Thursday, January 19, 2006

Fair Warning of the day   1:44:10 PM     comment []

January 19, 2006 Op-Ed Contributor If You Give a Congressman a Cookie By NORMAN ORNSTEIN and THOMAS E. MANN CONGRESSIONAL Republicans are suddenly taking a strong interest in lobbying reform. Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, are rallying behind a reform package that will include measures like increasing disclosure and doubling the length of time after leaving Congress before lawmakers and staff can lobby their colleagues. These are commendable and desirable reforms. But to get to the root of what ails Washington's political culture, a more basic change is necessary. The two of us have been immersed in Washington politics for more than 36 years. We have never seen the culture so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional. The plea deals of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the indictment of Tom Delay and his resignation as House majority leader, and the demise of Representative Randy Cunningham notwithstanding, this is not simply a problem of a rogue lobbyist or a pack of them. Nor is it a matter of a handful of disconnected, corrupt lawmakers taking favors in return for official actions. The problem starts not with lobbyists but inside Congress. Over the past five years, the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate and voting - what legislative aficionados call "the regular order" - have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom. Roll call votes on the House floor, which are supposed to take 15 minutes, are frequently stretched to one, two or three hours. Rules forbidding any amendments to bills on the floor have proliferated, stifling dissent and quashing legitimate debate. Omnibus bills, sometimes thousands of pages long, are brought to the floor with no notice, let alone the 72 hours the rules require. Conference committees exclude minority members and cut deals in private, sometimes even adding major provisions after the conference has closed. Majority leaders still pressure members who object to the chicanery to vote yea in the legislation's one up-or-down vote. To be sure, bills have been passed under this regime, on party-line votes with slender majorities. But the results have not always been true to party objectives or conservative ideals. Democrats aren't the only ones undermined by a process whose methods, like the cynical use of earmarks for pet projects, serve to bloat government bureaucracies. Some of the abuses are straightforward breaches of the rules. The majority Republicans bypass normal procedures and ignore objections that parliamentary rules have been violated. They then reframe substantive issues as procedural matters that demand party discipline. Other abuses do not violate the rules, but they do transgress longstanding practice. For example, House rules don't set a maximum period of 15 minutes for most roll call votes. But since the advent of electronic voting in 1973, 15 minutes has been the norm. In 1987, when the majority Democrats once - and only once - stretched a budget vote to 30 minutes because they found themselves unexpectedly down by one vote when time was supposed to expire, the minority Republicans loudly protested, with their whip, Dick Cheney, saying it was the worst abuse of power he had ever seen in Congress. Now it is routine to bring up a bill and troll for enough votes to pass it, even when a clear majority of the House - 218 members - has voted nay. What has all this got to do with corruption? If you can play fast and loose with the rules of the game in lawmaking, it becomes easier to consider playing fast and loose with everything else, including relations with lobbyists, acceptance of favors, the use of official resources and the discharge of governmental power. We saw similar abuses leading to similar patterns of corruption during the Democrats' majority reign. But they were neither as widespread nor as audacious as those we have seen in the past few years. The arrogance of power that was evident in Democratic lawmakers like Jack Brooks of Texas - the 21-term Democrat who was famed for twisting the rules to get pork for his district - is now evident in a much wider range of members and leaders, who all seem to share the attitude that because they are in charge, no one can hold them accountable. Indeed, Mr. Hastert showed open contempt for the House ethics process last year when he fired the Republican chairman of the ethics committee and ousted two Republican members after they did their duty and reprimanded Tom DeLay for three violations of standards. Mr. Hastert then appointed two members to the committee who had given large sums to the DeLay legal defense fund - when the main matter pending before the committee involved Representative DeLay. The same attitude produced the K Street Project, in which the new Republican majority, led by Mr. DeLay, used its governmental power to demand that trade associations and lobbying groups fire Democratic lobbyists and hire designated Republicans, who could then be expected to show their gratitude by contributing generously to party candidates and committees. Jack Abramoff was one of the progenitors of that initiative. What can be done? First, Mr. Hastert; Representative David Dreier, the Rules Committee chairman; and the new House majority leader should declare that there will be a return to the regular order and to a reasonable deliberative process. And they must be prepared to follow through on that declaration. But there are also rules reforms that would help. Two- or three-hour votes should become a thing of the past. Any major bill should be presented at least three days before it is considered, unless a supermajority votes to waive that rule. Votes should be required on objections to excessive earmarking in bills, and members should be required to declare that they have no personal interest in the earmarks they promote. Real debate and reasonable amendments must be allowed on most bills, and the integrity of conference committees needs to be reestablished. Finally, if there is to be real and credible ethics oversight, that process, too, must be overhauled. Quick and decisive Congressional actions could minimize the damage done by the explosion of scandals related to Mr. Abramoff. But lobbying reform alone is a temporary solution. The real solution is for Congress to behave like the deliberative body it is supposed to be. Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. They are co-authors of the forthcoming "The Broken Branch." Copyright 2006The New York Times Company 1:06:27 PM     comment []

Warrantless surveillance ‘inconsistent with law,' report says By John Diamond USA TODAY  WASHINGTON — The Bush administration probably should have informed the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of its warrantless surveillance program initiated after the Sept. 11 attacks, not merely a handful of congressional leaders, according to a report Wednesday by a research arm of Congress. The report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) said that the Bush administration's decision to limit briefings on the electronic surveillance to eight senior lawmakers “would appear to be inconsistent with the law, which requires that ‘congressional intelligence committees be kept fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities.' ” The program was approved by President Bush. It involved intercepting international calls, with one party in the USA, involving suspected terrorists without obtaining the court-ordered warrants normally required for domestic spying. Wednesday's CRS report points out that “in extremely rare circumstances” the sensitivity of intelligence operations or collection programs may require that some aspects be withheld “to preserve essential secrecy.” In the case of a covert action, the president can limit disclosure “to meet extraordinary circumstances affecting vital interests of the United States.” Because the circumstances are not defined in intelligence laws, the report notes, “The President appears to have the sole discretion in making such a determination.” But that probably doesn't apply in this case, according to the CRS report. Covert action is defined as an operation in which the role of the United States government would be denied if exposed. After the surveillance was disclosed in The New York Times, President Bush acknowledged the program. The CRS report was requested by Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Harman has been pressing the Bush administration to brief the full Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate, whose members are cleared to receive highly classified information. The Bush administration has not responded to Harman's request, but Bush last week said he supported congressional inquiry into the surveillance program provided it did not disclose secrets that would aid terrorist adversaries. The CRS report was written by Alfred Cumming, former Democratic staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Cumming is a specialist in intelligence and national security issues at CRS. Neither Harman nor Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, could be reached for comment Wednesday. They are returning from a committee visit to CIA stations overseas. Jamal Ware, Hoekstra's spokesman, said the chairman “is willing to have additional members of the Intelligence Committee briefed on the program.” 1:02:25 PM     comment []

Home » Blogs » Bob Fertik's blog Zogby Poll: Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping Submitted by Bob Fertik on January 13, 2006 - 11:34pm. For Release: January 16, 2006 New Zogby Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,216 U.S. adults from January 9-12. The poll found that 52% agreed with the statement: "If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment." 43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 2.9% margin of error. "The American people are not buying Bush's outrageous claim that he has the power to wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Americans believe terrorism can be fought without turning our own government into Big Brother," said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik. Recently White House spokesman Scott McClellan cited a Rasmussen poll that found 64% believe the NSA "should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects." Of course, that is exactly what Congress authorized when it created the FISA courts to issue special expedited secret warrants for terrorism suspects. But Bush defied the FISA law and authorized warrantless wiretaps of Americans, which has outraged Americans to the point that a majority believe Congress should consider Bush's impeachment. "Bush admits he ordered illegal warantless wiretapping, but says it began in response to 9/11 and was limited to a small number of calls to or from Al Qaeda," Fertik said. "But recent reports suggest wiretapping affected a much larger number of Americans, and a report in Friday's Truthout says the wiretapping began before 9/11." "The upcoming Senate hearings on White House wiretapping could be as dramatic as the Watergate hearings in 1973. A majority of Americans have already believe Congress should look into grounds for impeachment, yet we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in the Corporate Media. If Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping long before the terrorist attack on 9/11, then Americans will realize that George Bush came into office determined to shred the Constitution and take away our rights," Fertik said. Impeachment Supported by Majorities of Many Groups Responses to the Zogby poll varied by political party affiliation: 66% of Democrats favored impeachment, as did 59% of Independents, and even 23% of Republicans. By ideology, impeachment was supported by Progressives (90%), Libertarians (71%), Liberals (65%), and Moderates (58%), but not by Conservatives (33%) or Very Conservatives (28%). Responses also varied by age, sex, race, and religion. 74% of those 18-29 favored impeachment, 47% of those 31-49, 49% of those 50-64, and 40% of those over 65. 55% of women favored impeachment, compared to 49% of men. Among African Americans, 75% favored impeachment, as did 56% of Hispanics and 47% of whites. Majorities of Catholics, Jews, and Others favored impeachment, while 44% of Protestants and 38% of Born Again Christians did so. Majorities favored impeachment in every region: the East (54%), South (53%) and West (52%), and Central states (50%). In large cities, 56% support impeachment; in small cities, 58%; in suburbs, 46%; in rural areas, 46%. Support for Clinton Impeachment Was Much Lower In August and September of 1998, 16 major polls asked about impeaching President Clinton (http://democrats.com/clinton-impeachment-polls). Only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal. Even so, the impeachment debate dominated the news for months, and the Republican Congress impeached Clinton despite overwhelming public opposition. Passion for Impeachment is Major Unreported Story The strong support for impeachment found in this poll is especially surprising because the views of impeachment supporters are entirely absent from the broadcast and print media, and can only be found on the Internet and in street protests. The lack of coverage of impeachment support is due in part to the fact that not a single Democrat in Congress has called for impeachment, despite considerable grassroots activism by groups like Democrats.com (http://democrats.com/impeach). The passion of impeachment supporters is directly responsible for the four polls commissioned by After Downing Street. After the Zogby poll in June, activists led by Democrats.com urged all of the major polling organizations to include an impeachment question in their upcoming polls. But none of the polling organizations were willing to do so for free, so on September 30, AfterDowningStreet.org posted a request for donations to fund paid polls (http://afterdowningstreet.org/polling). People responded with small donations (on average $27) which quickly added up to over $10,000. After Downing Street has spent a portion of that money on the Ipsos Poll and the two Zogby Polls. 12:33:14 PM     comment []

The Bush Economy Bubbles Along I'm sure it's everything his benefactors hoped for. And for the people who voted for him because they thought they were voting for Jesus, and now face the bleak future of spending the rest of their downsized, outsourced, pensionless, dead-end lives stocking shelves at the Sprawl-Mart. . .a big fat "fuck you".   Bush's Expansion Leaves Workers Behind, Sparking Fed Friction Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- American workers have rarely taken home a smaller share of the nation's prosperity, a condition that is undermining bipartisan support for free trade and creating friction between President George W. Bush's administration and the Federal Reserve. After 16 consecutive quarters of economic growth, pay is rising at a slower rate than in any similar expansion since the end of World War II. Companies are paying less of their cash gains in the form of wages and salaries than at any time since the Great Depression, according to government figures. Such a disparity, partly the result of globalization of the labor market, helps explain why the Bush administration is struggling to muster support for lower trade barriers even with the jobless rate at a four-year low. The imbalance has also triggered a debate between Bush's Treasury Department and the Fed about how low unemployment can go without kindling inflation. ``There is no doubt that something is happening'' to reduce labor's share of income, says Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize- winning economist and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. An economy that doesn't distribute its gains widely is ``poorly performing,'' he says. From the final quarter of 2001 through last year's third quarter, total compensation paid to employees by corporations, including health benefits, rose at a 4.3 percent average annual rate, according to government figures. That's the slowest growth for any similar period in post-war expansions lasting at least four years. `Not Connecting' Stripping away benefits, corporate wages and salaries rose at a 3.4 percent annual rate in the 16-quarter period, the slowest of any post-war expansion lasting that long. Wages and salaries as a share of the cash corporations are generating from the expansion stood at 51 percent in the second and third quarters, the lowest in government records going back to 1929. Including benefits, labor's share was the lowest since 1997. ``The good economic news is not connecting,'' says John Zogby, president of Zogby International Inc., a Utica, New York- based polling firm. ``You've got fairly low unemployment, solid profits'' and gains in stock and housing markets and yet ``there is a considerable amount of economic anxiety.'' A December Zogby poll found 28 percent of Americans said they are better off than they were a year earlier, 52 percent said their finances were the same, and 20 percent said they were worse off, even as the economy grew by $787 billion. Only 38 percent said Bush is doing a ``good'' or ``excellent'' job in office. `Tipping Point' Treasury Secretary John Snow said Jan. 6 that wage growth will pick up. ``We are at that tipping point where labor's share of national income will be rising,'' he said. That may require further declines in the unemployment rate, something the Fed is likely to resist. Fed policy makers flagged high levels of ``resource utilization,'' meaning labor and productive capacity, as an inflation risk at their December policy meeting. Michael Moskow, Chicago Fed president, said Nov. 21 that the 5 percent unemployment rate reported for October, before revisions, ``is probably close to the level associated with a healthy economy and little labor market slack.'' Treasury officials object to that idea. ``Nobody knows what the full employment, non-inflationary number is,'' Snow said after the government published a 4.9 percent unemployment rate for December. ``I'm confident it's considerably lower. We have room to bring it down.'' Solow says the Fed should seek the full employment rate, which is probably lower than the current 4.9 percent. ``The standard economic argument for free trade involves the presumption that you keep the domestic economy fully employed,'' he says. Free Trade Arguments for free trade are losing their force with some member of Congress, who blame globalization for holding down wage growth in the U.S. The House recently approved a bill that requires employers to certify immigrants are eligible to work and allows for construction of 700 miles of fences along the Mexican border. Last July, a trade pact with Central America cleared the House by only two votes after Vice President Dick Cheney lobbied Republicans. ``Support for both trade and globalization is declining,'' says Representative Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat. ``You are working harder, and you are working longer, and you are deriving less benefits. People say they are confused about what is going on.'' Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that approves all trade accords, said Dec. 20 that a global agreement to lower trade barriers is likely to ``go over like a lead balloon'' in Congress unless there are clear benefits for U.S. workers and companies. Minimum Wage Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott last October urged Congress to raise the minimum wage, which has remained at $5.15 an hour since 1997, saying the company's customers ``are struggling to get by.'' The Senate that same month rejected a proposal by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy to increase the minimum to $6.25 over 18 months. The weaker returns to labor, and the Fed's concerns about resource utilization, are even more perplexing when seen in the context of rising productivity. Output per hour has grown at an average 3.6 percent annual rate over the past 16 quarters versus 2.6 percent the prior four years. Companies have room to boost pay without raising prices because productivity gains reduce production costs. They have little incentive to do so, though, with ready sources of low- cost labor overseas and declining union membership at home. Pay Not Issue ``We are not finding compensation being the issue at all,'' says Terry Laudal, senior vice president of human resources at SAP America in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, a unit of Walldorf, Germany-based SAP AG, the world's largest maker of business- management software. ``The issue is really the culture. Are you winning, are you investing in personal growth?'' Pay is typically a fourth- or fifth-rank issue for SAP job applicants, says Mark Steinke, the firm's vice president of staffing for North America. In a sign that employees are focusing on stability, SAP's turnover rates for sales and marketing in the U.S. and Canada dropped to 12 percent last year from around 18 percent in 2003, Laudal says. The bursting of the Internet bubble and corporate accounting scandals, which shuttered dozens of firms, are causing workers to value job security more than pay raises, executives say. ``When you put it all together you get what you have now, a tight labor market but no wage inflation,'' says Jeffrey Joerres, chairman of Manpower Inc., the Milwaukee-based employment services firm that places about 2 million people a year worldwide. ``We are in a whole new territory.'' -- With reporting by Mark Drajem, Nicholas Johnston and Alison Fitzgerald in Washington. Editor: Rohner (rxj/dfr) Last Updated: January 17, 2006 00:17 EST 12:20:37 PM     comment []

Printed from http://www.texasobserver.org © Texas Democracy Foundation Return to site The Pimping of the Presidency Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist Billing Clients for Face Time with G.W. Bush BY LOU DUBOSE our months after he took the oath of office in 2001, President George W. Bush was the attraction, and the White House the venue, for a fundraiser organized by the alleged perpetrator of the largest billing fraud in the history of corporate lobbying. In May 2001, Jack Abramoff’s lobbying client book was worth $4.1 million in annual billing for the Greenberg Traurig law firm. He was a friend of Bush advisor Karl Rove. He was a Bush “Pioneer,” delivering at least $100,000 in bundled contributions to the 2000 campaign. He had just concluded his work on the Bush Transition Team as an advisor to the Department of the Interior. He had sent his personal assistant Susan Ralston to the White House to work as Rove’s personal assistant. He was a close friend, advisor, and high-dollar fundraiser for the most powerful man in Congress, Tom DeLay. Abramoff was so closely tied to the Bush Administration that he could, and did, charge two of his clients $25,000 for a White House lunch date and a meeting with the President. From the same two clients he took to the White House in May 2001, Abramoff also obtained $2.5 million in contributions for a non-profit foundation he and his wife operated. Abramoff’s White House guests were the chiefs of two of the six casino-rich Indian tribes he and his partner Mike Scanlon ultimately billed $82 million for services tribal leaders now claim were never performed or were improperly performed. Together the six tribes would make $10 million in political contributions, at Abramoff’s direction, almost all of it to Republican campaigns of his choosing. On May 9, 2001, when he ushered the two tribal chiefs into the White House to meet the President, The Washington Post story that would end his lobbying career and begin two Senate Committee investigations was three years away. (When the Post story broke in February 2004, however, Abramoff and Scanlon, a former Tom DeLay press aide, were already targets of a U.S. Attorney’s investigation in Washington.) Abramoff brought the Coushatta and Choctaw chiefs to Washington at the request of Grover Norquist. Norquist is founder and director of Americans for Tax Reform, the advocacy group committed to slashing taxes until the federal government is so small you “can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist started ATR in 1985. His power increased exponentially in 1994, when Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and he collaborated with then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay to launch the “K Street Project”—a coordinated campaign to compel lobbyists to contribute only to Republican candidates and ultimately to hire only Republicans. Like Abramoff and Rove, Norquist considered George Bush’s victory over Al Gore the culmination of a project the three Washington insiders started 30 years ago as national leaders of the College Republicans. Since the Post’s Susan Schmidt broke the Jack Abramoff story, the media has focused on the stunning $82 million Abramoff and Scanlon billed six tribes for lobbying and public relations work. Far less attention has been paid to the political contributions, by Abramoff’s account $10 million, made by the six tribes. That piece of the story involves the K Street Project, which moves the money of corporate lobbyists and their clients into the accounts of Republican candidates, PACs, and issue advocacy groups. Republican Campaign Accounts Abramoff advised tribal leaders that the contributions were the cost of doing business in Washington, where he could protect them from other tribes trying to open casinos to compete with those that already had them. He sent orders for the checks to be cut, designating each recipient. On March 6, 2002, for example, Coushatta Tribal Council Chair Lovelin Poncho followed Abramoff’s orders and disbursed $336,300 in tribal funds, according to tribal accounting ledgers obtained by the Observer. The Coushattas, a southwest Louisiana tribe of 837 members, operate a casino that does an estimated $300 million in annual business. The $32 million they paid Abramoff and Scanlon makes the tribe the largest victim of the fraud their lawyers now allege in a lawsuit filed by Texas plaintiff’s firm Provost Umphrey. The tribe also contributed what tribal council member David Sickey said was probably “many millions” of dollars to political causes and charities designated by Abramoff. Since we first reported the White House ATR fundraiser and the $1 million contribution to the Capital Athletic Foundation (see “K Street Croupiers,” November 19, 2004), the Coushattas, speaking through Austin attorneys at Hance, Scarborough, Wright, Ginsburg & Brusilow, and through Louisiana political consultant Roy Fletcher, have vociferously denied that tribal Chairman Poncho visited the White House after contributing $25,000 to ATR. They also denied the $1 million contribution to Abramoff’s foundation. Recently the story has changed. Or at least the version told by the majority that controls the council has begun to change. Two minority members of the five-seat council have pointed to the pay-to-play meeting with President Bush and the $1 million contribution to Abramoff as examples of the council’s financial mismanagement. One of the two members of the minority faction, David Sickey, has regularly made himself available to the press. Normally, press inquiries to the council majority are answered by Hance Scarborough, by Roy Fletcher, or occasionally by sources close to the council majority. According to a source close to the tribal majority, Chairman Poncho recently “revisited that issue” of his visit to the White House. He had previously denied it because he thought he was responding to press inquiries that implied he had a one-on-one meeting with Bush. He now recalls that he in fact did go to the White House on May 9, 2001. Tribal attorney Kathryn Fowler Van Hoof went with him, although she did not get into the meeting with the President. That meeting lasted for about 15 minutes and was not a one-on-one meeting. At the meeting, Bush made some general comments about Indian policy but did not discuss Indian gaming. Abramoff was at the meeting—for which he charged the Coushatta Tribe $25,000. The change in Poncho’s position is odd in light of the fact that he and his spokespersons have maintained for more than a year that he did not meet with President Bush in May 2001. Norquist has not responded to inquiries about using the White House as a fundraiser. It is, however, a regular ATR practice to invite state legislators and tribal leaders who have supported ATR anti-tax initiatives to the White House for a personal thank-you from the President. A source at ATR said no money is ever accepted from participants in these events. The $25,000 check from the Coushattas suggests that, at least in this instance, Norquist’s organization made an exception. The $75,000 collected from the Mississippi Choctaws and two corporate sponsors mentioned in Abramoff’s e-mail suggests there were other exceptions. Norquist recently wrote to the tribes who paid to attend White House meetings. His story regarding that event is also evolving. The contributions, he told tribal leaders in letters that went out in May, were in no way related to any White House event. That doesn’t square with the paper trail Abramoff and Norquist left behind, which makes it evident that they were selling access to the President. The Coushatta Tribal Council majority has also revised its response to questions about the $1 million contribution, which critics in the tribe have insisted was made to Abramoff’s Capital Athletic Foundation in 2001. The foundation funded Abramoff’s Jewish prep school in Bethesda, MD, which closed soon after his lobbying scheme unraveled. When the Observer inquired in November 2004 about the $1 million contribution, we had obtained a copy of the Capital Athletic Foundation’s tax filing, but the contributor’s name was redacted. Following the lead of Lake Charles, Louisiana, American Press reporter Shawn Martin, the Observer last week obtained an un-redacted copy. The $1 million contribution, roughly 95 percent of what the foundation raised in 2001, was attributed to the Coushatta Tribe. A source working with the Coushatta Tribal Council majority said it now appears that the contribution was made in response to a bill sent by Mike Scanlon. Accountants working under the direction of Hance Scarborough found a $1-million Greenberg Traurig invoice that Scanlon sent the tribe. Scanlon routinely sent un-itemized bills for larger sums, which the tribe routinely paid. But as he was not a Greenberg Traurig employee, he billed on his own Capitol Campaign Strategies invoices. On the $1 million Greenberg Traurig invoice Scanlon sent the tribe in 2001, the company name was misspelled. There will need to be more accounting, probably by different accountants. And perhaps by different legal representation, or at least under a different understanding between the tribe and its lawyers. In the May 28 tribal election on the Elton, LA reservation, a reform slate won a majority on the five-member council. Sickey, who five days before the election maintained that the $1 million contribution was made and that tribal chair Poncho indeed went to the White House in 2001, predicted the new majority will hire forensic accountants to determine where all the money went. (A week before the election he was looking for a tribal newsletter in which, he said, Poncho described his 2001 White House visit.) The shift on the council does not bode well for its Austin law firm. Hance Scarborough had gone to tribal court and successfully blocked a recall election that would have forced the council majority to stand for election a year ago, and David Sickey was a proponent of the recall. “Kent Hance doesn’t represent me or [the other minority dissident] Harold John,” said Sickey. “He represents Lovelin Poncho.” The White House press office has not responded to our questions about other visits Jack Abramoff might have made to the White House or about Norquist using the official residence of the President to raise funds for Americans for Tax Reform. None of the political contributions Abramoff insisted the tribes make as yet have been returned. Lou Dubose is a former Observer editor and co-author of The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress. This story was written with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government. 8:05:23 AM     comment []

© Copyright 2006 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 2/1/2006; 9:24:14 AM.