PACs and Congressional Corruption: A Chicken and Egg Situation

By Richard H. Curtiss

There are seven senators in deep doodoo, to put it presidentially. The press has dubbed five of them, four Democrats and one Republican, "the Keating Five." They ganged up on the federal official responsible for regulating savings and loan institutions and told him to stop leaning so hard on the now massively defunct Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, whose chairman was Charles H. Keating, Jr. When Keating was asked if the generous campaign donations he had bestowed on all of them influenced their actions, he responded: "I certainly hope so."

Intervention by these five senators may have delayed federal action to close the incredibly mismanaged Lincoln Savings and Loan Association by a year or more, adding another billion or two to the more than $100 billion savings and loan bailout that will cost every American taxpayer several hundred dollars. The senators explained their intervention as routine constituent services.

Keating, of course, was fortunate to have five senators in three states. It is doubtful, however, if the people of Arizona, California and Ohio, who sent Keating's five senators to Congress, would want to assume full responsibility for Lincoln S&L's several billion dollar portion of the nationwide savings and loan debt. Their states might go belly up, right along with Keating, who invested so freely in Congressional campaigns.

The Senate Ethics Committees is also investigating the finances of Republican Sen. David Durenberger of Minnesota. He didn't need Charles Keating to get him in trouble. All by himself he decided to charge monthly travel costs to see a marriage counselor in Boston and other personal expenses, including rent he paid to live in a condo he owned himself, to any account but his own. Now his only statement that has credibility with Minnesota voters is his admission that he used very bad judgment."

Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato is being investigated on charges that he helped large financial backers win federal housing grants. He's not the only federal official involved in the HUD scandals, but he's the only senator to come under Senate Ethics Committee investigation for it so far.

What else do these four Democrats and three Republicans have in common? We knew before we looked it up in our new book, Stealth PACS, and regular Washington Report readers will already have guessed it correctly: All seven senators have received substantial donations from pro-Israel political action committees.

No literate American who sincerely believes in democracy will disagree at this point that PACs may be good for congressional incumbents, but they are bad for America. The only question for Congress to decide is whether to get rid of some of them, or all of them.

They're pernicious, even when they operate legally. They are required to limit their donations to $10,000 per candidate per election cycle, as the PACs for America's five biggest lobbies (realtors, teamsters, physicians, teachers, federal employees) apparently do. PACs are an enormous evil, however, when a single special interest conspires to use them to evade the legal limits on donations to a single candidate by forming an armada of deceptively named but likeminded PACs, as the pro-Israel Jewish community in the United States has done.

The only question about those pro-Israel PACs that remains is whether they corrupt the candidates they support, or whether they just find their way to already corrupted politicians. Either way, they contribute to keeping the very worst of weak, venal, immoral or amoral politicians in office. They degrade American leadership, provide a colossally destructive example for America's youth, and steal from all Americans.

Granted it's only the portion of the American Jewish community responsive to AIPAC and its tactics that has created this cancer growing at the heart of American democracy. But the long-suffering American public, which has already caught on, is going to find it increasingly difficult to make fine semantic distinctions between American Jews who are members or supporters of AIPAC, B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, all of whom are still playing this awful game, and the many, many other Jewish individuals and organizations who have opted out, but decline to speak out because of the misguided notion that delaying the revelation will somehow lessen its consequences for American Jewry as a whole.

Here's the record of donations by pro-Israel PACs to the seven senators under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committees. Readers can draw their own conclusions about chickens and eggs.

Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) $252,532

Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato (R-NY) $26,705

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) $80,750

Sen. David Durenberger (R-MN) $226,500

Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) $17,500

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) $54,000

Sen. Donald W. Riegle (D-MI) $87,250

Except, possibly, for Senators Glenn and D'Amato, given the large populations of their respective states, it's not chicken feed.

AIPAC's Early Money: Already Shouting

"If money talks, early money shouts," officers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee tell prospective donors. AIPAC's legendary ability to energize pro Israel political action committees to concentrate their resources on key pro-Israel congressional candidates who face stiff competition is dramatically illustrated in the first Federal Election Commission returns for the forthcoming 1990 elections.

By June 30, 1989, 40 pro-Israel stealth PACs, so called because their non-descriptive names conceal their funding sources and disbursement goals, had already made 395 contributions totaling $885,309 to 1990 congressional candidates. Virtually all of those contributions (see table below) were made more than a year and a half in advance of the general election. Democrats received $623,680; Republicans received $262,929. Incumbents received $862,683; challengers received only $22,626.

All of this is classically normal. AIPAC encourages the stealth PACs to support incumbent candidates who have been supportive of Israel, regardless of personal integrity, party, or political record on other issues. Wavering in the ranks sometimes occurs when the pro-Israel incumbent is not Jewish, and the opponent is. Then AIPAC signals support for the incumbent and the PACs make a show of compliance, but individual PAC members do as they please.

Similarly, when the pro-Israel incumbent is a Republican with a conservative record on issues such as prayer in schools and right-to-life that the majority of American Jews find distasteful, the PACs who get their cues from AIPAC support the conservative incumbent, but so-called "multi-issue Jewish PACs" vaguely in tune with the American Jewish Committee may support a liberal Democratic challenger. This applies, of course, only if both candidates are equally supportive of Israel.

What's astonishing about the 1989 filings is the speed with which the money was raised and directed not just to any pro-Israel incumbents, but especially to pro-Israel incumbents in trouble. Here's what the Detroit Jewish News said about the top three recipients on Sept. 8, 1989:

"Jewish political watchdogs are keeping close tabs on US Senate races for three Democratic incumbents—among them Sen. Carl Levin (D-Ml)—who are vulnerable in the 1990 election. Joining Levin are Paul Simon (D-IL) and Tom Harkin (D-IA), all long term friends of Israel who serve on committees that deal with weapons sales, foreign aid and trade."

That article, by Kimberly Lifton, went on to explain that a likely opponent to Levin in the general election, Rep. Bill Schuette (R-MI), "has a fine Israel record," and to Simon, Rep. Lynn Martin (R-IL), "has a good Israel record." (We'll seek to pin down the difference in a subsequent report.)

"Harkin's Iowa GOP opponent, Rep. Tom Tauke, concerns Jewish analysts, "Lifton explains. "Harkin, a good friend with a solid record, now is on two key subcommittee panels. Tauke has a mixed to poor record of support for Israel."

These are quotes from the Detroit Jewish News. If the Washington Report made such statements, some readers would reprove it for lack of journalistic objectivity, and others might label it "anti-Semitic." So remember, you didn't read it here first. If this sort of thing intrigues you, there are 176 pages of it in the newly-published Stealth PACs: How Israel's American Lobby Took Control of US Middle East Policy, published in 1990 and available from the AET Book Club.

Next month PAC tracker Parker Payson, who prepared the chart below, and complete charts of PAC donations to every Congressional candidate in every election since 1978 for the book, will present Washington Report readers with a complete record of donations by pro-Israel PACs to candidates in the 1990 elections, as of Dec. 31, 1989. Similar lists will be published quarterly, as the FEC releases returns throughout 1990 and right up to the November election. With the book and the quarterly updates, Washington Report readers will know at least as much about every candidate in the United States as Kimberly Lifton of the Detroit Jewish News, quoted above. They may, however, have different ideas about who should be helped.

Major Recipients of Pro-Israel PAC Donations, Jan.-June 1989

Senate Top 10:

Carl Levin (D-MI) …………… $73,500

Thomas Harkin (D-IA) ……………$56,500

Paul Simon (D-IL) …………… $53,601

Howell Heflin (D-AL) ……………$48,000

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) …………… $48,000

Rudy Boschwitz (R-MN) …………… $45,679

Joseph Biden (D-DE) …………… $44,000

Max Baucus (D-MT) ……………$25,500

Bill Bradley (D-NJ) ……………$25,000

William Cohen (R-ME) ……………$23,000

House Top 10:

Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) ……………$16,000

Ron Wyden (D-OR) ……………$15,500

Les Aspin (D-WI) …………… $13,000

John Browder (D-AL) ……………$11,000

Lee Hamilton (D-IN) ……………$9,500

David Obey (D-WI) ……………$9,000

Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) ……………$8,500

Sam Gejdenson (D-CT) …………… $7,500

Eliot Engel (D-NY) …………… $7,000

Peter Kostmayer (D-PA) …………… $6,800

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired foreign service information officer, is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.