Here’s an experiment occasioned by the excellent report by John Solomon of the Washington Post on spouses of members of Congress who lobby. Solomon identifies 6 lawmakers married to registered lobbyists (listed below). Is it possible, after reading the lobby disclosure reports that list these spouses (I’ve linked the results page in the Senate Office of Public Records page for each of them, making it easy to find the reports) to determine whether the member votes for the spouse’s clients’ interests?

Here’s the list, with links:

Sen. Byron Dorgan……….Kimberly Olson Dorgan here and here
Sen. Elizabeth Dole…………Robert J. Dole
Sen. Ted Stevens…………….Catherine A. Stevens
Sen. Kent Conrad……………Lucy Calautti
Rep. Roy Blunt……………….Abigail Blunt
Rep. Steven LaTourette……Jennifer LaTourette

The Washington Post has a nice database of congressional votes which should prove helpful when lobbyists list particular bills….

Update: Here’s an example. This disclosure tells us that Catherine Stevens, the wife of Sen. Ted Stevens, lobbied on S. 2439, the Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2002, for a group called CuresNow, which, according to this (scroll to the bottom) seemed to support S. 2439:

7. Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) have joined together to sponsor S. 2439, the “Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2002.” The act would ban reproductive cloning to create children, but permit privately funded research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), sometimes called therapeutic cloning. This legislation is widely supported among scientific, medical, and patient groups.

Stevens, incidentally, was not a cosponsor.

The bill was referred to the Senate Juciciary Committee, where it apparently died. At the time, Sen. Stevens was not a member of the Judiciary Committee, so it’s unlikely he had much of an effect on the bill.

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We’ve gotten some great feedback on planning the next round of our Congressional Family Business investigation, both from inside the office, from some of the folks who made the first round such a success, and from some smart observers (thanks to David Cohn for posting that at Digg!).

We’re starting to design phase two now (what this means in practice is that I get to keep bothering our Sunlight Labs geniuses with questions that begin with cringe-inducing phrases like, “How quickly could you…” or “How hard would it be to…” or “Would it be possible to…”). I’m really excited about round two; and even though we won’t be able to incorporate all the excellent suggestions we’ve gotten right away, this step will include some of your ideas while also giving us the building blocks to do some never-before-seen investigations, like figuring out whether spouses work for companies or organizations that have gotten federal contracts or grants (something our friends at OMB Watch have made possible through FedSpending.org), or for firms that lobby or hire lobbyists to influence Congress.

If you need a reminder as to why this is important, look no further than this USAToday story focusing on relatives of members and staff working for just two committees of Congress, the House Appropriations Committee and its Senate counterpart:

Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA TODAY investigation found. Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.

The connections are so pervasive that, in 2005 alone, appropriations bills contained about $750 million for projects championed by lobbyists whose relatives were involved in writing the spending bills.

Again, that’s two committees, $750 million in one year. And that could be a low figure (I say this on the basis of what a dogged researcher with Taxpayers for Common Sense, who have as much experience as anyone else in ferreting out earmarks, once told me: Even after all their efforts, there are usually some big earmarks in Defense Appropriations or Defesne Authorization bills that they can’t tie to a member or a company). Imagine what we’ll find when we cover the rest of Congress…

Stay tuned…

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USA Today, and its reporters Matt Kelley and Peter Eisler, have an astounding story out that today that really advances our knowledge of the extent of insiderism on Capitol Hill, and how Congress really has become a family business. And as you read the next few paragraphs, remember that they looked at two committees–JUST TWO COMMITTEES–the House and Senate Appropriations Committees–to get their totals.

Think what we’ll turn up when we’ve done the whole Congress!

Members of Congress and their staffs are barred from using their positions for personal profit. But their spouses and other relatives can — and often do — cash in when lawmakers spend taxpayer dollars.

Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA TODAY investigation found. Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.

The connections are so pervasive that, in 2005 alone, appropriations bills contained about $750 million for projects championed by lobbyists whose relatives were involved in writing the spending bills.

“It smells bad; it is bad,” Mickey Edwards, a Princeton University lecturer, said when told of the newspaper’s findings. “If it is not already completely outlawed, it should be.” Edwards served on the House Appropriations Committee during his 16 years as a Republican congressman from Oklahoma.

USA TODAY examined the family ties between lobbyists and the 94 members of the House and Senate appropriations committees, as well as 250 top staffers who serve those members. Those committees control the federal government’s purse strings, allocating hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.

My only complaint: as far as I can tell, the paper’s Web site doesn’t list those thirty family members, their relatives in office or on staff, or any of the $750 million in earmarks for which they lobbied. Let’s hope they’ll rectify that oversight soon!

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While we’re wrapping up the last loose ends of the first part of our Is Congress a Family Business? investigation, I’d like to share a few suggestions for what we do next, solicit as many suggestions as possible for alternatives, and get people thinking about how we could better design the tools for going forward.

A few notes: I’d like to continue looking at family members of members of Congress, and I’d like to do so systematically–that is, focusing on Congress as an institution rather than digging into just one or two members. Here we list 19 members of the House who pay their spouses salaries and wages directly from their campaign treasuries, adding money donated to their campaigns to their family budgets. There are also members with close relatives that are registered to lobby Congress (here’s a partial list compiled by the Associated Press) or who represent foreign interests. I would like us to develop as comprehensive an index as possible on family members of Congress who are in the business of electioneering or influence.

A logical follow-on would be to repeat what we did with the House–looking for direct payments from campaign funds to a Member’s spouse–with the Senate. Regrettably, no one organizes the expenditures from Senate campaigns in the way that the Center for Responsive Politics does for House campaigns. That’s because, unlike House members, federal law does not require Senate campaigns to file electronically (for more background on that, see here, here, here and here). In practical terms, what this means is that if we wanted to look for Senate spouses, we’d have to begin by scrolling through reports to the Federal Election Commission like this 1170 page monster filed by Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who’s now campaigning for the Senate. (I chose him as an example because in the past his House campaigns hired his wife–and his stepdaughter, too.) The reports list both itemized receipts (that’s campaign contributions) and itemized disbursements (that’s money spent by the campaign); in the 1170 page report linked above, the disbursements start on page 979. I didn’t click through all 191 pages, but that’s what you’d have to do to search for payments to Sanders’s spouse, and even then you wouldn’t know definitively whether or not she is working for his Senate campaign; you’d still have to go through all the other reports he’s filed in this election cycle. I’m not saying this isn’t doable for 100 Senators or the third of them that are running for re-election, but the tool would look a little different than the House version and the work might have to be divided differently.

We could also continue looking at the spouses of House members. Some commenters on the first round pointed out that the research didn’t capture situations like this one, in which a spouse works for a firm that in turn works for the member’s campaign (we might call this the Julie Doolittle phenomenon, after the wife of Rep. John Doolittle. Ms. Doolittle runs a firm called Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions, which makes its money raising money for her husband’s campaign–or, as the Sacramento Bee reported about one recent fundraising event…

Julie Doolittle’s company, Sierra Dominion Financial Solutions, earns a 15 percent commission on money she brings in for the Doolittle campaign, meaning their household could take in more than $90,000 as its share of donations from Tuesday’s 311 paying guests.

To track this sort of information, we could build a tool that starts with a member’s personal financial disclosure form (on which members must list their spouse’s sources of income), then check spouse employers against campaign expenditures.

Those are my thoughts, but obviously, there are many other possibilities–we could look for children of House members working for their campaigns, we could for leadership PACs of members that have hired spouses, or we could shift from campaigns to lobbying records, and look for spouses who have registered to lobby for special interests.

And, of course, beyond the subject we choose to research, there’s also the way we design the tools and the methodology to do the research. I’d be eager for feedback on that as well (although, to some extent, the topic and the resources for finding the information will have quite a bit of impact on what the tools look like and do).

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From the miracle of Nexis comes this list compiled by Chuck Neubauer, Judy Pasternak and Richard T. Cooper of the Los Angeles Times in June 2003 of Sen. Ted Stevens official actions in the U.S. Senate that have benefited the clients of his son, state Sen. Ben Stevens. Regrettably, that article (part of a two-part series the Times did looking at congressional offspring who became lobbyists) is not available online; this is a small chunk of it.

The Stevens connection

The special interest: Cook Inlet Region Inc., (CIRI), a Native Alaskan corporation created by federal legislation sponsored by Sen. Stevens

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Put a rider on an appropriations bill to help CIRI make a profit from a telecommunications investment. Pushed other legislation that would benefit CIRI, including an attempt in January to make CIRI eligible for tribal gaming.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $218,774

The special interest: VECO, a large Alaskan engineering and construction company with business around the world. It started out as an oil field service contractor

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Helped settle a contract dispute between VECO and Pakistan while chairing an appropriations subcommittee that was considering legislation to remove sanctions against Pakistan. Mandated that federal job training money be used to train Russian oil field workers for VECO and other Alaskan companies. Pushed for the Alaska Natural Gas pipeline.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $148,000 in consulting fees from 2000 to 2002. $64,000 in lobbying fees in 1996 and 1997

The special interest: Special Olympics

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Brought more than $10 million in federal aid to put on the 2001 Special Olympics Winter Games in Anchorage.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $715,395 in salary over three years to run the Alaska games. $57,000 as a consultant to the national Special Olympics since he ended his job running the Anchorage games

The special interest: At-Sea Processors Assn., the trade group of the 19 large factory trawlers that catch and process groundfish in the Bering Sea. The group’s executive director is Trevor McCabe, a former Stevens aide

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Sits on the subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which has jurisdiction over the fisheries. Co-sponsored American Fisheries Act in 1998 that gave 40% of the pollock harvest to the 19 trawlers in the association, which are listed by name in the legislation. In 2001, put through a rider that eliminated the sunset provisions of the act, making it permanent.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $54,000

The special interest: North Pacific Crab Assn., a trade group of nine onshore processors

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Pushed legislation to have federal fishing regulators come up with a plan for crab quotas. Congress is expected to vote this year on the plan, which gives processors, vessel owners and skippers shares that can be bought and sold. Has held hearings on the plan.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $56,000

The special interest: Bering Sea Crab Effort Reduction Fund, an ad hoc group of Bering Sea vessel owners

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Pushed through legislation for a $100-million buy-back program for crabbing vessels as the crab population shrinks.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $42,500

The special interest: Norquest Seafood, a large fish processor

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Earmarked $10 million in federal funds to market Alaska seafood. Required Defense Dept. to buy only domestically produced seafood.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $37,502

The special interest: Adak Fisheries, a groundfish processor

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Earmarked $10 million in federal funds to market Alaska seafood. Required Defense Dept. to buy only domestically produced seafood.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $80,000

The special interest: Adak Seafood, former operator of a groundfish processing plant on Adak Island

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Sponsored legislation that opened this one-time naval base for commercial development.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $25,000

The special interest: Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference, a nonprofit economic development agency

What Sen. Ted Stevens has done: Picked the agency to divide $30 million in disaster relief money after a bad groundfish season in 2000.

How much Ben Stevens has been paid in consulting fees*: $12,800

*Unless otherwise noted

Sources: Financial disclosure forms filed by Ben Stevens with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, covering 2000 through 2002; congressional bills, news releases and documents; interviews with Ben Stevens’ clients and others.

All coincidences, I’m sure. The full cite for the article is: Neubauer, Chuck, Judy Pasternak and Richard T. Cooper, “The Senators’ Sons; A Washington Bouquet: Hire A Lawmaker’S Kid.” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2003 Sunday, Pg. A1.

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