next two years.
Hey, Mike and Jim, that’s what we’ve been saying for a while now. We’re screwed, because the people who spent thousands getting Cotton elected are the ones explaining the issues to him and his dumber peers.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 9, 2013
“Shadow Republican Money Groups”: Soft Cash Changes Hands Between Crossroads GPS And The NRA
While the National Rifle Association has been making headlines in the wake of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. last week, its nonprofit affiliate has been flying under the radar.
The NRA Institute for Legislative Action is a conservative 501(c)(4) group that is not required to disclose its donors, but the Center for Responsive Politics dug up a six-figure contribution from a similar tax-exempt group.
In its investigation into shadow money groups, the Center uncovered a $600,000 donation to the NRA’s nonprofit from Crossroads GPS — the 501(c)(4) associated with Karl Rove and his super PAC, American Crossroads. In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action spent $7.4 million on independent expenditures, bringing the overall total spent by NRA-affiliated groups to $17.6 million.
In order to maintain 501(c)(4) status with the Internal Revenue Service, social welfare must be the main focus of these groups, so they cannot have more than half of their overall spending go toward politics.
According to an OpenSecrets Blog report from earlier this year, in 2010, Crossroads gave large sums to Americans for Tax Reform, National Federation of Independent Business, Center for Individual Freedom and National Right to Life. Recipients of Crossroads for the 2012 election cycle will not be available until next year when it files with the IRS.
The NRA, with its nonprofit affiliate, spent $11.4 million of the money they spent in the general election opposing Democrats and $5.9 million supporting Republicans. Within the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, about 63 percent of its $7.4 million was spent against Democrats, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Although the money trail is further clouded when one 501(c)(4) gives money to another, Crossroads GPS and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s goals were similar, as shown by their overlapping targeted candidates.
The NRA Institute for Legislative Action focused on 62 candidates, spending at least $100,000 on 11 of them. The most it dropped on a single candidate was the $3.2 million opposing President Barack Obama, followed by the $885,000 it spent favoring Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
In addition to Obama, other Democratic candidates the nonprofit opposed this election were Ohio Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown ($408,000), Florida Sen. Bill Nelson ($378,000) and Virginia Sen.-elect Tim Kaine ($350,000) — all of whom nevertheless won their respective races. On the other side, Republican benefactors included Sen.-elect Jeff Flake ($322,000), Wisconsin Senate candidate Tommy Thompson ($243,000) and Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel ($168,000).
The NRA’s PAC also spent about $9.5 million on independent expenditures that targeted many of the same candidates. The PAC spent about $16.1 million overall.
By: Michelle Martinelli, OpenSecrets.org, December 17, 2012
“And The Rich Get Richer”: Massive Insurance Industry Profits For Republicans In Ryan Medicare Scheme
Insurance companies that would benefit from a Medicare privatization program supported by GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and nearly every congressional Republican are filling their campaign coffers and raising questions about whom they really work for – constituents or big insurance and Wall Street donors. The privatization scheme, designed by Ryan, would end Medicare as we know it and leave seniors without protection from soaring out-of-pocket medical costs.
The insurance industry and HMOs so far in the 2012 election cycle have given at least $14 million in campaign contributions to U.S. House members who voted for the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare, according to a new report prepared by Public Campaign Action Fund and Health Care for America Now utilizing data downloaded and coded by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has received $2.7 million from insurance interests this cycle alone. Taking the long view, members of Congress who voted for the Ryan budget collected $49.7 million in campaign contributions from the insurance industry over their careers – far more than those voting against the plan, the report said.
For the insurance industry, the political spending is an investment that could reap enormous returns. The market value of Wall Street-run health insurance companies will increase by $12 billion to $25 billion if the Republicans win the Senate and the White House, and by 2030 the industry would post $16 billion to $26 billion in increased annual profits attributable to the Medicare privatization, the report said.
“Americans want quality and guaranteed Medicare, but when we have a Congress on the auction block, they’ll put Medicare on the chopping block,” said David Donnelly, executive director of Public Campaign Action Fund. “This report allows voters to connect the dots for themselves by showing the members of Congress who voted for Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare while scooping up checks from the insurance industry that would benefit.”
“The Republican plan to privatize and voucherize Medicare would increase costs for seniors and turn the most effective and cost-efficient health insurance program over to the insurance industry,” said Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, the nation’s largest grassroots health care advocacy organization. “It’s disturbing, though not surprising, that the GOP is bankrolled by the insurance industry – the special interests that would reap staggering profits from this plan. When the GOP and health insurance companies win, consumers lose.”
New polling shows that seniors are extremely sensitive about the alliance between the health insurance industry and the Republican Party. More than half – 55 percent – of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supports the budget that includes the privatization scheme, according to Democracy Corps, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Public Campaign Action Fund. But that swelled to 70 percent when voters were asked if they would be less likely to vote for that candidate if he or she also took thousands in campaign donations from insurance executives, lobbyists and political action committees.
“Along with their systematic effort to undermine Medicare, the Republicans are working to repeal the Affordable Care Act and decimate Medicaid,” Rome said. “The GOP’s plan is to put seniors and their families at the mercy of the private health insurance industry without adequate coverage, without their choice of doctor and without protection from huge new out-of-pocket costs.”
“Policy in Washington is too often decided by those who give the most money at the expense of everyday Americans,” said Donnelly. “Insurance interests are pouring money into campaigns because it’s in their narrow interest to privatize Medicare and maximize profits. The problem is, Americans of all political stripes don’t have the same power and influence to shape policy. That’s why we have to hold our members of Congress accountable and it’s why we need fundamental changes to our campaign finance system.”
By: Adam Smith, Health Care For America Now, October 10, 2012
“An Ethical Morass”: The Wall Street Journal Won’t Acknowledge Its Karl Rove Ties
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal continues to trip over its Karl Rove conflict of interest, with the paper’s newsroom routinely failing to mention that the man who helped found an anti-Obama super PAC is also a Journal employee. Time and again this election season the Journal has reported on Rove’s campaign work with American Crossroads, and time and again the newsroom has neglected to acknowledge Rove works for the Journal as a political columnist.
The disclosure failure, and the obvious lack of transparency, is just part of the paper’s ongoing ethical morass with regards to Rove. As Media Matters has reported, scores of editorial page editors have criticized the paper for failing to disclose in its opinion pages where Rove’s anti-Obama columns appear, that Rove is closely associated with an anti-Obama campaign group.
The very fact that the Journal hired Rove, a GOP fundraiser, to write columns about the races Rove is trying to win for the GOP represents a glaring ethical lapse. The Journal’s refusal to disclose those ties only compounds the problem; a problem that extends from the opinion pages to the newsroom.
Today’s front-page Journal article examines whether conservative super PACs have been effective in denting the president’s re-election chances. Rove’s Crossroads group is featured as the pivotal conservative super PAC in the article. Yet nowhere in the piece is it reported that Rove also works for the newspaper.
That transparency failure has become commonplace. On September 6, the newspaper published an article about super PAC fundraising efforts by liberal and conservative groups and noted, “By contrast, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, two Republican groups founded with the help of Karl Rove, have spent $67 million combined.”
There was no mention that Rove’s a Journal employee.
On Sept. 5, the Journal focused on the surprisingly tight U.S. senate race in North Dakota, and the amount of outside money pouring into the campaign:
Crossroads GPS, a Republican campaign fund co-founded by Karl Rove in 2010, and Majority PAC, a group that aims to protect Democrats’ Senate majority, have spent heavily and run negative ads in the state.
No mention that Rove’s a WSJ employee.
And back on July 19, the newspaper reported that Crossroads was coming to the aide of Romney with new television ads designed to defend the candidate’s career at Bain Capitol. The Journal noted the super PAC “was founded with the help of Bush White House aide, Karl Rove.”
No mention though, that Rove’s a Journal employee.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters, September 24, 2012
“Bain-Like Bonuses”: A Leveraged Romney Campaign With Nothing For The Troops
Mitt Romney’s campaign is in a bit of trouble. No, not poll numbers, or internal disputes, or the candidate himself, though those are all problems too. Rather, the Romney campaign, which outraised President Obama for four consecutive months this summer, is in money trouble. Campaign finance disclosures released yesterday show the campaign has only $35 million in the bank — a relatively low amount this close to the election — and is $15 million in debt. The campaign has been forced to scramble to find new big donors, something you don’t want to have to do this late in the game, because its other donors are maxed out.
The problem is not Romney’s fundraising abilities — he’s unquestionably adept at bringing in big checks — but rather with quirks in campaign finance law, his reliance on big donors, and perhaps some mismanagement. The loan was needed as a bridge before he could access his general election fund, which candidates can’t touch until after their nominating conventions. The low cash on hand is because much of the money he raised went to the Republican National Committee to help pay for other races and not to the Romney campaign (he redistributed the wealth, if you will). And the need for new contributors is a byproduct of relying on high-dollar donors, who max out after contributing $2,500 and thus can’t be returned to for a consistent money stream throughout the campaign like smaller donors (John McCain had the same problem in 2008).
Given all that, not to mention the other problems the campaign is facing, this is a bit unexpected. The Washington Post’s Dan Eggen:
Mitt Romney’s campaign handed out more than $200,000 in bonuses last month to senior staffers, according to new disclosure records filed Thursday. Richard Beeson, Romney’s national political director, received a $37,500 payment on Aug. 31 in addition to his salary, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. In addition, records show at least six other top staffers each received $25,000 bonuses on the same date: campaign manager Matt Rhoades, general counsel Kathryn Biber, policy advisor Lanhee Chen, communications director Gail Gitcho, digital director Zach Moffatt and advisor Gabriel Schoenfeld. Two other employees received $10,000 bonuses.
“Win bonuses” are pretty common on political campaigns, though President Obama’s campaign did not hand out any after its convention this year. And $200,000 isn’t a ton of money for a campaign that will spend close to a billion dollars. But one has to wonder if it’s really a good idea for a struggling campaign that’s already in debt to hand out cash to its top executives while the candidate is fighting a perception of being a corporate raider .
The comparison to Bain Capital, though imperfect, is almost too obvious to make. Bain often bought companies, leveraged them with massive debt, and then paid the executives big bonuses regardless of whether the company succeeded. Something not entirely dissimilar happened to Bain & Co., the consulting firm that Bain Capital spun off of, when Romney went to rescue it.
And while the very top echelon of his campaign got bonuses, there was nothing for the ground troops. The field staffers who work too many hours manning lonely remote offices for the reward of meager pay and doors getting slammed in their faces didn’t get a bonus. Neither did drivers or clerks or janitors or opposition researchers forced to cable news 24 hours a day.
Again, this isn’t entirely unusual for any political campaign. People sign up knowing they’ll be worked hard for no money because they believe in their candidate and maybe hope they have a shot at a job if their guy or gal wins. But one can’t help wondering if the bonus model sheds some light on Romney’s view of the world and how businesses are run. It’s the people at the top who make it happen and deserve the bonuses, not the ones down below who are actually doing the work.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, September 21, 2012
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