Rick Cohen

Chasing the Charities of the Pols

In prior DMI blog postings, we've discussed the purported charities of the likes of Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, and others. To be fair, the emphasis on the Republicans is simply because they're in power and have more opportunities to use 501(c)(3) nonprofits as venues to camouflage the buying and selling of influence and access. There have been some Ds who have been caught with a few questionable nonprofit deals, including at the federal level, West Virginia Congressman Alan Mollohan, who Bloomberg News revealed to have traded earmarks with companies eager to access his influence and with nonprofits he either established or were operated by his friends, business partners, and political contributors. That earned Mollohan an editorial rebuke in one of West Virginia's leading newspapers, the Charleston Daily Mail, in a state that otherwise has historically thrived on the earmark- and pork-capacities of its Congressional delegation. At the state level, there have also been a few Ds lurking behind nonprofits, notably Pennsylvania state senator Vincent Fumo, whose behavior earned him a federal investigation and the arrest so far of two of his aides for destroying troubling e-mails.

All of this follows in the well-publicized wake of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's shenanigans whose crimes include the misuse and abuse of his nonprofit foundation, the Capital Athletic Foundation. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has been the leading if not only nonprofit watchdog calling for increased oversight of the charities of members of Congress, laying out the issue originally in Nonprofit Quarterly , then in an op-ed in the Washington Post, and finally in the pages of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Remarkably, Congress has done next to nothing about these charity abuses. Senator Max Baucus introduced an amendment to the lobbying reform bills calling for enhanced disclosure of donors to charities established or largely controlled by members of Congress. Baucus said, on introducing the amendment, that the charitable work of members of Congress should be without a hint of impropriety. The Baucus amendment lasted a few milliseconds in committee before it was deep-sixed with the ostensible reason that it was unrelated to the problem of lobbying--as though unregulated lobbying and influence-peddling isn't one of the main attractions for donors to give to the charities of DeLay, Frist, Santorum, and Mollohan.

Now comes Roll Call, one of the two major papers on Capitol Hill read by members of Congress, editorializing in the wake of the release of the report of Senator McCain's Indian Affairs Committee on Abramoff, with significant attention to the nonprofit abuses of both Abramoff and Grover Norquist (denounced by Grover as McCain's political retribution for Grover's opposition to McCain's last presidential run--hardly!). Roll Call's "tax exempt corruption" editorial basically endorses the position long advocated by NCRP and the moribund Baucus amendment. Is there anything that will get Congress to move on the dubiously charitable activities of members of Congress? If the McCain report (we've drawn from the testimony at the hearings in past DMI blog postings) can't do the trick, what will?

Rick Cohen: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 10:27 AM, Jul 05, 2006 in Government Accountability | Governmental Reform
Permalink | Email to Friend