Duke Cunningham's "menu" put him in prison but it hasn't slowed down Bill Young or Richard Burr
Washington being a company town, it made sense for their newspaper of record to run another story on K Street yesterday, ostensibly on the malignant impact lobbyist contributions have on our government. And it is telling that they started the story off with a paragraph on the unending nightmare of congressional campaign fundraising, a paragraph that touches on one of the two or three historically most corrupt in Congress, the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. It was from this perch that Duke Cunningham, Jerry Lewis, and Duncan Hunter built their very profitable little financial empires. And though Cunningham when so far out of bounds that he's now in prison, his incarceration hasn't even slowed down the process one bit.
Congressmembers routinely claim that they are unaware-- unaware, I tell you-- of who gives what and if those who give what just happen to get a juicy earmark or two now and again... well, what a coincidence! And one thing that is bipartisan around Capitol Hill is both parties' determination to keep the money rolling in. A couple weeks ago, the House ethics committee exonerated half a dozen members of the defense subcommittee members of abusing "their offices by, in essence, selling earmarks to donors. In so doing, it drew heavily on promises... that their campaign fundraising operations had been carefully walled off from their earmarking decisions. Otherwise, their actions would violate laws and rules that bar any link between such donations and legislative acts."
In detailing how the lawmakers approached their earmarking, however, the ethics report and accompanying reports by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) made clear that the wall between grants and donations in their offices was in many instances very thin. Key individuals in their offices played at least some role in both activities, starting with the lawmakers and typically including staff members responsible for reviewing and making preliminary earmark decisions.
..."This constant claim by members that there is no link is specious, because we can see the link," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group. Sloan referred to data showing that well-targeted defense industry donations are routinely followed by earmarks or other legislative benefits.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group that has criticized earmarks, has noted that 68 percent of the companies and universities that wanted earmarks and contributed to Senate defense appropriators this year got them, whereas 48 percent of those who did not make contributions got them. A similar outcome occurred in the House defense subcommittee, said Laura Peterson, a senior policy analyst at the group.
rest at http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2010/03/will-american-democracy-get-swept-away.html
No comments:
Post a Comment