Members of the House and Senate are allowed to send out news to their constituents, without paying any postage. This is known as
franking privelege. Most of us have probably gotten mailings from our elected officials from time to time by this means. This is only allowed for "news", not campaigning, and is generally for mail directed to constituents of the official in question.
Rep. Pombo, ever one to push the limits on his priveleges (the perqs of power), sent a mass mailing to snowmobile owners during the fall 2004 election. The main point of the mailing was to praise Bush Administration policies for off-road vehicles, and has been alleged to have been for the purpose of political campaigning, and thus a violation of House rules.
This cropped up again this past week in an editorial in Roll Call on the subject (March 29, 2006), with a petulant LTE in response penned by Pombo himself. (Well, probably by a staffer, but Pombo signed it.) This from House Resources website (NOT an official House website, as comment on ANWR drilling opponents, seemed appropriate here:
The editorial was about the dysfunctional House Ethics Committee. Sorry, can't provide a link as it's behind a subscription firewall:
Fifteen long months into the 109th Congress, the House ethics committee is supposedly ready to get to work. A chief counsel and new investigators have been hired, but Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) and ranking member Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), still haven't sounded the gong to set any investigations in motion.
It points out that committee rules keep them out of the snake pit of matters Abramoff, because they are currently under investigation by the Justice Department. The editorial goes on to point out that there are other cases worthy of attention, but which are getting none. Amongst half a dozen cases referred in the editorial, the one involving Pombo's creative interpretation of the franking privelege has been spotlighted.
In Roll Call's editorial opinion:
The charges are serious enough, in our judgment, to merit investigative action on the committee's own initiative. One of these is Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), chairman of the Resources Committee, who is accused of (among other things) using his franking privileges to mail 175,000 letters within 90 days of the 2004 election praising his and President Bush's efforts on behalf of snowmobile owners.
Whaddya wanna bet that there aren't 175,000 snowmobile owners in Pombo's district, in which the dominant demographics are San Joaquin Valley farmers & ranchers (i.e. agribusiness) and East Bay exurban commuters? In addition, Roll Call mentions another matter perhaps with relevance to Pombo:
In addition, dozens of Members have taken trips apparently paid for by lobbyists which they either did not report or mis-reported and corrected. It's the job of the ethics committee to determine whether House rules have been been violated in these cases and to make sure travel is adequately reported upon.
Roll Call is reminding the public that the Committee has been asleep at the wheel, implying between the lines that things might never have gotten so out of hand had the committee been doing his job. (That failing probably should be blamed on Tom Delay.) And, mixing metaphors that the committee should get it's sputtering engine revved up and running.
Not surprisingly, Pombo was not pleased with this, and quickly fired off a letter to the editor, published the very next day. He says he was cleared by the House Administration Committee and as far as he was concerned, the matter was long closed. Why it was taken up by Administration rather than Ethics is not clear. Perhaps Delay and his lieutenants, of which Pombo is clearly an important one in how he's been running Resources. Perhaps a case of Congressional forum shopping? Not unlike when Resources - in a special Task Force featuring Pombo and headed by John Doolittle - sabotaged an FDIC investigation into a failed Savings & Loan involving a Houston crony of Delay's, Charles Hurwitz.
Anyhow, Pombo seems to be in a bad mood about this. Apparently, he's finding the ongoing attention to his (at best) questionable doings to be irksome, including calls for investigation by fellow Californian, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. From "Pombo":
When asked to elaborate, Ms. Pelosi told reporters, "I am not familiar with the facts of the case, I really am not. I only know what I have read in the paper."
I kinda thought that an investigation, review, hearing were in order in cases of alleged wrongdoing. But Pombo finds this annoying. Here's how his LTE concludes:
Readers expect more from Roll Call than the trumpeting of inane, vacuous, election-year character assassination tactics. Report the facts. Educate the Minority Leader. She only knows what she reads in the paper.
Pombo was "cleared" sort of. When this came up, a "clarification" limiting the amount that could be spent on franking to well below what Pombo had spent on this one mailing - for any purpose whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the Swiftboaters are after Pombo's Republican primary challenger, Pete McCloskey, with the help of columnist Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday (April 2, 2004). Yeah, the same guy who outed Valerie Plame, and who lost his gig on CNN's Crossfire when he threw a petulant fit and stormed off the set. That guy. These comments come as an addendum to a longer piece on relations between Congressional primary rivals Duckworth & Cegelis in Illinois. If we're to believe Novak, who used to work for CNN, McCloskey's some kind of Nazi sympathizer who denies that the Holocaust occurred:
HOLOCAUST POLITICS
Former Rep. Pete McCloskey, the liberal Republican attempting a comeback congressional campaign in California, faces charges of association with an organization accused of Holocaust denial.
At a 2000 conference of the Institute for Historical Review, McCloskey was quoted in a transcript of his speech as referring to "the so-called Holocaust." Mark Weber, the Institute's director, told this column that McCloskey was granted a request to remove from the IHR's Web site an expression of "esteem" for the organization's "mission." The Web site offers for sale books questioning the Holocaust, and the IHR has hosted Holocaust deniers as speakers.
No time to dig into what's behind it today, but figured it was worth a mention. If it goes anywhere, it will likely require further attention.