So here’s an idea for any reporter covering Congress. Grab a microphone and ask members on both sides of the aisle if they would support a rule — if not a law, just a simple ethics rule that could be promulgated by both the Senate and the House as a housekeeping measure — that would require any legislator to disclose any conflict of interest when performing any official act, such as voting on legislation, holding hearings, or interceding with a federal agency.
In other words, when Menendez or a staff member wrote to the State Department about his pal’s port deal, he would have been required to disclose to those officials, and also make public on his own website that the doctor was a good friend who had paid for his vacations and donated $700,000 to his campaign fund. More generally, whenever a member of the House or Senate cast a vote that helped a campaign donor, hurt a campaign donor’s competitors or aided the cause of a lobbyist- donor, he or she would be required to disclose it.
Would this result in a blizzard of disclosures accompanying almost every vote or other official act? Probably. But that kind of sunlight and accompanying embarrassment would be the point.
It would be fun to watch politicians squirming to figure out a way to avoid supporting a basic public policy principal — transparency — that seems as American as apple pie and that is free of the First Amendment issues that trump most efforts to regulate lobbying or campaign contributions. This, after all, is only about disclosure, not about prohibiting anything. The first interview, of course, should be with Menendez, who has repeatedly said he has nothing to hide. So doesn’t he think it would have been better to disclose his relationship with the good doctor when he took these unusually aggressive steps to intercede on the doctor’s behalf so that his constituents could then judge whether he was acting in the public interest?
4. Procurement Follies and the sequester:
A favorite line of liberals to explain their support of Rand Paul having used a 13-hour filibuster to question the president’s drone strike policies is that, as the saying goes, “a broken clock is right twice a day.”
Lately a lot of conservative blogs, like this one, have sounded the alarm that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered more than 2,700 “mine-resistant armor protected vehicles” for domestic use. Could this be the second time the clock has been right?
My guess is that despite the right wing bloggers’ theory that these armored vehicles are for general “domestic use” on the “streets of the United States,” if they were ordered, the explanation from DHS will be that they are needed for border patrols. While not a tip-off to an Obama declaration of martial law or some such thing, that explanation would be a good lead-in to a sequester-oriented story about how so many of DHS’s procurement programs are emblematic of rampant waste and cronyism in Washington. For a refresher on one such multi-billion dollar fiasco - in this case, the failed deployment of high-tech sensors on the border rather than armored vehicles — see an item I wrote in this space last year.
That in turn suggests a broader, more fundamental story: Why hasn’t the Washington Post or Politico (assuming it aspires to go beyond DC process stories in a big, substantive way) scoured the various agencies and done its own thinking man’s sequester budget by finding obvious waste and expendable programs, the elimination of which would yield the $85 billion targeted in the sequester?
That request to Mark Knoller says more about you than it would tell us anything about the president, Mr. Brill. What possible thing do you seek to prove with such a request? A confirmation of your obvious bias and dislike of the president? Have you ever made such a request about how many phone calls and lunches and visits to Congress by George W Bush? I doubt it. What exactly are you trying to "prove"?
It isn't exactly a secret that President Obama holds you in the press in disdain, and rightfully so. As Politico observed "The president’s staff [and the news-consuming public] often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance.." And it shouldn't be surprising that the public and probably Barack Obama holds the US Congress in a similar vein.
I'll tell you something from outside your conservatively-biased bubble. Ordinary people do not find the president "aloof." Try this: 50 Photos Of Obama With Babies. Or, go watch the end of any speech before the public, either during the campaign or an official speech. He plows into the crowd to shake hands and greet as many people as he can. They most definitely don't find him "aloof." That's nothing but rightwing spin that you have naively fallen for.
I'd advise you to shake yourself out of that beltway spin before you really embarrass yourself. Though I am an admirer of your epic reportage on health care costs, it appears that you have become enamored of your own self-importance. All that reporting, but your analysis of it sucked. It was way off, straight out of the American Enterprise Institute. So that's two instances where you have proved yourself to be nothing but a rightwing shill.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 19 Mar 2013 at 09:32 PM
Mr. Brill demonstrates his ignorance with this request. I would hope that Mr. Knoller has actual reporting to do.
Does Mr. Brill want the number of times Mr. Obama was rebuffed by Republican House and Senate members? Would he like to know how many were invited to the White House for social occasions -- such as the Wednesday evening cocktail hour -- but opted instead to hang with the Club For Growth? Or who made which snarky comment in the driveway of the White House before a battery of microphones, without the common courtesy of getting off your host's property before you trash the food, the drink and company? Or how about the number of times the recipient of a Presidential phone call pretended to be asleep, in the john or otherwise so indisposed that he or she couldn't get it together enough to pick up the phone? Perhaps Mr. Brill would like to know how many times certain GOP golfers chose to stay home rather than be seen in the company of "that guy" in the White House?
Either way, it is a another in the long line of Beltway media fails that the so-called "charm offensive" is what is considered as news. I supposed it's easier to report the fluff and not the facts.
"Can you do a comparison of how many times before his recent flurry of congressional encounters President Obama has met with members of the House and Senate? It could include a sub-category of one-on-one sessions, and compare Obama’s record, if possible, with the stats for presidents going back as you can?"
#2 Posted by Jade, CJR on Sat 23 Mar 2013 at 08:34 PM