Cram 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 readingAlways amazes me…
what you can find in lobbying disclosure data. I was looking for something else when I came across this filing. TIG Insurance has hired the Normandy Group to "[a]ddress non-payment by Government of Argentina of fees owed to TIG Insurance Company. Seek to put restrictive language in Foreign Operations Appropriations Bills re: US assistance to Argentina." The fees paid are less than $5,000, so it doesn't seem like a lot of lobbying went on, but the list of lobbyists has a few revolvers on it:
I guess that's one way to get a bill paid...
Continue readingCongress’ family business, John Murtha edition
From the Washington Post:
The headquarters of Murtech, in a low-slung, bland building in a Glen Burnie business park, has its blinds drawn tight and few signs of life. On several days of visits, a handful of cars sit in the parking lot, and no trucks arrive at the 10 loading bays at the back of the building.Continue readingYet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech's most striking feature is ...
Roll 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
Congress’ family business, Chris Dodd edition
Edmund H. Mahony and Jon Lender of the the Hartford Courant report on Sen. Christopher Dodd's wife:
Since the low-profile family wedding on a rise above the Connecticut River in 1999, Jackie M. Clegg Dodd's income has quadrupled to the mid-six-figure range. All of the increase is due to her appointment as a highly compensated member of multiple corporate boards of directors.Clegg Dodd, a former legislative aide and senior federal Export-Import Bank officer, was compensated at a rate of about $500,000 a year in 2007 and 2008 from seats on five corporate boards, according to the ...
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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 readingThe unbearable opacity of TARP: Government agencies can’t tell us who’s in charge
The new report to Congress from SIGTARP -- the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- begins by noting that TARP has evolved into "12 separate, but often interrelated, programs involving government and private funds of up to almost $3 trillion" of an "unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity." The report highlighted the possibilities of fraud and conflicts on interest in the bailout process and calls for better disclosure. We continue to find that even some of the most elementary details about the program -- like who is actually managing distribution of the bailout money to financial institutions -- is still shrouded ...
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