Meanwhile, the dispute over the Martin County investigation carried on in Spadaro’s absence. In October 2001, Thompson asked that the remaining investigators sign off on the final report, without giving them a chance to read it. When they protested, Thompson put them on a conference call with Lauriski, the new MSHA chief, who made clear that the orders were coming from the top. The following April, MSHA cited Martin County Coal with just the two violations, and so halfhearted a case had the agency mounted for even those two that one was later overturned by an administrative judge and the other reduced to a mere $5,600.
The company did face $3.5 million in state fines, plus undisclosed restitution costs to homeowners. But the lightness of the repercussions from the main federal oversight agency for coal mines was conspicuous. In 2003, the Department of Labor’s inspector general released a report on the investigation confirming most of Spadaro’s claims about the undermining of the investigation by his superiors—but the impact of the report itself was softened by widespread redactions that left half of the twenty-six pages crossed out.
Why had Elaine Chao’s Department of Labor gone so easy on Martin County Coal and Massey Energy? It would have been easy enough to blame the slurry spill on the Clinton administration, whose MSHA appointees had been so lax in following up on the recommendations following the 1994 spill.
Doing so, though, would’ve meant coming down hard on the coal industry—not just Massey Energy, but other coal companies as well, to the extent that the administration decided to tighten restrictions on the dozens of other slurry impoundments built over coal mines. And Elaine Chao and the rest of the administration were unlikely to take that approach. The coal industry had tripled its contributions in the 2000 campaign, more than four years earlier, and virtually all of this money had gone to Republicans. A coal tycoon whom Massey brought onto its board in 2001, James H. “Buck” Harless, had raised $275,000 for Bush’s campaign, kicked in $5,000 for the Florida recount fight, and topped it off with $100,000 for the inaugural fund.
The financial bond was even stronger with the senator who had played such an influential role in filling the senior levels of Elaine Chao’s administration. Yes, the residents who’d seen their property damaged and water contaminated by the slurry spill were Mitch McConnell’s constituents. But over McConnell’s career, his fifth-biggest source of campaign contributions was Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world. And between 1997 and 2000, when McConnell was leading the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the coal industry had given $584,000 to the group, making it one of the group’s most reliable supporters, according to Washington Monthly.
Those contributions to the NRSC hadn’t included any from Massey Energy. That is, not until 2002, with the investigation still proceeding, when Massey gave the NRSC $100,000. McConnell had over the prior decade also been the second-highest recipient in Washington of direct contributions from people tied to Massey, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Spadaro, for one, had no difficulty connecting the dots. “It was Mitch McConnell who fired Jack Spadaro,” he says. “I’ve been around a long time and I swear this was one of the most outrageous things I’ve seen. It was one of the most blatant circumventions of the law and it was all orchestrated by Mitch McConnell’s people.”
* * *
It hadn’t always been about the money, at least at first. In December 1973, while newly installed as chairman of the Jefferson County GOP at a time when the shadow of Watergate was lengthening over his party, the thirty-one-year-old McConnell had submitted an op-ed to the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform.” His proposal was aggressive: in local Kentucky races, he said, contribution limits should be drastically lowered, from $2,500 to $300; all donors should be disclosed; and candidates should have to abide by a ceiling on overall spending—a restraint that many of the most aggressive of campaign finance reformers have been leery to propose. That wasn’t all. He hailed a city-run campaign trust fund then under consideration and wrote favorably of public financing for both gubernatorial campaigns and presidential campaigns. Under the status quo, he lamented, “Many qualified and ethical persons are either totally priced out of the election marketplace or will not submit themselves to questionable, or downright illicit, practices that may accompany the current electoral process.”
Years later, McConnell dismissed his op-ed as mere posturing, “playing for headlines” to divert readers from Watergate. To the extent his position was at all sincere, he said, he began to reassess it a few months later, while teaching a night class at the University of Louisville. Or as Dyche paraphrased it: “After studying and teaching how political parties operated and elections were won, he began to believe that much of what he had been saying about campaign finance was radically wrong. This epiphany would become an important part of his political philosophy and a focal point of his future career.”
This was a charitable interpretation, that a single class as an adjunct instructor would bring about a transformation in how to judge the ethics of money in politics. McConnell had been around enough campaigns by that point to know “how elections were won.” More credible was a different explanation that McConnell offered for his own evolution, one tied not to his 1974 class but to his first victory as a candidate, in 1977. The race against Hollenbach had been the most expensive race in Louisville’s history. McConnell had spent $355,000 to win it. The lesson to the former reformer was plain: in campaigns, “[e]verything else is in second place” to fund-raising, he told the Courier-Journal after taking office. “Paid television commercials are an indispensable part of winning a modern campaign in an urban area. This is not to say that I like that or am happy about it, or that I think it’s the most informed way to make a decision. It is nevertheless a fact of life.” In the future, he warned any and all opponents, “I will always be well financed, and I’ll be well financed early.”
As grudging as this concession to reality sounded, Mitch McConnell seemed to like fund-raising—or at least liked it enough to excel at it. Joe Whittle, the former state Republican chairman who campaigned alongside McConnell in 1984, still marvels at his lack of reluctance when it came to asking others for money. “Mitch has an uncanny ability to sit down with people and tell them what needs to be done and say, ‘I need your help.’ ” Whittle compared it to his own meager collection during his run for state attorney general. “A small-town lawyer like I was would ask for fifty dollars. He’d ask for five thousand.” If, Whittle says, McConnell called someone up who told him, “I’m a little tight now. I’m going to wait till after the primary,” McConnell refused to settle for that, knowing that the limit for giving after the primary was only half as much. “He’d say, ‘There’s a report coming out and I need to show support,’ ” says Whittle. Dyche recounts a time in McConnell’s endless cold-calling of Republican donors in 1984 when he went to the wrong house and nonetheless finagled $4,000 out of the mistaken hosts, and $2,000 from their relative next door.
Former senator Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican who served alongside McConnell for twelve years, says this avidity was one of the most striking characteristics of McConnell. “When you raise the flag and somebody hollers from the back of the room, ‘Does anyone want to go to a fund-raiser and raise some bucks?’ Mitch will be right there,” says Simpson. “It’s a joy to him. He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.” Forgy, the Reagan campaign chairman in Kentucky, speculates that this strength derives from McConnell’s recognition of his own weakness, the same self-awareness his first campaign consultants noted in him. “He knows that without a definite advantage in money, he’s not going anywhere in politics. If he had to meet voters on a stump in a traditional way, the way politicians used to, without the benefit of ads, he’d be a lost ball in high weeds,” Forgy says. “Politics in small Southern states requires a certain amount of showmanship and he just didn’t have the ability to do that.”
The ease
of relieving supporters of their money extended beyond campaign contributions. On being elected county executive, which was paid about $80,000 in today’s dollars, McConnell set up an arrangement with an undisclosed group of local business leaders who had supported his campaign. They paid a supplement of $25,000—$91,000 in today’s dollars—in exchange for giving some speeches around town. “It had never been done before,” says Hollenbach. “It was all kind of a mystery. Suddenly there was this mysterious group contributing $30,000 in matching funds.” (Some reports put the sum at more than $30,000.) After his high-spending reelection campaign for county executive, McConnell had accepted a free five-day vacation to Cancun paid for by a Louisville television station as part of a promotion for heavy advertisers. The eagerness to accept supplementary income continued when he reached the Senate. Just two years after hammering Huddleston for his cross-country travel to give paid speeches, McConnell earned $10,500 during an eleven-day speaking tour on the West Coast. He reported the income but got unwelcome headlines later when it emerged that he had let corporate sponsors pay for his companion’s travel expenses as well as his own, plus her expenses for an expensive trip to Japan, against Federal Election Commission rules. “Many of us are not millionaires,” he said at the time, explaining his speechifying. “It’s nice to have some options.”
So adept was McConnell at fund-raising that, by his own admission, he spent a lot of his time in his first months in Washington devoted to it, five years before his next race—a level of preparation that at that point was still unusual among senators. By the end of 1985, he had banked more than $700,000 in today’s dollars, “putting more emphasis on reelection than legislation,” as Dyche put it.
Before too long, though, the fund-raising was becoming such an emphasis that it was not so much diverting McConnell from legislating as determining which legislation he cared about. In 1987, he sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to limit independent expenditures on campaigns and on candidates’ use of personal funds for their own races. In May 1990, he made his first real reach out of junior-status obscurity when he wrote the Republican counterproposal to a sweeping Democratic campaign finance reform bill that would have instituted partial public financing for Senate and House candidates who agreed to voluntary spending limits. McConnell’s plan rejected public financing and spending limits (both of which he’d spoken favorably of in that 1973 op-ed) and instead called for abolishing political action committees. The PAC clampdown had the benefit of both appearing principled and being self-interested: McConnell was still sore about having gotten less PAC support in 1984 than Huddleston had (though he’d risen in the ranks of PAC beneficiaries once in office).
But the real point of contention was spending limits. It looked for a while as if a compromise that included them was gaining ground among some Republican senators. At a GOP retreat in West Virginia, the rookie senator rose to quash this momentum, arguing that rejecting spending limits was, in the words of one participant, “in the best interest of Republicans.” He rallied enough Republicans to sustain a filibuster against the compromise while, with his own proposal, having given his party cover on the issue. “Thus far he’s devoted himself to coming up with proposals that make compromise impossible,” said Oklahoma senator David Boren, the lead sponsor of the Democratic bill. “I really think he doesn’t want to see a change in the current program, unless it works to the advantage of his own party.”
McConnell had found his legislative calling. He was becoming informed enough on the dry subject to get more senior colleagues to listen to him. (“Like him or not, Mitch McConnell is an expert on campaign finance reform,” veteran New Hampshire Republican Warren Rudman said in 1990.) And he was learning the art of opposing reforms that might hurt his party while at the same time supporting ones that would hurt the other party—or that stood no real chance of becoming law. In 1993, his focus shifted from banning PAC contributions to banning “soft money,” the large sums collected by parties from corporations, unions, and wealthy donors outside the individual contribution limits for candidates, a source of funds that Democrats were becoming adept at exploiting for so-called issue ads that barely skirted prohibitions against the use of such funds to aid specific candidates directly. “Soft money should be banned. All campaign spending should be on the top of the table where voters can see it,” McConnell wrote in a 1993 op-ed.
And he was discovering another tool of gamesmanship: how to gum up the works for partisan advantage. In 1994, as Democrats were trying to make the most of their remaining months before midterm elections that were boding poorly for them, McConnell deduced that the Senate would have to pass three motions, each subject to filibuster before the House and Senate could settle differences between the campaign finance bills passed by each chamber that year. In a kind of eureka moment, McConnell launched successful filibusters of these once-routine motions, thereby eating up much of the Democrats’ precious remaining time on the calendar—and foiling campaign finance reform in the process. It was, he told the Weekly Standard years later, his “proudest legislative accomplishment” to date.
* * *
Once it takes hold, the motivating force of money in politics is boundless, reshaping and redirecting everything in its path, not unlike runaway coal slurry.
On arriving in the Senate in 1985, McConnell had been assigned, for the two committee seats allotted to each senator, to serve on the Judiciary and Agriculture panels. Two years later, he had switched from Judiciary to the esteemed Foreign Relations Committee, following in the footsteps of John Sherman Cooper and giving him a perch for his increasingly hawkish, internationalist views. But in 1993, he leapt at the opportunity to leave Foreign Relations for Appropriations, where, with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, he assumed the chairmanship of the subcommittee on foreign operations.
This change was the best of both worlds—being able to keep a hand in world affairs while also getting to have a hand on the budget. Holding hearings and issuing reports at Foreign Relations was one thing, but deciding which programs or countries got how much of the country’s $20 billion foreign aid budget was something else entirely. And it came with a crucial bonus: those with control over the money tended to raise more money.
Some of the causes championed by the new subcommittee chairman appeared to be the function of a genuine internationalism seeking to protect human rights and oppose communism. Long before Aung San Suu Kyi became a global celebrity, McConnell promoted the plight of suppressed dissidents in Burma. But it was hard not to notice that other small countries that attracted McConnell’s interest happened to be attached to ethnic communities in the United States eager to reward him for his efforts.
In the decade after he took control of the subcommittee, McConnell increased annual aid to the small former Soviet republic of Armenia to $90 million a year, or as much as $25 million more than the Clinton and Bush administrations sought. At the same time, he took a cooler stance toward Azerbaijan, Armenia’s neighbor and historic rival, which has a far smaller immigrant community in the United States. In 1992, he had been one of only four members of Congress who voted to allow aid to Azerbaijan, but after taking over the appropriations subcommittee, he turned against that nation during its territorial disputes with Armenia, which resulted in more than a half-million refugees on the Azeri side of the border. By the late 1990s, Azerbaijan was receiving $12 per capita in U.S. aid, to Armenia’s $180. And in 2004, McConnell touted this skewed arrangement in a speech to an Armenian-American conference in Washington. “Armenia received $75 million last year, and that is considerably more than Azerbaijan, an imbalance I don’t apologize for,” he said. “And we will try to achieve such an imbalance again this year.”
The gratitude of Armenian-Americans—a famously cohesive immigrant community—was abundant. A wealthy Armenian-American bakery magnate, Albert Boyajian, who took McConnell on a tour of Armenia in 1996, hosted an annual fund-raiser in California for his “good friend
Mitch.” Armenian-Americans in California alone had given McConnell $125,000 after his first decade on the subcommittee, as the Herald-Leader noted in 2006. Boyajian himself gave $50,000 to Republicans over the prior decade, and was awarded the “Republican Senatorial Medal of Freedom” by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which McConnell led for four years.
Confronted with these dollar figures by the Herald-Leader, McConnell downplayed their influence. “I assume they support myself and others because they like my views,” he said then. But in 1996 he was more candid about his motivations, in remarks he made on the Senate floor. “We have a lot of Jewish-Americans who are interested in Israel, a lot of Armenian-Americans who are interested in Armenia, and a lot of Ukraine-Americans who are interested in Ukraine,” he said. “Boy, when we hear from them, we get real interested.” McConnell was speaking for himself—from his arrival in the Senate, he had built close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and as subcommittee chairman, he had earmarked $225 million per year for Ukraine, for which he was rewarded on fund-raising trips to neighboring Ohio and Illinois, both home to large Ukrainian-American communities.
The Cynic Page 6