A6 

The Buffalo News/Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Washington News

House Dems plan
‘aggressive’ oversight
of gridlocked FEC
By Dave Levinthal
and Ashley Balcerzak
C E N T E R FOR PU BL IC I N T E GR I T Y

McConnell under intense pressure from
both parties to advance prison reform
WASHINGTON – In the
past three years, Sen. Chuck
Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman
of the Judiciary Committee,
blocked a Democratic Supreme
Court nominee for more than
a year, pushed through an
army of conservative judges
and helped cement a conservative Supreme Court by securing confirmation of the most
controversial high court nominee in a generation.
All of that has come at great
personal cost, so the 85-yearold Iowan had some chits to
call in when Monday morning he joined a private phone
call with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader,
to discuss a bipartisan breakthrough to overhaul the criminal justice system and the nation’s sentencing rules.
I have been there for you,
Grassley told McConnell, the
man standing in the way of
a quick vote on the measure.
And I would hope this is something that you would help me
make happen, according to
three people familiar with the
call who were not authorized
to publicly discuss the conversation.
The direct lobbying by
Grassley was just part of a
pressure campaign aimed
squarely at McConnell this
week as an unusual coalition
of senators, conservative advocacy groups and White House
officials press to change the
nation’s sentencing and prison
laws. With President Trump
supportive of the effort and
Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.,
pledging to move it through
the House, they increasingly
view the Senate majority leader as the lone obstacle to unwinding some of the federal

Twitter followers urging Congress to move quickly.
Kushner plans to ask Trump
to lobby McConnell directly by
phone, but is waiting to line up
more Republican support first,
according to two people familiar with his thinking.
Outside advocacy groups
have largely focused on Kentucky, where McConnell is up
for re-election in two years.
Justice
Action
Network,
which supports the overhaul,
is digitally targeting conservative voters in the state. So
is FreedomWorks, a Tea Party-aligned conservative group,
whose online targeting had
driven 10,000 calls of support
to McConnell’s office in the
last few days.
“We are going to keep up
the pressure on him to make
sure he is good on his word,”
said Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs for
FreedomWorks.
The state’s junior Republican senator, Rand Paul, and
his wife, Kelley, were saturating the Kentucky airwaves to
make the case directly to McConnell’s constituents.
“I would just ask Mitch McConnell to look at the people
who are coming at this from
all walks of life and hear all of
our voices saying we want this
legislation,” Kelley Paul said in
an interview.
But McConnell is also getting pressure from Sen. Tom
Cotton, R-Ark., the leader of
a small but powerful bloc of
conservatives deeply opposed
to any sentencing changes or
early release provisions that
could free jailed criminals.
Cotton has argued that senators should slow down the process and hold hearings on the
bill, which he said amounts
to a jailbreak – a traditional
watchword in Republican pol-

itics.
Cotton has channeled the
support of influential law enforcement groups, including
the National Association of
Assistant United States Attorneys, which sent another letter
to McConnell and the Democratic leader Monday warning
that the First Step Act would
“subject the public to more
crime, not less.” Other law enforcement groups support the
bill.
The appeals on both sides
grew in urgency over the weekend after a New York Times report that McConnell had privately told Trump he did not
foresee enough time to bring
the bill up for a vote this year,
which many viewed as tantamount to killing the measure
just as it was gaining momentum.
As intensity on both sides
has increased, interparty tensions unusual in the modern
Senate have spilled into public.
After sparring at a private Republican luncheon last week,
Cotton and Lee traded public
shots on Twitter on Monday,
accusing each other of misrepresenting the facts.
The compromise First Step
Act builds on a prison overhaul bill passed by the House
this year, adding four changes
to federal sentencing laws. It
lumps together new funding
for anti-recidivism programs
meant to prepare prisoners to
re-enter society and the expansion of early release credits for
inmates. It also reduces some
mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Though its effect would be
limited to federal prisons and
offenses – not state ones – the
legislation could affect tens of
thousands of current inmates
and future offenders, experts
believe.

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BU-1462357

N E W YOR K T I ME S

tough-on-crime policies of the
1980s and 1990s.
Now top White House officials, Trump family members,
Republican senators and allies
of billionaire activists Charles
and David Koch are working
to get Dr. No to a yes.
“I’ve been working on this
issue for nearly eight years,
and we have never been closer than we are right now,” said
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who
joined Grassley on the Monday call. “The stars have just
aligned in such a way, all it
takes is getting to the Senate
floor.”
Proponents of the bill,
known as the First Step Act,
fear McConnell will let the
short window for consideration this year slide shut rather than bring up for a vote a
complicated issue that divides
Republicans. His allies insist
that those fears are misplaced
and that McConnell will make
a decision based on factors he
has already stated publicly:
How much Republican support the bill secures and how
it fits in with other must-pass
legislation.
So Republican senators allied with Grassley, including
Lee, Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina and Tim Scott of
South Carolina, began working over wavering colleagues
by phone. Jared Kushner, the
president’s son-in-law and a
leading advocate of the legislation, convened a call with
business groups to praise the
changes, and the White House
circulated a USA Today op-ed
that Kushner wrote with Tomas J. Philipson, a member
of the White House Council
of Economic Advisers. Donald
Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump,
the president’s eldest son and
daughter, blasted supportive
messages to their millions of

BU-1454304

By Nicholas Fandos

BU-1213936

New York Times

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., right, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley,
R-Iowa, left. Grassley called in his chits with McConnell, part of a campaign to get a criminal justice overhaul passed.

WASHINGTON – For most
of this decade, Congress has
all but ignored the perpetually gridlocked Federal Election
Commission, which exists to
enforce and regulate the nation’s campaign finance laws.
No longer, two Democratic
congressional representatives
tell the Center for Public Integrity. The FEC is broken and
needs fixing, they argue.
“In the next Congress, we
will be conducting aggressive
oversight and pursuing legislative reform so we can finally
have an FEC that’s fulfilling
its mission of fighting corruption,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren,
D-Calif., a member and potential chairwoman next year of
the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over the FEC.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.,
concurred.
“We clearly need to have
an oversight hearing on the
FEC,” said Raskin, also a
member of the Committee on
House Administration. “We
need to shine a spotlight on
dysfunction at the FEC.”
Whether House Democrats’ efforts can go beyond
spotlight-shining is unclear:
Republicans, who generally
oppose strict campaign finance laws and regulations,
will next year control the U.S.
Senate.
But the prospect of new attention on the FEC comes as
Democrats are poised to lead
the U.S. House for the first
time since 2011 – the most recent year a House committee
conducted any kind of FEC
oversight hearing – and are
primed to widely deploy oversight, investigation and sub-

poena powers that come with
such leadership.
(The current Republicanled Committee on House Administration last year flirted
with conducting an FEC oversight hearing, but it never followed through.)
FEC Chairwoman Caroline
Hunter, a Republican, says
she’s “always happy to speak
to Congress.” Vice Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, concurred: “We welcome
the opportunity.”
If Lofgren and company
summon Hunter and Weintraub, along with Republican
Commissioner Matthew Petersen and independent Commissioner Steven Walther, to
Capitol Hill, there will likely
be much for them to discuss.
That’s because the FEC’s conservative and liberal commissioners disagree on numerous
issues concerning election law
and money, from defending
against foreign incursions to
policing digital political advertisements.
Perhaps the thorniest issue of all is “dark money,” or
secret political cash that can’t
be traced to a human source.
It’s nevertheless used by certain nonprofit groups, and
increasingly, by lightly regulated super PACs, to advocate
for and against political candidates.
The FEC is doing its job,
Hunter said. “Political committees register and report
with the FEC. Groups that
aren’t political committees
don’t have to report all their
donors. That’s the way the law
is written,” she said.
But there is another take.
“This is a controversial area
and one where we disagree,”
said Weintraub, who believes
the FEC should more actively
regulate political money.