Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner announced the members for the new Office of Congressional Ethics and one member is a total shocker. That is former congressman and former CIA Director Porter Goss, who was tainted by the Duke Cunningham scandal.

Porter Goss is the former chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and former CIA Director who resigned amidst questions regarding his promotion of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. Goss was the Director of the CIA for a little over a year, as he butted heads with the Director of Central Intelligence John Negroponte and was close to goons like Foggo. Upon his appointment as Director, Goss elevated Foggo, against the complaints of senior staff, to the number three position of executive director. In the weeks before Goss announced his resignation, the press and the FBI were zeroing in on Foggo as a chief co-conspirator in the massive Cunningham bribery scandal. Days after Goss’ May 5, 2006 resignation the FBI raided the home and offices of Dusty Foggo. In February of 2007, Foggo was indicted with co-conspirator Brent Wilkes.

Goss’ demise at the CIA has been hotly debated and was, at the time and still, inextricably linked to the indictment of CIA Executive Director Foggo and Foggo’s life-long friend Brent Wilkes. Wilkes was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Foggo is awaiting trial and was indicted on subsequent charges for accepting thousands of dollars in meals, vacations, and “sexual companionship.”

While serving as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Goss’ staff included one former CIA hand, Brant Bassett. Bassett, known as “Nine Fingers,” regularly attended the private poker and cigar parties that Wilkes through at D.C. hotels. Other attendees included Cunningham and Foggo. Bassett also consulted for Wilkes’ ADCS while working in Congress. When Goss moved from Congress to the CIA, he brought Bassett with him as a consultant.

These kinds of personal and professional connections do not lend themselves to the kind of unbiased judgement needed when serving on a panel such as the Office of Congressional Ethics. I can’t quite wrap my head around this decision from Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Boehner. (more…)

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Last month, after Portfolio revealed that Sens. Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad received favorable loan deals from mortgage giant Countrywide, members of the Senate Ethics Committee attempted to attach an amendment to housing relief legislation that would require the disclosure of mortgages and their details for members of Congress in their annual personal financial disclosure reports. The amendment was ruled non-germane and was dropped from consideration.

In the House, Rep. Mark Souder is keeping the disclosure flame alive, introducing a bill to require mortgage disclosure on personal financial disclosure reports. Souder’s bill would mandate the disclosure of home mortgages including the name of the creditor, the interest rate on payments, the number of years remaining, and the amount of the mortgage.

This is a good step in providing more detailed and accurate information on personal financial disclosure reports, and certainly a proper response to the Countrywide revelations. Congress should take this issue seriously and aim to adopt the transparency reforms in Souder’s bill.

For further steps on clarifying and furthering disclosure in personal financial disclosures, you can see Ellen Miller’s Op-Ed in Roll Call (no subscription needed this time) from a few weeks ago.

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The Society for Human Resource Management is displeased with a public blog post by Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker lambasting the organization’s legislative push to replace the E-verify system, an online program that allows employers to check the legal immigration status of potential employees. At issue is the July 11th post to the Department of Homeland Security’s public blog in which Assistant Secretary Baker takes a sarcastic tone and argues that SHRM wants to kill E-verify so that corporate employers can safely hire illegal immigrants.

SHRM is unhappy not simply with the tone, but also because this was the first contact they received from the Department of Homeland Security after repeated attempts to discuss the issue. SHRM and the bill’s congressional supporters can decide whether Baker’s post was uncouth or his positions are unacceptable or incorrect. Looking from outside of this debate, there are clear positives to the use of a public forum, like a blog, for these kinds of differences of opinions. SHRM now knows the position of those in power at DHS and the level of committment to that position, as evidenced by the tone of the blog post.

Perhaps, SHRM is also somewhat shocked at the use of a new media platform - and a transparent one at that - as a way for the government to express policy views and make known personal and policy differences. The public nature of this response is likely a positive for the group’s efforts in that they can readily point to the attitude that they are fighting against. They can also likely parlay the publicity into an actual meeting, at which they will already know the positions of those they will be in discussions with. (Baker has already stated that he is willing to meet now.)

Accusations of bad faith and improper tone aside, this is a welcome development for the government’s use of transparent new media. The public greatly benefits from the open flow of information coming from the government in its discussions with outside actors, such as SHRM, and inside actors, such as Congress. It liberates policy disputes from behind the closed doors where they occur and let all know where all actors stand.

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While many major K Street firms are still increasing their profits, the total improvement of profits over last year was 2.8% in the first half of the year, a significantly smaller increase than recorded over previous years. Doing best these days are firms tilted heavily towards the majority Democrats or those with a strong bipartisan staff. The biggest growth rate was seen by the Podesta Group, a Democratic firm, pulling in 47.4% more than the 2007 first half.

The presidential election year and the slow economy have a lot to do with the K Street slowdown. (Of course, by slowdown, I mean smaller increases in profits; not exactly a slowdown, except in terms of the previous exponential growth rates posted over recent years.) Top ten earners were:

Patton Boggs - $20.5 million (+5.7%)

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld - $17.8 million (+17.1%)

Van Scoyoc Associates - $14.5 million (+16%)

Cassidy & Associates - $12.1 million (-1.6%)

Dutko Worldwide - $10.4 million (-4.1%)

Hogan & Hartson - $10.2 million (+8.5%)

BGR Holdings - $10.2 million (-11.4%)

Ogilvy Government Relations - $9 million (-27.2%)

Williams & Jensen - $8.6 million (+6.0%)

K&L Gates - $8.0 million (+23.5%)

Both Roll Call and The Hill filed reports on this.

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TRACE International released a report on bribery in China that includes some really interesting charts. While I’m sure that bribery is more prevelant in China than in the US, it would be interesting to see similar charts for bribery here at home.

SPECIFIC NATURE OF BRIBE DEMANDS

(via Ethics World)

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Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are partnering with Helium to hold a contest for citizen journalists who can best write about the influence of money in US politics and elections. Here’s the run-down from CRP:

The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) has partnered with Helium to bring you the OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Awards. Compete by writing unique, compelling articles about money’s influence on US elections and public policy. You could be named the next OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalist and win a cash prize.

The assignment: CRP will feature one new title each month. Follow CRP’s article guidelines, research the featured topic using OpenSecrets.org and other resources and write a compelling article for your chance to win.

The awards: CRP will pick one winning article each month. The winning writer will receive an OpenSecrets.org Citizen Journalism Award and a $100 cash prize from CRP.

CRP will also feature the winning articles on its website and in its email newsletters, which reach thousands of journalists, activists, academics and citizens.

Get started

Pick a title: See CRP’s current contest title below. You can also visit CRP’s partner page at Helium to write to more (noncontest) titles.

Research: OpenSecrets.org is an unparalleled resource for researching the influence of industries and interests in U.S. politics, and on issues that affect all our lives. The more you draw on OpenSecrets.org in your article, the better. Please attribute all data and statistics and provide URLs, whether you find the information on OpenSecrets.org or elsewhere. Expressing your opinion is fine, but please back it up with facts.

Write: Write a unique, well-researched article in 750 words or less. You can submit articles to this contest until noon on Friday, August 8. CRP’s staff will begin reviewing essays on August 5 from the top articles rated by the Helium community. Selection will be based on the most compelling essay and the winner will be the essay that brings the freshest insight on the issue presented.

Submit: File your article at Helium.com, where other Helium users will be able to read and rate it. CRP will pick the contest’s winner from among the top-rated articles.

Do not pass go. Proceed directly to OpenSecrets.org to enter the contest and collect your $100. The current contest topic is:

How have campaign contributions and lobbying efforts influenced policy on an issue you care about?

Submissions are due by August 8th.

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The Federation of American Scientists has just launched a new collection of reports from the (currently) defunct Office of Technology Assessment.

The site, called the OTA Archive, indexes “over 720 reports and documents that were produced by OTA during its 23 year history.”  In an effort somewhat similar to OpenCRS, the site features exhaustively researched reports prepared by a legislative support agency.  In the case of the OTA, however, the reports haven’t been published since 1995, when the office stopped receiving funding.

As we’ve described before, and as described in great detail by FAS here, the OTA served an essential function that has only gained importance in the years since it lost support.  Negotiating complex technological issues requires technological knowledge, and institutional support is a necessary component of adequate technological policy.  CRS serves general policy needs, GAO presents oversight information, CBO does cost estimates, and Joint Tax gives tax assessments.  Clearly there’s a need for continuing support of scientific and tecnological substance, and the $2.5 million appropriated in this year’s legislative branch approps bill is only a very small step in the right direction.

The FAS site presents a compelling argument, along with all the evidence necessary, to prod Congress to support a reinstated OTA.

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The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate are loosening their interpretation of lobbyist disclosure provisions on gifts to lawmakers and staff members and on PAC contributions. The new rules will be put in place after lobbyists and ethics lawyers launched a lobbying campaign to loosen disclosure requirements in the new LD-203 form - a new disclosure document requiring disclosure of campaign contributions and gifts.

The two offices initially ruled that lobbyists must disclose the fee of events where a “covered official” is in attendance. This rule no longer applies:

The new revisions require lobbyists and lobbying organizations to report the fee or contribution for an event if a covered official is honored or receives an award and they are a “sponsor” as defined by the Senate and House gift rules.

The House and Senate’s gift rules take a narrow view of sponsor, requiring that a person or group not only make a financial contribution to an event but have primary responsibility for the event’s organization.

The new ruling also reduce disclosure for lobbyist spending through political action committees (PACs):

The previous guidance stated that lobbyists sitting on a PAC board would have to list all donations of the PAC on their personal LD-203 form. This could require a single lobbyist to list all the donations of several PACs they were involved with.

Under the new guidance, lobbyists are required to list only that they are on the board of the connected PAC, not document the individual contributions made by the PAC.

While certain lobbyists were complaining to force these changes, Sunlight’s John Wonderlich filed his LD-203 and had this to say about it on twitter, “lobbying disclosure was really painless.” Onerous disclosure requirements are in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

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It’s been a bad two weeks for Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel. Last week, the Washington Post and the New York Times broke successive stories revealing the congressman’s below market value apartment rentals and his use of congressional letterhead to solicit contributions from corporations for the construction of the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at the City College of New York. While the apartment deals are causing a stir in Rangel’s Harlem congressional district, his clear violation of House rules in using congressional letterhead for fund raising appeals are getting the most attention.

Presidents, senators, congressmen, and governors often receive honorary centers at local universities and colleges after they have retired from office, so the future existence of a Charles Rangel Center is not an out-of-the-ordinary or unexpected occurrence for the second African-American congressman from Harlem. The use of earmarking, the clear violation of House rules in his fund raising appeals, and the conflicts of interest in the operation of his committee mark this Center in the pantheon of congressional monuments to vanity. (more…)

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GOOD Magazine has a knack for taking political stories or data and turning them into to clever images. In this case, they’ve taken lobbying data from Open Secrets and turned it into something of a middle school bulletin board (this also may work as it’s own form of commentary in equating Congress with a middle school).

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