by Dick Morris
3. A ban on lobbying by members of the immediate family of any member of Congress.
WHY: the potential for conflict of interest is obvious. It’s a way to funnel money to families of members from companies that might be seeking favors.
4. A prohibition against any immediate family member accepting employment or serving on the corporate board of any corporation that hires a lobbyist or is, in any way, affected by federal legislation or regulation, or receives federal funds.
WHY: again, it’s a way to funnel money to the families of members of Congress who might be voting on legislation that is important to the company.
5. Stop the revolving door: a ban on all members of Congress and all Congressional staff members from lobbying Congress for five years from their last date of service or employment or from working for any company or firm that performs lobbying services.
WHY: because staff and former members should not be able to use their inside knowledge and information for personal benefit. The current bans on lobbying have two defects: they do not cover a long enough period of time after leaving Congress and they do not ban working for lobbying firms. Many ex-members and former staffers work as “consultants” or “public relations advisors,” avoiding direct lobbying to comply with the restriction, but, in fact, making their inside information available to their clients.
6. Require disclosure of all partners of members of Congress and their immediate families—in real estate deals or any other business. Prohibit partnerships with anyone who is employed by or is a director of any company doing business with Congress, seeking or getting federal funds, or lobbying Congress.
WHY: it is impossible to tell who members might own property jointly with but it is important to know. Chris Dodd, for example, disclosed that he owned one-third of an Irish “cottage,” without disclosing that his partner was a stand-in for a man for whom he got a presidential pardon and an owner of a company that sought and received funds from Congress.
7. A ban on all free travel—including that provided by not-for-profit organizations and “think tanks.”
WHY: these trips are nothing but boondoogles. If the foundations that sponsor them are so interested in providing information to members of Congress, they can meet in Washington and avoid any travel costs. They don’t have to go to Honolulu on the sands of Waikiki Beach to get educated.
8. Require full and accurate disclosure of the actual value of all income and assets of all members and their spouses at the time of each filing.
WHY: there is no rational reason for the current range of value used by Congress and the executive branch. The only reason for it is to keep us from knowing the exact value.
9. Include all personal residences in disclosure of assets and all mortgages in disclosure of liabilities.
WHY: all real estate, including all homes, should be listed. There is no rationale for the exclusion.
10. Require that all financial disclosure statements be permanently available on each member’s website.
WHY: the voters have a right to see this information.
11. No work, no pay. If a member is not present for more than ten consecutive workdays and does not provide a doctor’s letter, he or she should not be paid.
WHY: for $174,000 a year, we expect them to at least show up.
12. Disclosure of all appointments with members of Congress on their government website, along with a notation about the purpose of the meeting.
WHY: so we can tell how much of their time is spent with donors and lobbyists and on campaign matters.
13. Prohibit private charities founded by members from receiving contributions from corporations that do business with, seek favors from, or receive money from the federal government.
WHY: some current members have set up private charities that receive money from businesses that seek favors from the government. The money is often distributed in the member’s community to enhance their image as generous to the community.
This is another backdoor payoff.
We also need:
Full online publication of committee votes
Full online publication of financial disclosure forms
Full online publication of member car lease data and/or purchase with federal funds
Full online publication of all government-sponsored travel
Full online publication of all ethics complaints and all actions by the Ethics Committee
Full online disclosure of any special assistance for repayment of student loans for members or staffers in Congress.
Only by enacting these rules can we have an open and honest Congress.
Tell your member to support them—right now!!!
PART SIX
THE NEW LEADERS
The elections of 2010 brought to light a new set of national leaders. Toiling well outside the spotlight of establishment media attention, these young men and women turned around the Obama program, blunted his momentum, defeated his congressmen, and laid the basis for an American recovery. They deserve our appreciation, respect, and praise.
The bold, new force on the scene of American politics in 2010 was the Tea Party. It isn’t one organization. It is a term used by thousands of small groups around the country to describe themselves. They vary in size, power, ideology, and orientation. But they all agree on trimming the size of government.
It all started with Rick Santelli’s rant. Rick, an on-air editor for CNBC Business News, was reporting live from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade at the time. He first joined CNBC in 1999, and his reporting focuses primarily on “interest rates, foreign exchange, and the Federal Reserve.”1
But it was his Rant Heard Round the World on February 19, 2009, that will earn him a place in U.S. history:2
RICK’S RANT
SANTELLI: This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.
(Booing)
President Obama, are you listening?
TRADER: How ’bout we all stop paying our mortgage? It’s a moral hazard.
SANTELLI: Don’t get scared, Joe. They’re already scaring you. You know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.
KERNEN: They’re driving them on water, too, which is a little strange to watch.
SANTELLI: There you go.
REBECCA QUICK: Wow. Wilbur, you get people fired up.
SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.
(Whistling, cheering)
The rant spawned a movement when it fell on carefully listening ears.
There is no one leader of the Tea Party movement. It is far too diverse and disconnected. But there is great unity in the Tea Party because of a common set of beliefs centered around the need for free markets, low taxes, and less government.
There are no leaders, but there are two founders, and they deserve our appreciation: Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler.
Jenny Beth Martin
How emblematic of the Tea Party is the fact that its founder—and still one of its leaders—went through a painful bankruptcy only very recently. After her husband closed his business, Jenny Beth relates how “we went from a husband working and stay at home mom family to an unemployed family to a [two]-parent working from home family.”3
They made ends meet by “cleaning houses and repairing computers.”4 They couldn’t help noticing that all those around them were also suffering and that only the government was doing well. She “began to blog about what we were going through financially. So many others are facing a difficult time due to the recession and I wanted to show that you can keep what matters most: faith in God, love of family. All the other things are truly the icing on the cake of life. They are truly things. Thing
s that can be lost or broken, sold or given away.”5
This is the woman who had a lot to do with changing America! She heard Rick Santelli rant on CNBC about “government bailouts.”6 She says “it truly changed my life.”7
Jenny Beth focused her formidable organizing skills, her even temperament, and her techno-savvy on organizing a force that would change her country. In 2009, the Tea Party movement was born when she “co-hosted the Atlanta Tea Party on February 27, 2009 at the Georgia State Capitol in the pouring rain.”8
There are more than 5,000 groups that call themselves part of the Tea Party movement and Jenny Beth’s attitude is: the more the better! About 3,000 are loosely affiliated in the Tea Party Patriots organization Jenny Beth Martin cofounded (with Mark Meckler). They “meet” every Monday in a conference call where they discuss current affairs and vote—online—about whether to take certain positions or adopt various initiatives.
We both have participated in these calls and are amazed by Jenny Beth’s cool, calm presence as she presides over them. At one point, a participant asked Dick a question about abortion. Before he could answer, Martin stepped in and reminded the questioner that “we are only focused on economic and financial issues. Social issues are outside of our framework.”9
Martin, a total political novice, has fashioned a national pressure group that changed American politics. She has developed an organization that can summon millions to the streets and match the best the union/Democratic Party machines can offer.
Best of all, she and Mark have not let Tea Party Patriots become encrusted with bureaucracy and controlled by financial donors. With their mammoth organization, they have only seven employees and a monthly budget of only about $40,000. “You can’t buy us because we don’t take money” might as well be their motto.
Think of Europe, where the leader of a grassroots movement would likely be a self-aggrandizing politician, seeking money, fame, and power in a narcissistic mania. Then think of Jenny Beth Martin—a regular person (her blog is jenuinejen)—angered by government handouts and fighting not for the government to do more, but for it to do less. And there you have the difference between the U.S. and Europe.
For further information about Tea Party Patriots, go to their website: www.teapartypatriots.org.
Mark Meckler
Rick’s rant also inspired Jenny Beth’s cofounder—at the other end of the nation—Mark Meckler. Galvanized to action, Mark attended what theunion.com called a “hastily organized Tea Party on the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento.”10
Mark went with his wife and two children. “I wanted to show the kids what the First Amendment was all about,” Meckler said. “We brought premade signs. At first, no one was there. The police came over to give us a hard time—we didn’t know we needed a permit.” Eventually, 150 people came. Meckler called it “astounding.”11
“It was liberating to feel there were other people out there. People from all walks of life, both political parties, pro-choice, pro-life, Prop. 8 supporters and gay-rights activists,” Meckler said. “It was magic—it was something I’d never seen in politics. That really jacked me up.”12
A Southern California lawyer, Meckler moved to Nevada County, California, in 1993. “I was always into the art scene and music—in college, I was a punk rock DJ,” he recounts. But he makes clear that he grew up with “cowboy ethics” from his father, who “had this underlying, tremendous love of America and raised (me) as a very strong patriot.”13
He was the owner of Cafe Mekka (not Mecca!), until he sold it in 1997 and started MekTek Industries, which manufactured snow-skiing equipment. He “stumbled into” Internet marketing law. Theunion.com notes that “Meckler’s expertise in Internet-based marketing perfectly positioned him to facilitate the explosive growth of the Tea Party movement through social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook.”14
Meckler became a catalyst for the Tea Party movement. In December 2009, he organized a “die-in” on Capitol Hill to protest Obama’s health care policies.
He is creative, articulate, and charismatic. His networking skills have helped to build the movement, and his political savvy has helped to guide it into the force that it has become.
“I think Ronald Reagan would have loved the Tea Party,” Mark says.15
Right on!
The Tea Party is unique for its almost total absence of financing. During the 2010 campaign, Dick addressed a gathering of 4,000 Tea Party people in Richmond, Virginia. Every single person in the room (including Dick) was there as a volunteer. The speakers, the organizers, the MC, the security guards, everybody! No movement quite like it has ever happened.
But politics needs money to succeed, and two courageous men, the brothers Koch, have stepped forward to lend their fortunes to save the country that made it possible for them to succeed, and we should all be grateful.
Charles and David Koch
Conservatives, patriots, and lovers of freedom are deeply indebted to Charles and David Koch (and David’s wife, Julia). Their financial generosity let us equal the fund-raising machine the Democrats have put together.
But there is one key difference: the Democrats’ money came directly or indirectly from us, the taxpayers, while the conservative efforts were all privately funded.
The Democrats drew on donations from lobbyists for earmarks of taxpayer-funded projects, funds from public employee unions docked from the taxpayer-funded paychecks of their members, and donations from others seeking favors from the Obama White House. Conservatives had David and Charles Koch and their privately amassed fortune.
NPR reports that in the past thirty years, the Kochs have donated “more than $100 million” to “dozens of political organizations, many of which are trying to steer the country in a more libertarian direction,” including the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia.16
More important has been the Koch brothers’ role in forming and helping to fund Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—a key driving force behind the drive that led to victory in 2010. AFP, with millions of members and chapters in most states, fueled much of the grassroots organizing that drew voters to conservative causes. And, without their targeted advertising, we could not have won in 2010.
AFP—and American Crossroads, led by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie—stepped in where the Republican National Committee (RNC) failed. The RNC was so absorbed by its own overhead that it could spare little for the 2010 campaign. We were astonished to learn that as of July 2010, the RNC had raised $106 million for the 2010 election cycle and had spent $100 million of it! On what? Building a direct mail base in the era of the Internet and God knows what else.
But AFP, Rove, and Gillespie stepped in and saved the day. And the Koch brothers were a big part of what made that possible.
Politics is, of course, not the only venue for their generosity. Jane Mayer, a left-wing reporter, did a hit piece on them in The New Yorker, but had to note that David Koch “donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.”17
The New Yorker reports that the annual revenues of Koch Industries “are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars.” It notes that the Kochs operate “oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products.”18
Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, erroneously report
ed that the Kochs are “the sugar daddies who are bankrolling…America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising.”19 Mr. Rich, whose skills as a political observer have never quite equaled his abilities as a drama critic, is misinformed. The Kochs help to fund AFP, which is quite independent of the Tea Party Patriots organization. The efforts of Martin, Meckler, and their colleagues are not bankrolled! They are exactly a “spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising.” And that is why they are both so remarkable and so outside the realm of Mr. Rich’s comprehension.
But it took a unique talent to be able to channel the Koch resources—and those of many others—into concrete political action. That’s where Tim Phillips came in.
Tim Phillips
It is not easy to coordinate an organization of 1.6 million members with chapters in thirty-two states. But Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), showed such organizational talents in 2010 that he was able to mobilize and harness his group’s energy to bring critical mass to bear in crucial states at exactly the right time. Like a chessmaster competing on one hundred boards at once, he directed the AFP’s human and financial resources with precision and flair.
Phillips’s warm-up for the 2010 election was the 2009 AFP drive against ObamaCare. Sponsoring more than three hundred “hands off my health care” bus rallies and town hall meetings, he tapped into and helped fan the massive backlash against Obama’s program and its arrogant Democratic Congressional sponsors.