Apparently, PACs and the FEC are playing a serious game of Calvinball over disclosure rules. Bill Allison at Real Time... View Article
Continue readingCram down look ups, cont.
Quarters doubled in odd years, halved again in evens
This always makes me thing of Lewis Carroll every time I see it. A PAC tells the FEC it's going to file quarterly reports rather than monthly reports. The FEC approves the request, and writes back:
The Commission has received notification of your request, dated 1/30/2009, to change from a monthly filer to a quarterly filer of receipts and disbursements. Please note that during years that have no scheduled federal election, quarterly filers are required only to file semi-annually.
As for the practical effects: Well, we can be glad that Washington mostly takes odds year off, so ...
Continue readingLooking up cram down opponents in Party Time
This post is all research and no results -- that'll come later. I wanted to take a look at a vote my colleague Paul Blumenthal referred to with the title (quoting Sen. Richard Durbin) "They own the place." The "they" in question are financial sector firms, the place is Congress; at issue is a bill, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 -- or rather, an amendment to that bill -- that was voted down by a 51-45 margin.
The Durbin amendment, also known as the cram down bill, would have removed the mortgage exemption from bankruptcy proceedings, allowing bankruptcy ...
Continue readingRoll Call makes PMA Group articles available online
In conjunction with the appearance of Paul Singer on C-Span's Washington Journal this morning (his bit starts about 1:03:30 in on the video), Roll Call has put online its amazing body of work tracking the PMA Group, the defunct lobbying firm under federal investigation that, along with its clients, provided oodles of campaign cash to more than 100 members of the House while securing hundreds of millions in earmarks for its clients.
Of all the stories there, this one, from March 17, still strikes me as the most interesting:
...top PMA officials also had financial stakes in ...Continue reading
Specter, unions & Blank Rome LLP
Just a thought about Sen. Arlen Specter's shift to the Democratic party:
In March, Specter withdrew support from the Employee Free Choice Act, the controversial "card check" bill which many labor unions list as their top legislative priority (he was the only Republican in the Senate to support the bill in a cloture vote in the last Congress, according to this newsletter from Blank Rome LLP--more on them in a moment). In his party-switching statement, Specter pointedly referred to his opposition to card check as an example of his ongoing independence.
Ron Moore, writing at a labor union site ...
Continue readingSen. Klobuchar Supports S. 482!
As a commenter noted in a post yesterday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the 37th senator to cosponsor S. 482, the... View Article
Continue readingSenate Obstinacy on Electronic Filing
David Waldman (aka Kagro X) posted a very good piece on Congress Matters regarding congressional transparency and the bureaucratic arguments... View Article
Continue readingPolitical Party Time: More than 170 fundraisers for appropriators (already!) in 2009
We're just past the end of the first quarter of the current election cycle (with seven more to go before it's all over), but members of the Appropriations Committees in the House and the Senate have already had <a href="http://blog.politicalpartytime.org/2009/04/23/more-than-170-parties-with-appropriators/">more than 170 fundraisers</a>, according to my colleague Nancy Watzman.
A few thoughts: Earmark season (why do I imagine a lobbyist dressed up like Elmer Fudd?) comes early in the year--requests had to be submitted to members by April 3 in the House; for the Senate they'll start ...
Continue readingSenate E-Filing in Politico
The campaign to pass S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill, continues apace with a great mention in the Politico today.... View Article
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