The Washington Post reports on a bipartisan effort in the House to ban a practice that Sunlight and citizen journalists investigated in 2006: How many members of Congress were using campaign contributions to pay their spouses, in essence putting special interest money into the family budget?

In the latest ripple of an ethics spat gripping Congress, the House yesterday passed a bipartisan bill that bans lawmakers from paying their spouses for campaign work.

The measure, passed on a voice vote, was sponsored by Reps. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). It would not bar other family members from working on a lawmaker’s campaign but would require disclosure.

Currently, spouses can work for campaigns provided that they charge fair market value for their services. The measure still has to passed by the Senate.

The meat of the bill is contained in these passages:

(1) PROHIBITING COMPENSATION OF SPOUSES- Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, no authorized committee of a candidate or any other political committee established, maintained, or controlled by a candidate or an individual holding Federal office (other than a political committee of a political party) shall directly or indirectly compensate the spouse of the candidate or individual (as the case may be) for services provided to or on behalf of the committee.

(2) DISCLOSURE OF PAYMENTS TO SPOUSES AND IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBERS- In addition to any other information included in a report submitted under section 304 by a committee described in paragraph (1), the committee shall include in the report a separate statement of any payments, including direct or indirect compensation, made to the spouse or any immediate family member of the candidate or individual involved during the period covered by the report.

(3) IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBER DEFINED- In this subsection, the term `immediate family member’ means the son, daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother, father, brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, or grandchild of the candidate or individual involved.

I find it a little odd that “indirectly compensate” isn’t defined — I guess that the Federal Election Commission will determine what that means (if you’re married to a UPS lobbyist, does that mean your campaign can’t ship via UPS?). In any case, here’s Govtrack’s page on the bill.

Just an observation, but I’ve always thought that of the two practices, lobbying by a spouse or immediate family member is potentially far more corrupting — there’s no requirement for a lobbying firm to pay fair market value for the services of a member’s spouse or son or daughter. (See here for one example….)

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While it’s a little odd see Dick Morris, the former hired gun political advisor of both Bill Clinton and Trent Lott, show an interest in congressional ethics, it’s worth noting that among the reforms he proposes (indeed, the top one on his list) is banning campaigns and Political Action Committees from hiring family members of members of Congress. Morris has a pretty long list that includes not just spouses, not just children, but also brothers, cousins, nephews and an in-law:

Those who have hired spouses and family members include: Reps. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), wife and two brothers; Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), husband’s law firm; Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wife and step-daughter; John Doolittle (R-Calif.), wife; Ralph Hall (R-Texas), daughter-in-law; Pete Stark (D-Calif.), wife; Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), wife; Ron Lewis (R-Ky.), wife; Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), wife; Jim Costa (D-Calif.), cousin; Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), wife; Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), nephew; Chris Cannon (R-Utah), three daughters; Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), sister-in-law and daughter; Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), wife; Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), daughter; Bob Filner (D-Calif.), wife; J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), wife; Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), wife; Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), wife; Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), wife; John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), wife; Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), wife; Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.), nephew; John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), son; and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), brother Michael’s political consulting firm; Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), son; and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), son and daughter during vice presidential race; and ex-Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), wife; and Tom DeLay (R-Texas), wife and daughter.

Worth clipping and saving. Number two on Morris’s list is banning family members from lobbying Congress, also a worthy idea. But I would add that there needs to be some kind of disclosure for adult children — which the stories about Rep. Silvestre Reye’s advocacy for a contractor that hired his children so richly demonstrate:

Reyes has been a key backer of the system and its contractor, International Microwave Corp. Shortly after its 1999 contract award, the firm hired Rebecca Reyes to serve as a liaison to what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She ultimately became IMC’s vice president for contracts. IMC also hired her brother, Silvestre Reyes Jr., as a technician on the program, known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS.

I wouldn’t object to any of the other items on Morris’ list, although I think all of them could go farther.

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The basic research is done, and before I begin making the earnest effort to digest the raw results, let me first thank all who participated–especially Beezling, who topped his prolific performance on round one with an incredible turn on round two–he did 319 this time around, doing by far the bulk of the entries. Get that man a fedora and a press pass!

More information soon…

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Nearly 7 p.m. Sunday, and we’re through 296 members and 41 states–pretty incredible. To all who’ve joined this effort, once again let me offer a heartfelt thank you.

Some preliminary numbers as we move toward the final leg, but first let me point out that these a). haven’t been verified and b). need to be looked at more closely to figure out what they mean. So keep those caveats in mind. Citizen journalists have tentatively identified $480,029 in campaign expenditures going from a House member’s campaign to a firms that employs that member’s spouse in the current election cycle. Citizen journalists have also tentatively found that organizations for which House members’ spouses work have landed a total of $2,788,663,441–that’s $2.7 billion–in federal contracts in 2005 (the last full year for which information is available) and $2,649,935,942–$2.6 billion–in federal grants in 2004 (again, the last year for which we have complete data).

What does this mean? I’m not sure. Maybe if you picked 296 names at random out of a phone book, you’d come up with similar figures for the companies they worked for. It’s the particulars here that count, and we’ll begin digging into them once we’re through phase one.

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Some 19 current members of the House of Representatives pay their spouses out of their campaign war chests, totaling more than $636,000 in the current election cycle, a study by citizen journalists working with the Sunlight Foundation has found. Phase one of the “Is Congress A Family Business?” investigation is now complete.

Using an innovative tool developed by Sunlight Labs, about 40 volunteers investigated anywhere from one to as many as 155 members, uncovering those who, by hiring their spouses to work for their campaign, allow special interest cash to enter their family budgets.

While the federal nepotism statute prohibits members of Congress from hiring spouses to work in their Washington or district offices, there is no law preventing members from hiring family members to work for their campaign committees, provided they render bona fide services to the campaign at fair market value.

In the current election cycle, the spouse paid the most directly from campaign funds was Patricia McKeon, the wife of Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif. From January 1, 2005, through June 2006, she has been paid $78,287–which works out to an annual salary of a little more than $52,000 a year. According to the campaign, Ms. McKeon serves as the treasurer. Rep. McKeon’s 2005 financial disclosure form indicates that his campaign was his wife’s sole source of earned income.

Rep. Richard Pombo’s wife Annette has been paid $52,950 through June 2006 by the seven-term Republican’s reelection effort. When contacted by the Sunlight Foundation about the payments, a campaign spokesperson explained that Annette Pombo is not an employee of the campaign, but rather is paid fees for consulting.

Citizen researchers also found that Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., has hired his wife, Janet, to be his campaign manager, paying her $41,792 over the study period. Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., gave his wife Mary Anne the same title and paid her $28,960.

The investigative tool allowed users to easily access members’ biographical information—including spouse names—compiled by the nonpartisan VoteSmart.org. They could then look up campaign expenditure information from the Center for Responsive Politics’ Web site, OpenSecrets.org, to see if an individual with that name was receiving payments from the campaign. Researchers recorded the information at the Sunlight Foundation’s site.

Citizen journalists investigated all 435 members of the House of Representatives in less than 48 hours; Sunlight Foundation researchers verified the information and contacted campaigns to confirm the identity of the individuals.

Some campaigns did not respond to queries; in those cases, personal financial disclosures of members were consulted to verify the information.

Future projects will track spouses who are paid indirectly by campaigns—that is, they work for firms that in turn work for a campaign—and spouses who work for firms that receive government contracts and grants.

Of the 19 current House members who employ their spouses on their campaigns, two are not seeking reelection in 2006. The campaign of Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who on Sept. 13, 2006, pled guilty to multiple crimes stemming from the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid his wife Elizabeth $25,598 through June 2006. More recent filings by the campaign with the FEC show that she continued to receive payments even after her husband’s guilty plea: she received two payments of $851 on Sept. 15 and Sept. 30. According to the 2005 financial disclosure form filed by Rep. Ney, his campaign is his wife’s sole source of earned income.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., announced on March 17, 2006, that he would not seek reelection. But even though his campaign is no longer geared to winning an election, it’s not entirely inactive: it continues to hold fundraising and other events, it makes contributions to other Republican candidates, and it still files reports with the FEC.

The campaign’s last remaining paid employee is Boehlert’s spouse, Marianne Boehlert, who first became a paid employee of the campaign in 2002, according to Sam Marchio, the communications director for Boehlert’s office. “She was an integral part of the team,” he said, adding that she was involved in fundraising, scheduling events and managing volunteers. “She really kept the trains running on time,” he said.

The campaign has paid Ms. Boehlert $35,430 through June 30, 2006; a review of more recent FEC records filed by the campaign show that she has remained on the payroll through September.

“Just because he’s not running for reelection doesn’t mean there’s no activity,” Marchio said, adding that there’s “still a lot of work to be done closing down a campaign office.”

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John Podhoretz draws a distinction, in his New York Post column, between those who get their information from the awkwardly-named “Mainstream Media” (I prefer traditional media) and those who follow (or follow, in addition to newspaper and television) political blogs and Web sites, and hypothesizes that the latter are getting a much different election picture than the former. Those on “Blog Time,” Podhoretz argues, are more attuned to subtle or even significant shifts of voter zeitgeist: Rep. Harold Ford had a bad week; Republicans have put the worst of the ongoing Foley mess behind them; this district’s latest poll looks good for the incumbent, and so on so forth. Those on “Mainstream Media Time,” by contrast, are getting fed a steady diet of one way stories suggesting that Republicans are in trouble, according to Podhoretz.

For what it’s worth, my impression of the tenor of stories in papers and television versus what blogs are saying squares pretty well with Podhoretz, but I think the difference is better explained by the audience each is trying to reach–people who follow politics more closely will be far more interested in the ups and downs week-to-week than people who (apologies for putting it this way) have better things to do with their time. So while I might suddenly find it fascinating that new polls show challenger Eric Dickerson has pulled ahead of Rep. Julia Carson (and further, that that poll may well be inaccurate due to limitations in polling techniques for House races), I wouldn’t expect, say, someone who’s not obsessed with politics or who doesn’t live in Indiana’s seventh district to find this all that fascinating.

One thing I’d fault traditional media for is the extent to which, once again, its coverage is poll driven rather than substantive, and it seems like a lot of the blogs are following suit. Polls are interesting as far as they go, but the only poll that matters, of course, is the one on election day; to win that one, the campaigns and parties are raising and spending obscene amounts of campaign cash. I’m far more interested in who’s giving that money than anything in the latest poll results.

I’m also getting more and more interested in how campaigns are spending that money (and what they’re spending it on). Is there a channel of communication we’re missing, a microtargeting effort that lets a campaign (or rather, its volunteers) speak directly to voters, making pre-determined pitches on the basis of voter preferences to get people to the polls on Nov. 7? To me, that’s a much more interesting question than whether people who closely follow political blogs are much more up to speed on nuances in political races than those who don’t.

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How likely is it that Karl Rove is right, and that Republicans will hold both the House and Senate in the 2006 elections? I don’t pretend to know — and remember, I’m the guy who once again is betting the Philadelphia Eagles will win the Superbowl, but let me offer a few thoughts as to why the GOP might very well have grounds for confidence. Let me also note that I don’t have any particular Rove obsession: He’s human, and he may well be absolutely wrong or saying something he knows is wrong for tactical reasons–declaring “Woe is me” might well be one of those sorts of things that depress turnout. In any case, here goes…

In the 2004 election, the GOP pioneered the use of political datamining and microtargeting–sending individualized messages to voters based on such variables as the magazines they subscribed to or whether or not they ordered college football packages from their cable stations. They identified their likely voters and used messages tailored to the concerns of each voter–family values, low taxes, gun rights, whatever–to get them to the polls. Republicans were able to reach voters directly, intimately, and without using clunky television ads that might energize one constituency while alienating another. A candidate could stress her support for free trade and open borders to Reason subscribers, her pro-life credentials to National Review subscribers, and her support for Israel and democratizing the Middle East to Weekly Standard subscribers, directly, privately, and without the risk of upsetting libertarians with anti-abortion rhetoric or social conservatives with a pro-immigration stance.

The polls look uniformly bad for Republican prospects of holding both Houses of Congress (although at various times the House has looked safer than the Senate, and vice versa), but suppose the GOP had something better than polls: suppose they had a database of people they knew would go to the polls and vote for their candidates? Instead of extrapolating from a weighted sample of 660, a thousand or twelve hundred voters, suppose that, district by district, Republicans have a pretty accurate count of how many votes–total votes–they’re likely to get (and, of course, an estimate of how many they need to win).

They had something like that in 2004. Here’s a bit from a Thomas Edsall and James Grimaldi article that ran in The Washington Post on Dec. 30, 2004:

Republican firms, including TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc., delved into commercial databases that pinpointed consumer buying patterns and television-watching habits to unearth such information as Coors beer and bourbon drinkers skewing Republican, brandy and cognac drinkers tilting Democratic; college football TV viewers were more Republican than those who watch professional football; viewers of Fox News were overwhelmingly committed to vote for Bush; homes with telephone caller ID tended to be Republican; people interested in gambling, fashion and theater tended to be Democratic.

Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine “anger points” (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows and other “flags.” Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct mail, precinct walking and phone bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message.

“You used to get a tape-recorded voice of Ronald Reagan telling you how important it was to vote. That was our get-out-the-vote effort,” said Alex Gage, of TargetPoint. Now, he said, calls can be targeted to specific constituencies so that, for example, a “right to life voter” could get a call warning that “if you don’t come out and vote, the number of abortions next year is going to go up. “

Dowd estimated that, in part through the work of TargetPoint and other research, the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to “quadruple the number” of Republican voters who could be targeted through direct mail, phone banks and knocking on doors.

Democrats had access to similar data files. But the Bush campaign and the RNC were able to make far better use of the data because they had the time and money to conduct repeated field tests in the 2002 and 2003 elections, to finance advanced research on meshing databases with polling information, and to clean up and revise databases that almost invariably contained errors and omissions.

“Very few people understand how much work it takes to get this technology to actually produce political results. We are one election cycle behind them in this area,” said a Democrat who helped coordinate voter contact in the 2004 campaign.

Suppose Replubicans are still a cycle ahead? Predicting elections on the basis of polls might be like assuming that because 400,000 people subscribe to a newspaper, all 400,000 are going to read the lead editorial, rather than skipping to the comics page to read Beetle Bailey, Dilbert or Zippy the Pinhead. Maybe Rove really does have a reason to smile.

Caveat one: this Washington Post story provides some caution in thinking that microtargeting will make that much of a difference in individual races, and suggesting that the polls have some validity. But see also caveat two: this post from Dan Riehl on polls taken two days before the 2002 elections compared with final results in those same races (although this may say more about individual pollsters than it does about the overall reliability of polls).

It’s also worth asking, in an age of increasing media fragmentation, what messages are getting through to individual voters and from what sources–from newspapers, radio, television news, political ads, or from phone calls from phone banks from callers who have some inkling that someone’s top issue is taxes or immigration or the War on Terror or health care.

Bottom line: While nobody ever gets rich betting on the Cubs after the Fourth of July, as the saying goes, and I will never get rich betting on anything–politics being no exception–it would be well worth looking at how much Republicans are spending on TargetPoint Consultants and National Media Inc. in 2006, and how much Democrats are spending on their microtargeting efforts.

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