Last night, the House passed an ethics reform bill, which will create an outside panel to review ethics complaints against lawmakers. It's a noted improvement over the current setup -- which isn't saying much since the House ethics committee has been a punchline for many years.

The outside panel, which will have six members (3 GOPers, 3 Dems), won't have subpoena power. And it will simply forward recommendations to the actual House ethics committee for further action after investigating. That's why some critics like CREW's Melanie Sloan call it a "paper tiger." Other good government types have given their support on the theory that something is better than nothing.

As The Hill reports, the Dem leadership pushed hard for the reform bill despite Republicans and a number of senior Democrats digging in their heels and doing what they could to prevent the vote. As The Washington Post reports, "Even with two House members under indictment, two others sent to prison, and several others under federal investigation, nearly half the House did not want to submit the body to the scrutiny of a panel not under its control." Some of the choicer quotes from last night's debate:

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS): "If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you'll vote no."

Mighty reform foe Rep. John Murtha (D-PA): “We have a New York governor in the news right who shows that you can’t legislate ethics. It always comes down to the individual.”

And most quotable of all:

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Actually, it's nothing at all:

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct voted today to form an investigative subcommittee to probe whether indicted Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) has violated the chamber's Code of Official Conduct....

Based on recent precedent, it is likely the panel will defer most further proceedings out of deference to the Justice Department's prosecution of Renzi, who is scheduled to be arraigned in Tuscon March 6th.

Just another sign that with the House ethics committee playing possum, the FBI has been forced to take up the slack.

Meanwhile, prospects for reform aren't looking too bright.

Update: CREW's Melanie Sloan has a bright idea: "The trick would be for the Ethics Committee to spearhead an investigation of a member alleged to have engaged in misconduct before the Justice Department gets involved."

12,881 earmarks. $18.3 billion. Taxpayers for Common Sense has cataloged them all, and you can see them right here in their awe-inspiring earmark database of this year's spending bills. Jump in and tell us what you find.

A number of journalists dove in to the database and here's what they came up with (TPMm research hounds Andrew Berger, Peter Sheehy, and Diane Vacca compiled this round-up):

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) has received campaign contributions from each (sub. req.) of the 26 groups for whom he requested earmarks in the recent defense spending bill. An analysis by Roll Call shows that since the beginning of 2005, PACs and employees of those groups have given Murtha $413,250, of which $100,750 came "in the two weeks leading up to March 16, the original deadline for lawmakers to file their earmark requests." (Roll Call)

In terms of securing earmarks, Hillary Clinton (D-NY) ranks among the top ten in the Senate ($340 million) while Barack Obama (D-IL) ranks in the bottom 25% of the Senate ($91 million). John McCain (R-AZ) has rejected earmarks entirely. Since becoming the majority party, Democrats are responsible for 57% of the $18.3 billion spent on earmarks. (Washington Post)

Freshmen Democrats in the House are "among the biggest recipients of earmarked funds." Democratic leaders have distributed the funds with an eye towards aiding representatives in contested districts in the upcoming election. Further analysis of the study by Congressional Quarterly shows that Democratic minority lawmakers trailed white Democratic lawmakers' earmarks by a two to one ratio in the House. (The Hill, CQ Politics)

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It was the ghost of State of The Unions past. Five years ago, President Bush used the SOTU to forcefully make the case for war with Iraq. Remember "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa?" Those were the days.

The USA Today headline for last night's speech? "Bush Tries to Show That He's Still on The Job." Ouch.

Nothing was a bigger tell of the desperation here than the heroic centerpiece of Bush's address. It's pretty safe to say that before the Bush administration, most Americans had no idea what an earmark was. But Bush, the earmark president, the man who presided over and enabled the Republican Congress during the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham scandals, changed that. And now he's decided that he's really going to bring the hammer down on the practice now that the Republicans no longer run Congress (actually not so much bring the hammer down as threaten to bring the hammer down right before he leaves office).

The major papers didn't even go to the trouble of taking him seriously.
The Boston Globe has a rundown of the watchdog disdain for Bush's crackdown. And The New York Times had a straightforward take:

President Bush has never shown much distaste for Congressional pork.

But in his last year in office, with his party out of power on Capitol Hill, he declared Monday that he had had enough.

In the last seven years he has signed spending bills containing about 55,000 earmarks worth more than $100 billion for projects....

In his State of the Union address Monday night, Mr. Bush threatened to veto future spending bills unless Congress cut in half the number of earmarks, which now total more than 10,000 items and nearly $20 billion annually....

Mr. Bush was notably silent on the subject until after his fellow Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. And, now that his power has waned, his threats are almost certain not to matter.

Last August, we united with Porkbusters.org and GOP Progress to unmask the senator who was holding up a bill introduced by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts.

For days, we worked the phones and gathered responses that hundreds of TPMm readers had received from senators' offices, eventually eliminating 98 senators as being behind the hold. And indeed, there turned out to be not one, but two pork-happy senators behind the hold: Sens. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). (The two didn't seem to appreciate the irony of holding up a government transparency bill in a singularly nontransparent way.) After being unmasked, the senators lifted their holds and the bill sailed through to passage.

Well, this morning, FedSpending.gov finally launched.

It's a minor victory, one that won't be recorded in the history books. But it looks like the Senate Republican leadership's strategy to keep Senate campaign disclosure reports from being easily searchable is on its way to success.

As we laid out before, they've long been fighting a bill to require the disclosure reports to be filed electronically, something the House did six years ago. The latest coup was a move by Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) to add a poison pill to the simple and thoroughly uncontroversial bill (it's got 41 co-sponsors, including 16 Republicans). Ensign said that bill is going nowhere unless it has his amendment, which would require non-profits that file ethics complaints against senators to disclose all donors who gave $5,000 or more, a measure that would effectively discourage ethics complaints against senators.

Last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked pretty please if Ensign might offer the amendment separately, since it has nothing to do with the underlying bill. Today, his answer came: no (sub. req.). And that means that senators will most likely not be required to electronically file in the run-up to the 2008 election -- definitely good news for candidates who will be receiving contributions they'd rather not have to explain.

For months, the Senate Republican leadership have worked to block a Senate bill that would make campaign contributions to Senate candidates immediately and easily searchable. Perhaps figuring that honey works better than vinegar, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) yesterday to ask if he would compromise on the latest effort to sink the bill. We've pasted the letter below.

All the bill would do is require Senate campaign reports to be filed electronically. That's it. The House started doing that six years ago, and journalists, watchdogs, and others constantly rely on the House's easily searchable records to see who's giving to campaigns. The speed of that reporting is especially crucial near the end of campaigns, when Senate candidates' voluminous paper filings, often hundreds of pages long, can make it much harder to figure out a candidates' supporters.

The bill has forty co-sponsors, including sixteen Republicans. Time is running out for the bill to affect the 2008 elections.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has worked to block the bill for months. And Ensign, coincidentally also the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (which works to get Republicans elected to the Senate), stepped up this September to employ a canny strategy of attaching a "poison pill" amendment to the bill. We'd laid out the whole scheme here.

In her letter yesterday, Feinstein asks Ensign to be flexible on his offered amendment, which would require all non-profits that file ethics complaints against senators to disclose all donors who gave $5,000 or more.

Last week, a group of watchdogs from left and right wrote Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and McConnell to ask that they defeat Ensign's amendment, calling it "a clear attempt to intimidate the public from seeking enforcement of Senate ethics rules."

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It's not hard to imagine: while Harry Reid launches into his tryptophan-fueled nap after Thanksgiving dinner, President Bush makes a flurry of recess appointments.

The Senate majority leader doesn't want that to happen. So, Roll Call reports (sub. req.), Reid is mulling using a little procedural jujitsu. He could keep the Senate in what's called "pro forma" session, where official recess is avoided by having certain Senate floor personnel show up every three days. No recess, no recess appointments. Reid and Bush struck a deal in August in order to avoid that; Bush got a couple nominees through, but agreed to make no recess appointments. But:

Since then, however, tensions have risen between the two branches, and on Wednesday sources said Reid doesn’t seem willing to negotiate with the White House this time. Also, several Senate aides suggested that Bush is increasingly likely to exercise the option since the clock is ticking on the second term of his presidency.

“I don’t think it should surprise anybody,” said one GOP leadership aide.

The chief candidate for a recess appointment would be surgeon general candidate and gay rights foe James Holsinger, but there would assuredly be others. With two days to go until the break, time is running out for a deal.

The Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act is a bill that you wouldn't think anyone could possibly be against. And yet, the Republican leadership in the Senate has gone to considerable lengths to stop it -- recently by brazenly insisting on an amendment that would effectively discourage groups from filing ethics complaints against senators. Without that amendment, which Democrats reasonably call a poison pill designed to sink the bill, Republicans say it's not going anywhere.

Here's what the bill would do. Candidates for the Senate file paper versions of their campaign disclosure reports. The bill would require those reports to be filed electronically. That's it.

The House moved to that system six years ago -- which is why it's called the campaign disclosure "parity" act. The bill has forty co-sponsors, among them conservative Republicans, such as Sens. Thad Cochran (R-MS) and John Cornyn (R-TX). A cynic might say that the only rational reason for opposing the bill would be if you wanted to make it harder for people to discover who's been giving to your campaign.

When the bill came to the floor this spring, it was blocked twice by an anonymous Republican senator, using what's called a "secret hold." (Here's our hunt last summer for those behind secret holders on another bill.) But that tactic was forbidden by the Democrats' recent ethics bill, and so when the bill came up again earlier this week, the senator who came forward to block it identified himself. It was Sen. John Ensign (R-NV).

Only Ensign didn't say that he was blocking it. In fact he said that he has "no objection" to the bill. But he insisted on offering an amendment. His bill would require all non-profits that file ethics complaints against senators to disclose all donors who gave $5,000 or more. His bill, he said on the floor, was designed to "protect individual Senators from purely politically motivated ethics complaints that come against us that sometimes we will have to run up legal bills and all kinds of other things." Without any evident irony he added: "transparency is the best way to do it."

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Perhaps a little wiser after seven months in the majority, Democrats have strategized to prevent the White House from utilizing some of its sneakier powers while Congress is in recess.

There'll be no recess appointments this time around, Roll Call reports (sub. req.), meaning the White House won't be taking advantage of Congress' vacation to install any contested nominees. That's due to a deal between Bush and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Last recess, the White House made a number of controversial recess appointments, including Swift Boat backer Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium. In order to prevent that sort of thing from happening again, Reid had plotted to keep the Senate in "pro forma" session during the recess -- whereby the Senate floor personnel show up every three days to make it an official session. But now Reid and Bush have made a deal, according to Roll Call. Bush won't make any recess appointments and Reid has promised to move some of his nominees when Senate gets back in session.

Roll Call also reports that there's a similar game being played over the ethics and lobbying reform bill that Congress passed last month.

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I can't count how many times I read stories last year about the new culture of fear on K Street. In the wake of the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham prosecutions, the story went, lobbyists were now shifty-eyed, hunted creatures. Suddenly their every move was suspect. Even an innocent campaign contribution could be construed as a crime.

But, with the Republican Congress in power, the reforms never came. And all in all, 2006 was a banner year for lobbyists. According to Political Money Line, special interests spent nearly $2.6 billion on lobbying last year, $229 million more than 2005.

But now the reforms have come, courtesy of the Democratic Congress. And while it's unclear whether they will really change the culture of Washington, one thing is clear: they will make lobbying a lot less fun.

No gifts, no meals, no sports tickets, no trips from lobbyists are allowed anymore. And breaking that ban could land a lobbyist with up to five years in prison. Witness, courtesy of The New York Times, what a sad state this has put influence peddling in:

....[W]orse still for [veteran lobbyist H. Stewart Van Scoyoc], under the new law he is required to certify each quarter that none of the 50 lobbyists in his firm bought so much as a burger or cigar for someone on a lawmaker’s staff....

Another lobbyist recently scaled back the menu at a breakfast briefing for lawmakers, offering bagels and cream cheese instead of ham and eggs. The rules permit lobbyists to provide refreshment of “only nominal value.” The House ethics committee guidelines suggest “light appetizers and drinks, or soda and cookies,” a standard that is known as “the toothpick test.”....

Lobbyists complain that Congress is unfairly punishing them for the misdeeds of its own members, not to mention ruining the social lives of innocent and underpaid staff members.

“All those people who grew up in the system — who aren’t evil-doers, just good people — used to be able to entertain and have fun,” lamented Jim Ervin, a veteran military industry lobbyist.

No more sushi (a favorite of ex-Rep. Bob Ney's, a "sushiholic"), no more well-done filet mignon (Duke Cunningham's preference), not even ham and eggs. Bagels (and probably plain ones at that). How's a lobbyist supposed to get anything done?

Well, it's not so bleak, it turns out. While lobbyists are prevented from their more traditional avenues of access, they can still throw political fund-raisers -- in fact the new bill may have the perverse effect of increasing the importance of those events. And the requirements melt away when lawmakers and lobbyists find themselves side by side at “widely attended events” -- then the lawmakers can be made more comfortable.

Furthermore, all these requirements might serve to professionalize influence peddling even more, since corporations might be unsure of how to comply with the new laws. Rather than risk going to jail for buying a representative a cheeseburger, why not hire someone who knows the loopholes?

Even the "bundling" provision of the new bill, which will require that lawmakers disclose when lobbyists solicit and provide a group of individual contributions (as, for instance, from company executives), might not turn out to be a bad thing, the Times points out:

But lobbyists say the recognition may only encourage them to bundle. Ties to lawmakers are calling cards for clients.

“That is not going to be viewed as the mark of Cain or anything,” Lawrence O’Brien III, a Democratic lobbyist and fund-raiser, said dryly. “It could be perceived as bragging rights.”

But if there's one group for whom this bill is plainly good news, it's muckrakers. The bundling provision allows a journalist to keep tabs as to who's bragging about access to a lawmaker, and the earmark provisions make it much easier to follow an earmark from the lobbyist to the lawmaker:

A self-described “earmarks guy” who specializes in spending items, [James Dyer] said the new rules were an invitation to scandal hunters. For the first time, the law will require disclosure of both the lawmakers who sponsor such items and the campaign contributions of the lobbyists who seek them.

“It is a road map that says, ‘Hey, come look at me; I have got my name against an earmark,’ ” he said.

Update: Actually, as The Washington Post points out, it's unclear who will be supervising all these new filings. So we'll have to wait and see whether the new system of disclosure is what it's cracked up to be.

It would be wrong to call the House ethics committee incompetent. Because, really, it ably strives to make itself as irrelevant and impotent as possible.

Please take a moment out of your day to appreciate its efforts.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

The House ethics committee has declared that an earmark requested by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to build a commuter transit center near a handful of properties he owns would not be an impermissible financial conflict because any benefit to Calvert would be shared by other similarly situated landowners.

Just let that sit a little bit. Calvert used his power as a lawmaker to appropriate $5.6 million in taxpayer dollars to build a transit center that's within walking distance of seven of his properties (ranging from office and/or retail buildings to a storage facility). But there's no conflict there, mostly because any financial benefit Calvert achieved “would be experienced as a member of a class of landholders in the vicinity of the transit Center.” You can read the ethics committee's opinion letter here. Here's a map of Calvert's properties (click to enlarge):

In other words, because Calvert's aren't the only buildings that might financially benefit from the transit center, there's no conflict. Or as the committee puts it in its own artfully contorted language: "We conclude that it is within your discretion for you to conclude that your properties do not constitute a financial interest in the earmark supporting the Corona Transit Center."

OK, so let's just say that I'm a property-rich lawmaker who wants to push the boundaries and play the earmark game for all its worth. What would it take for me to get into trouble? Just how self-serving of a project would actually garner the House ethics committee's disapproval?

“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me.

The committee's ruling is great news for Calvert (whose earmarking shenanigans have attracted attention before) and the growing group of lawmakers in the "honest graft" game (Justin had a great round-up over at ABC yesterday). And it's yet another indication that the House ethics committee actually has a lower standard for wrongdoing than our criminal justice system, which is why far more lawmakers have come under federal investigation in the past several years than have been investigated by the ethics committee (Calvert is no exception).

Apparently the Senate is an irony-free zone, because once again, a senator has placed a secret hold on legislation that increases government transparency.

In this case, the bill that's been blocked would require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically. Right now, they only file paper versions, which are much more difficult to search through. House candidates file electronically.

When Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) moved to approve the bill by unanimous consent yesterday, "a Republican Senator anonymously objected, stalling the bill indefinitely," according to Roll Call (sub. req.).

The good people at the Sunlight Foundation are working to find out who the culprit is. You can lend them a hand by giving your senator a call.

From the AP: "US Senator Tom Coburn [R-OK] says he will not run for re-election if an ethics bill that's passed the Senate becomes law."

Senate votes to strip felon ex-lawmakers of their pensions. Better start socking away those bribes in 401(k)s, boys.

Win a few, lose a few.

Yesterday, Paul reported on the fireworks erupting in the Senate over ethics reform. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) went to the wall for a watered-down reform proposal, which would have kept the public from knowing which lawmakers inserted billions of dollars worth of earmarked expenditures. Republicans, with the help of nine Democrats (and Joe Lieberman), kept him at bay by pushing an amendment that would force nearly all earmarks to be identified by their sponsors.

Today, Reid appears to have accepted defeat. From CQ (sub. req.):

After losing a critical floor vote Thursday and scrambling in vain to reverse the decision, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., found the spirit of bipartisan compromise more to his liking Friday morning.

Reid offered an olive branch to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., agreeing to embrace his amendment to a pending ethics and lobbying overhaul (S 1) with some modifications. DeMint’s amendment, which Democratic leaders tried but failed to kill on Thursday, would expand the definition of member earmarks that would be subject to new disclosure rules. . . .

Friday morning, a chastened Reid said, “Yesterday was a rather difficult day, as some days are. We tend to get in a hurry around here sometimes when we shouldn’t be. Personally, for the majority, we probably could have done a little better job.”

Showing he can be every bit as bullying to advance a bad idea, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) held open a vote on his watered down earmark reform legislation today in order to round up enough votes to push it through.

Part of the Senate's ethics reform bill deals with earmarks -- lawmakers' often abused practice of inserting items in legislation to direct funds to special interests (a la Duke Cunningham). According to current rules, lawmakers can attach earmarks anonymously, a state of affairs inviting abuse. Reform efforts have sought to change that. Republicans and good government types have criticized Reid's version of earmark reform legislation, which is weaker than the version passed by House Democrats, saying that it doesn't go near far enough in terms of disclosure.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) offered an amendment today that mirrored the tougher legislation passed by House Democrats.

According to Craig Holman of Public Citizen, Reid's version, if it had been applied to earmarks as part of legislation passed last year, would have disclosed the sponsor of only approximately 500 earmarks. DeMint's amendment would have forced sponsors to be known of roughly 12,000.

"DeMint's version is considerably tougher," Holman told me, noting that both Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who co-sponsored the bill, are "on the appropriations committee and haven't really believed in strong earmark reform propoals in the first place."

But Democrats sought to block DeMint's amendment, with an effort led by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). They failed, due mostly to nine Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and freshmen Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Jim Webb (D-VA), who crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Here's the roll call tally.

But instead of then passing DeMint's amendment, as would normally occur in the Senate, the Democratic leadership held the vote open, a move that Senate Republicans called unprecedented, and reminiscent of tactics used by the GOP-controlled House that voters just booted.

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We all knew this was supposed to be a new era of government with the Democratic majority blah blah blah. But public financing for elections? Really?

On the Senate floor today, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), while speaking about the Dems' ethics package, said that the next logical step is public financing, and that he would be introducing such a bill in a matter of weeks. (We're still trying to get a record of Durbin's exact remarks.)

Although the details of the legislation are still being pounded out, David Donnelly of the Public Campaign Action Fund said that Durbin's bill would probably be modeled on the Arizona and Maine laws "which are working very well." In Maine, candidates who participate in the program have to begin by demonstrating community support by "collecting a minimum number of $5 checks or money orders payable to the Maine Clean Election Fund (qualifying contributions). After a candidate begins to receive MCEA funds from the State, he or she cannot accept private contributions," according to the Maine Ethics Commission.

This the sort of thing that often gets laughed off as pie-in-the-sky legislating. But with the Senate's #2 pushing for it, might the story be different this time around?

Bad news for war profiteers and corrupt politicians.

Today, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced a bill, simply called The War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007, targeting fraud by government contractors supporting the occupation of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Such profiteering would be a felony under Leahy's legislation, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of $1 million or twice the gross profits of the profiteering. The bill would also clarify U.S. courts' jurisdiction to handle cases of profiteering which occur overseas.

To make it a muck-fighting twofer, Leahy also joined Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) to introduce a bill aimed at strengthening public corruption investigations. The proposal would extend the statute of limitations for many offenses, allow federal investigators to use wiretaps when chasing state and local officials defrauding the federal government, and would boost the FBI's public integrity budget by $100 million over four years.

Democrats are set to institute a raft of lobbying and ethics reforms in the new Congress. Now, as a lobbyist, you could just get depressed about the gift ban, or restrictions on lawmaker travel, or you could get... creative.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

If certain social interactions become taboo, [a "prominent" Democratic] lobbyist said, she would focus more on cultivating relationships with Members or staff in the context of alumni groups and state societies, or through activities with their children — not to mention through fundraisers that benefit the Members’ coffers....

Two well-known lobbyists, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, said that on the cocktail and fundraising circuits, lobbyists already have been abuzz with new ideas about how to sidestep as-yet-unpassed rules.

One said that a few colleagues have raised the possibility of terminating their lobbying registrations and moving into roles within their firms that are officially classified as non-lobbying, to avoid travel or gift bans if they apply only to registered lobbyists.....

And how about getting around new limits on Members using corporate jets? The Democratic lobbyist said he’d heard about lobbyists trying to get state party committees to charter corporate flights for Members.

Another GOP lobbyist said he’s been preparing himself for months to deal with a gift ban, which is expected to keep in place the numerous exceptions for widely attended stand-up receptions and for pre-existing personal friendships.

If the exemption for widely attended events holds, this lobbyist said, he would consider holding quarterly parties instead of just one holiday party each year.

And then there's one rather unfortunate side effect of the reforms. Because they restrict social interactions between lobbyists and lawmakers unless it's a fundraiser, lobbyists will probably soon break the taboo of talking up their client's cause while forking over dollars:

Several lobbyists said that fundraising events, too, will be at a premium, especially if Congress does not enact any campaign finance reforms geared toward lobbyists.

“I am going to be embraced and hugged and kissed as long as I’m giving them a check” for their campaign, said one lobbyist.

Is the era of the millionaire-backed attack group coming to an end?

The Federal Election Commission hit the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth with a $299,500 fine today for playing too fast with election rules. The Swift Boat Vets were a "527" organization, which has no limits on contributions, but were acting like federal political committees, the FEC charged. 527s are allowed to work for or against certain candidates, but if they have no other "major purpose," according to FEC spokesman Bob Biersack, then they should register as a committee.

That's a huge difference. Committees can only accept $5,000 in contributions per person per year. The Swift Boat Vets, by comparison, accepted $4.4 million from GOP money man Bob Perry in 2004. Perry played the same trick in this year's election, throwing $9 million at three different 527 attack groups, which used it to target dozens of Democratic congressional candidates all over the country. Democrats have also taken advantage of 527s, and two liberal groups were fined today: MoveOn and the League of Conservation Voters.

If the FEC were to really crack down on this sort of thing (the 527 loophole has been an open secret for a number of years), as they've idly been threatening to do, then 2008 would be a remarkably different election than the past two cycles.

Update: I talked to David Donnelly, the director of Campaign Money Watch, who knows a lot about this sort of thing, and he said that these fines (and the ones rumored to follow soon), probably will have a significant deterring effect in the '08 elections.

Incoming Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) announced yesterday that the Republicans' three day workweek for Congress is over: starting January, the Democrat-led 110th Congress will be working five days a week.

As Hoyer explained (sub. req.), all that promised oversight will take time -- time that somehow wasn't available in the Do-Nothingest Congress:

“First, you could argue there was no time for oversight, or you could argue there was no oversight and therefore no necessity to meet. But in any event, we are going to meet sufficient times, so the committees can do their jobs.”

Some Republicans have a different take -- congressional oversight destroys families:

"Keeping us up here eats away at families," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. "Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families -- that's what this says."

Update: For those curious as to how Democrats will begin their busy reign, Hoyer says they're sticking with their planned first 100 hour agenda ("implement proposals by the bipartisan committee that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, raise the federal minimum wage, reduce prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients, promote stem-cell research, lower the interest rate for student loans and repeal certain tax benefits for the oil industry"). Only after that will they address the numerous appropriations bills that Republicans will leave unfinished, in an effort to bog down the Democrats' agenda.

One sector of big-money Washington is eager for a reinvigorated Congress: White-collar defense lawyers.

In a recent memo to its clients, the white shoe firm Covington and Burling warned of the increased investigative activity soon to come from the Dem-controlled Hill -- and touted its credentials for representing corporations and individuals who may find themselves under scrutiny.

"Nearly every committee of Congress likely will participate in oversight on a broad array of issues," the memo predicts, "including those that are well anticipated, like Iraq redevelopment fraud, and those that are sometimes overlooked by the press, such as hedge fund oversight. Importantly, while the popular press will focus on high-profile actions like subpoenaing senior government officials or investigating Bush Administration failures, a broad range of private sector companies also will face scrutiny."

The new Congress will be busy ferretting out "sweetheart contracts, administrative cost overruns, waste and fraud, and narrow appropriations earmarks," the slick marketing piece predicted. Also at risk are "[c]ompanies that played a role in what are perceived as Bush Administration failures or abuses" like Katrina and the president's warrantless wiretapping program. And even though Enron was a long time ago, Covington also sees "corporate abuses" as a target area.

Are you an executive at a telecom involved in the NSA's wiretapping program? Did your company get a sweet no-bid contract in Iraq? Well, Covington's soon-to-be booming "congressional investigations practice" boasts such luminaries as Lanny Breuer, who was President Clinton's Special Counsel during impeachment proceedings, and Robert Kelner, who has represented the RNC in the New Hampshire phone jamming case.

Gentlemen, start your retainers.