House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a step forward earlier this week when she directed Dan Beard, the chief administrative officer of the U.S. House of Representatives, to begin posting online quarterly reports of how representatives spend their official office accounts. Members use these accounts to hire staff, lease automobiles and office equipment, and to pay for official lunches, and a host of other things.
To grasp the importance of these accounts, one need only recall that for years, the reports could only be viewed in an obscure office buried deep in the bowels of the Capitol building. So hardly anyone ever bothered to look at them. But when reporters for The Washington Times took the time to examine the accounts in 1993, their subsequent reporting exposed serious check-cashing abuses by hundreds of members of the House. Those revelations set the stage for the “Contract with America” campaign of 1994 and the Republicans regaining control of Congress for the first time in four decades. Today, it would be better still if these accounts were posted and available online in real time, but Pelosi still deserves credit for taking an important first step to that end.
But Pelosi took two giant steps back this week, too. The FBI investigation of allegations surrounding the PMA Group is clearly heating up, as evidenced by subpoenas issued for documents and other evidence in the official and campaign offices of Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-IN. He and Representatives John Murtha, D-PA, and Jim Moran, D-VA, are at the center of allegations that PMA Group, a lobbying firm started by Paul Magliochetti, a former aide on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on defense. Murtha, Moran, and Visclosky have in recent years sponsored legions of earmarks worth hundreds of millions of dollars that went to firms represented by PMA Group, or others close to the three members. The congressmen in turn received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from executives with the firms getting the earmarks. It appears to be a Chicago-style “pay-to-play” network that trades earmarks for campaign dough that could potentially involve at least 100 congressmen.
Murtha’s support was crucial to Pelosi’s election as Speaker, and she has since sought to blunt official probes of the PMA Group’s multiple and profitable relationships with congressmen, particularly Murtha. Rep. Jeff Flake’s resolution directing the House Ethics Committee to investigate the PMA Group has been defeated multiple times, but it has drawn a few more Democrat votes on every balloting. Pelosi is gravely mistaken if she thinks transparency on office accounts will quiet demands for transparency on pay-to-play earmarks.
