Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

There's no place like home
Three Albanian-Americans who fought for the KLA struggle to find their place after the war.
By Elsa Davidson
[08/19/99]

Contempt charges sought against Bush
Did the Republican front-runner lie in his sworn affidavit? It all depends on what the meaning of a conversation is.
By Robert Bryce
[08/18/99]

The great Arkansas railway mystery
Twelve years ago, two teenagers were murdered on a rural railroad track. Right-wing conspiracy theorists who blamed then-Gov. Bill Clinton for the killings have now lost a $600,000 libel suit in the case.
By Suzi Parker
[08/18/99]

Hungary's gentleman bandit
In a country rife with corruption, a chivalrous, whiskey-drinking criminal has captured the popular imagination.
By Adam LeBor
[08/17/99]

How much mourning is enough?
As Columbine High goes back to school, parents and students wrestle with how to remember while also trying to move on.
By Dave Cullen
[08/17/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The new tactic has brought a game-show feel to Feingold's speeches, with the Wisconson senator playing the role of Don Pardo, announcing the corporate sponsorships.

It's the latest gimmick in Feingold's ongoing crusade to illuminate what goes on behind the scenes in Washington. The world according to Russ goes something like this: Say some obscure, big money policy battle in D.C. pits the wealthy National Association in Support of Evil against the relatively poor American Association of Gumdrops & Bunny Rabbits.

The National Association in Support of Evil, or NASE, pours dollar after dollar into lobbying and PAC donations to key members of the House and Senate. The American Association of Gumdrops & Bunny Rabbits (AAG&BR) tries to lobby its few, outgunned friends on the Hill. It attempts to stir up media interest in the legislative battle, but nobody's interested.

Exploiting the soft-money loophole in the campaign finance laws, NASE funnels hundreds of thousand of dollars into the bank accounts of the Democratic and Republican national committees. Pretty soon a bill sails through the legislative process that NASE lobbyists could have written themselves.

It's not quite the way they taught it to us on "SchoolHouse Rock" -- but it's more or less how Washington works these days.

Feingold's new gimmick was born on May 20, just before the Senate took up this year's Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act. The Wisconsin Democrat pointed out that a last-minute change to the bill backed by big-money mining interests would have changed mining policy to the detriment of the environment.

"Obviously this kind of a change requires a full, careful and open debate," he said on the Senate floor. "It just can't get the kind of attention it needs when it is quietly slipped into an emergency supplemental appropriations bill that we are only going to debate for three hours. Of course, that is precisely the reason the advocates of the rider have done it this way."

Feingold went on to tell his colleagues that "PACs associated with the members of the National Mining Association and other mining-related PACs contributed more than $29 million to congressional campaigns from January 1993 to December 1998. Mining soft money contributions totaled $10.6 million during the same six-year period."

"It's the nature of how Washington works," says Karen Batra, media relations manager for the National Mining Association. "But if he's going to do that, he needs to do it with both sides of the issue. He didn't report how much environmental groups have contributed."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, mining interests donated $3.8 million to parties and candidates from '97-98; environmental groups donated $814,712 during that same time.

Feingold's press secretary said his boss has invited his colleagues to chip in with lists of their own. "I do not plan to lay out the whole picture of campaign contributions that might be relevant to our discussion of a bill," Feingold said on June 16. "I encourage my colleagues to join this debate."

They generally didn't, and the bill, of course, passed. But Feingold dug his new song.

Others did too. "I think it's a very useful exercise," says Don Simon, the executive vice president of Common Cause. "This is dragging something out of the cellar that people don't want to talk about. We only talk about this problem -- sort of -- once a year when we debate campaign finance reform. But money has a role every day."

Not everyone is such a fan, of course. While good-government groups and the media eat up Feingold's purity like it was free Ben & Jerry's, many of his colleagues -- on both sides of the aisle -- find his uprightness preachy and sanctimonious, and his populist mantra annoying and naive.

"I've enjoyed watching the expressions on my colleagues' faces," Feingold said in an interview with Salon News. Shaking things up, he explains, "is what my whole career has been about."

Next page | Fed Ex foots the bill