I ham-handedly tried to explain why Tom DeLay got off-the-hook yesterday when I stated that his ideology overlapped perfectly with the corrupt actions of former super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. What I meant is that it was impossible to distinguish whether DeLay's positions, for example, on labor laws for the Marianas Islands, were influenced by the trips and dining he was provided by Abramoff--via money laundered through a nonprofit--or whether that position stemmed from his conservative belief in free markets with little to no regulation. Prosecutors couldn't figure it out and there was no evidence to go by except for DeLay's statement that he was simply following his ideological beliefs. The money spent on him held no sway over his ultimate decisions, he argued.

A similar argument can be made for lawmakers who receive campaign contributions from lobbyists and employees of firms who receive earmarks from said lawmakers. Take deceased Rep. John Murtha as an example. Murtha could repeatedly state that all that concerned him was getting jobs and infrastructure into his economically depressed district. Same goes for Rep. Don Young, former Sen. Ted Stevens and former Sen. Robert Byrd. All the campaign contributions they were getting didn't matter when they signed off on earmarks for their contributors because they were just looking for viable job-creating projects. You can't necessarily prove that anything illegal happened.

All of that brings us to the Op-Ed by author and lawyer Scott Turow in today's New York Times. Turow does the best job possible explaining the dysfunctional ways in which our legal system views and deals with campaign contributions. One person can be convicted of bribery for offering a $1,000 contribution in exchange for a vote while Rod Blagojevich walks free on a hung jury over charges that he held up funding for a children's hospital over campaign contributions and so on and so on.

Our legal system accepts that the transmission of campaign contributions in exchange for official acts is illegal bribery, yet it fails to properly police this practice. This is mainly due to the circumstances described above. How do you prove that a contribution was intended as a bribe when the action may have taken place despite the contribution? It's impossible. So you get a system where we scold people for the appearance of corruption or improper influence, but don't do anything about it. Take this example that Turow lays out:

For example, in June 2009, the court decided a case involving Massey Coal and its chief executive, Joe Blankenship. (Coincidentally, Massey was the operator of a coal mine in West Virginia that exploded in April, killing 29 miners.) In 2004, after Massey had lost a $50-million fraud verdict to a rival coal company, Mr. Blankenship spent $3 million supporting the successful candidacy of Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, where Massey’s challenge of the fraud verdict was going to be heard. Although Mr. Blankenship’s spending eclipsed the contributions of all of Judge Benjamin’s other donors put together, the judge subsequently refused to remove himself from Massey’s appeal. Unsurprisingly, the court voted to overturn the verdict against Massey, with Judge Benjamin providing the deciding vote. The case eventually came to the United States Supreme Court, which by a 5-to-4 vote decided Justice Benjamin should have recused himself because of the “disproportionate” influence Mr. Blankenship’s money had in the election. Nonetheless, the court pointedly refused to require the same from other judges who received less grandiose campaign assistance from lawyers and litigants with cases before them. Moreover, the court appeared persuaded that nothing criminal had occurred, even though its ruling concluded that it was “reasonably foreseeable” at the time that Mr. Benjamin would decide the Massey case and that Mr. Blankenship had a “vested interest” when he spent the money. Given that logic, who can blame Mr. Blagojevich — or Wanda Brandstetter — for asking, “Why me?”

The court ruled that the judge was corrupted, but that no law had been broken. This is the sort of dysfunctional world of campaign funding that we live in.

Dan Froomkin has a good write-up of the Mine Safety and Health Administration's (MSHA) failure to release certain notes related to violations that Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine was cited for in the past year. The Upper Big Branch Mine was the site of the worst coal mining disaster in the United States in the past forty years.

The Charleston Gazette's award-winning mining beat reporter Ken Ward Jr. first reported about the inspector's notes late Tuesday, describing them as being among a "dribble" of documents that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA, pronounced em-sha) is finally releasing to the public "as federal and state officials begin a long and complex effort to figure out what caused the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in 40 years." The violation the inspector described in his notes was fixed later that same day; the company was cited for "unwarrantable failure" to follow safety rules and fined a hefty $70,000. But the inspector's notes -- a particularly valuable source of information that the government used to routinely make available on request -- weren't released to members of the public or to journalists until more than a week after the mine exploded. md5-98c266dd0c4f7a0e6c92c85f955a76b7 If those notes had been available, journalists like Ken Ward or Ellen Smith (the managing editor of Mine Safety and Health News) or someone else just might have brought some much-needed attention to Massey's evidently casual attitude toward such a life-threatening issue. And maybe a disaster would have been averted. "This is life and death stuff," said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists. "And by withholding this information from the public domain, the government's capacity to spur corrective action was blocked."

Sunlight Labs announced the release of TransparencyData.com earlier today. I spent some time playing around with the site yesterday and have to say that it completely changes the ways in which researchers tracking campaign finance issues will get their data. The site makes searching, obtaining and downloading data so much easier than it has ever been.

Labs Director Clay Johnson has been tweeting examples of what kind of data you can find through the TransparencyData.com database. (Follow the links.) Here's another example:

On Monday, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia killed 25 miners and trapped four others. In 2009, the mine received hundreds of violations from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), many of them very serious. The mine is owned by Massey Energy, which itself is owned by the politically powerful Don Blankenship. Blankenship is facing harsh criticism for his apparent indifference to MSHA violations. This has led many to look at his political influence in West Virginia, particularly in how he has tried to influence lawmakers and judicial races. With the help of TransparencyData.com, we can easily look up the contributions made by Blankenship, the employees of Massey Energy and the Massey Energy political action committee.

What we see here are the 364 contributions made by individuals listing Massey Energy as their place of employment from 2003-2010. The majority of these contributions come from Blankenship or the company's political action committee. The vast majority of these contributions were made in state-level races in West Virginia--legislative, gubernatorial and judicial races. You can even see the Win-Loss ratio that Massey Energy has on the candidates that received contributions from them.

I'm not going to pretend to know very much about West Virginia politics, but I can say that anyone writing a story about Blankenship's influence in West Virginia could quickly obtain the necessary contribution data through TransparencyData.com in seconds to begin or enrich their research. Just a cursory look over this allows a user to quickly see the contributions Blankenship made to his independent political committee, And For The Sake Of Kids.

And For The Sake Of Kids ran a campaign, funded with nearly $2.5 million in Blankenship's money, to unseat a West Virginia state Supreme Court of Appeals judge, who Blankenship feared would rule against Massey Energy in a number of appeals that were on the docket for the court. Blankenship's campaign worked and he installed a sympathetic ear onto the court. That sympathetic ear went on to rule in favor of Blankenship's appeal. The money worked. (The Supreme Court of the United States would later rule that the sympathetic ear--Judge Brent Benjamin--would have to recuse himself from certain cases due to the existence of "actual bias" due to the spending by Blankenship on his election.)

Another example that little bit of research uncovered was the revelation that Massey Energy actually owns a seat in the state legislature. State legislator Troy Andes (WV-14) works for Massey Energy in their Public/Community Relations department. Massey Energy employees spent $8,700 to help elect and re-elect Andes in 2006 and 2008.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge of West Virginia politics could actually dig further into this data. Or any other data you'd like to. Now that TransparencyData.com exists there are a whole host of new, incredibly fast queries to be done on campaign finance data from the state to federal level.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="274" caption="Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, WV"][/caption]

The Upper Big Branch Mine that suffered the most serious mining disaster since 1984 on Monday has received the most serious citations from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in 2009 of all Massey Energy-owned mines in West Virginia. Data collected from MSHA shows that over the course of the last year, the Upper Big Branch Mine received 48 "unwarrantable failure orders," far exceeding Massey Energy's number two recipient of serious citations in West Virginia.

On Monday, 25 miners were killed and left four others trapped underground at the Upper Big Branch Mine. It is the worst mining disaster in the United States since 1984 and, if the four trapped miners are not rescued, would become the worst since 1970. The Washington Post reports, "[t]he cause of Monday's explosion has not been determined, but a buildup of methane or coal dust was considered the likeliest culprit."

The Upper Big Branch mine received 39 violations in 2009 citing a failure to plan for ventilation to extract methane and other chemicals. Fifteen of these were considered "significant and substantial." In July of 2009, the mine received its largest monetary fine of the year ($66,142) for allowing the accumulation of combustible materials in working spaces. Upper Big Branch received 34 similar violations citing accumulation of combustible materials, 20 of which were determined to be "significant and substantial."

Massey Energy has contested nearly all major citations issued against the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009 and has paid less than 20% of the fines levied against them. Of the top 100 fines levied against the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009, Massey Energy has contested or are delinquent in paying 85% of them. Upper Big Branch was also cited for 202 violations that were considered "significant and substantial." Seventy-six percent of those have either been contested or Massey Energy is delinquent in paying them.

The only West Virginia mine owned by Massey Energy with a recent problem with MSHA violations that even compares to the Upper Big Branch mine is the Ruby Energy mine in Mingo, West Virginia. Where Upper Big Branch received a total of 515 citations for fines totaling $897,325 in 2009, Ruby Energy received 573 citations with fines reaching $1,668,408 over the same period. The key difference is that Ruby Energy received 15 "unwarrantable failure orders" while Upper Big Branch received 48.

Serious violations have continued to occur at Upper Big Branch this year. The Charleston Daily Mail reported after Monday's mining explosion that, "Two citations from January for not having a proper plan to ventilate the mine, extracting methane and other chemicals from the air, could cost Massey more than $130,000 in fines."

All data was obtained from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Web site. Data on mines, ownership and location were made available under the Open Government Directive (OGD). Mine safety data, while available online, was not available in an easily downloadable format.