As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Grassley seeks lobbyist disclosure for tariff bills

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It's been a while since I've looked at tariffs, but, as CongressDaily notes, they're back in the news (well, at least inside the beltway):

fter a high-profile fight over earmarks in the omnibus appropriations bill, another front in that battle is shaping up to be a huge package of tariff breaks on imported goods being cobbled together by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Senate Finance ranking member Charles Grassley wants to add the name of each lobbyist or individual proponent to the hundreds of individual tariff and duty suspensions Congress might consider, often of benefit to ...

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A few questions for Sen. Dodd

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This weekend, the august Sunday Times reported on Sen. Christopher Dodd's Irish "cottage":

John Moore, an Irish business partner of Downe's, also lobbied Galway county council to approve a planning application by Dodd to extend and renovate the property soon after it was bought in 1994.

Moore said: I didn't write to the council on behalf of Edward Downe. I was involved with Galway Chamber of Commerce at the time and had got to know Senator Dodd. I asked the council to look favourably on his planning application because I thought he might be able to help ...

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CRP: PMA Group, clients donated to 516 members of Congress

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Lindsay Renick Mayer of the Center for Responsive Politics writes on OpenSecrets.org about PMA Group, the lobbying firm that specialized in defense appropriations and that is reportedly under investigation for campaign finance irregularities:

No matter how we slice and dice the data related to contributions from embattled lobbying firm PMA Group and its clients, Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, remains at or near the top of the recipient list, along with Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.). This week, though, we took yet another look at the contributions from the firm ...

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Moran: Whole budget is earmarks

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Rep. Jim Moran, commenting on the controversy over all the earmarks (more than 8,500 of them) in the omnibus spending bill, tells the Washington Post, "The reality is that every dollar in the budget is earmarked. The question is: Who does the earmarking?"

Indeed. We have disclosure about $100,000 here, $500,000 there, $5,000,000 there -- telling us which member directed what spending where via earmark. But about the big ticket items, the decreases or increases in agency budgets, the large new initiatives--we know nothing beyond the name of the bill sponsor (who may or may not ...

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Another hole in financial disclosure

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The New York Times report that Rep. Maxine Waters helped arrange a meeting between Treasury officials and the CEO of a bank that her husband may or may not have owned $250,000 worth of stock in:

Top banking regulators were taken aback late last year when a California congresswoman helped set up a meeting in which the chief executive of a bank with financial ties to her family asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds, Treasury officials said.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one ...

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