As contributions fall, U.S. House GOP rebels blame party leaders
As he began his first re-election run in early 2013, Tea Party Rep. Thomas Massie had no trouble raising money from business interests. Then came 2015. The Kentucky Republican voted against returning Republican John Boehner of Ohio to the speaker’s job and opposed an effort by GOP leaders to avoid a standoff with President Barack Obama over immigration that threatened to shut down the Department of Homeland Security. In the first three months of 2013, Massie reported $46,000 rolling in from tobacco, trucking, health care and other industries. During the first quarter of 2015, Massie has collected just $1,000 from political action committees, which funnel contributions to candidates from business, labor or ideological interests. That money came from the conservative Eagle Forum. Massie and some other conservatives say the reason their business contributions have fallen is simple: GOP leaders are retaliating for their defiance. “Those who don’t go along to get along aren’t going to get as many PAC checks,” Massie said last week, using the acronym for political action committees. None offers concrete proof that top Republicans are behind the contribution falloff. But they say the evidence is clear. “I’m an engineer with a science background. I look at empirical evidence. If you have enough data points, you can prove something,” Massie said. Conservatives point out that leadership has targeted them before, and they cite Boehner’s removal of some rebels from coveted committee assignments. In March, an outside group allied with GOP leaders ran radio and Internet ads accusing some House Republicans who opposed efforts to end the Homeland Security impasse of being “willing to put our security at risk.” GOP leaders deny they have orchestrated an effort to deny business support to recalcitrant conservatives, arguing that they want to protect Republican-held seats. But they acknowledge that votes can have consequences with business groups whose political spending plays major roles in congressional campaigns. “If they agree with what the speaker is trying to accomplish and you don’t support the speaker, why should they support you?” said Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, a Boehner ally. Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission show that many GOP rebels are having a harder time raising cash from corporate interests, while others are not. In a public show of disloyalty that party leaders scorn, 25 House Republicans voted against Boehner to be speaker in January, including one who voted “present.” Of the 24 expected to seek re-election next year, 15 saw their contributions from PACs fall between this year’s opening quarter and the same period in 2013. For a few who did not file reports for the first quarter of 2013, this year’s data was compared with the earliest report from their 2014 campaign. None of the 24 has received contributions yet this year from political committees run by Boehner and the other two top GOP leaders, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, according to FEC reports. The three leaders have donated to dozens of other House Republicans, chiefly those facing tight re-elections. All except perhaps three of the 24 mutinous Republicans are in safe GOP districts and should breeze to re-election. In the first quarter of 2015, maverick Tim Huelskamp of Kansas saw his contributions from political committees fall in half from the $35,000 he reported raising during that period in 2013. He says lobbyists have told him of a “do not give list” from top Republicans that names about 35 GOP lawmakers. “Folks understood, ‘Hey, you may not get what you want if you’re helping the folks’” on the list, Huelskamp said. Leading Republicans deny such a list exists. “That is beyond conspiracy theory, because if someone was going to do the list, it would be me,” said California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, a Boehner friend and frequent critic of his party’s insurgents. Top Republicans say campaign contributions can vary over time for several reasons, including a preference by many donors to help incumbents in tight races or freshmen as well as lawmakers’ own money-raising efforts. They note that the first quarter of a non-election year is early, with plenty of time for donations before the November 2016 election. “You can blame failure on a lot of fathers,” said Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden, who leads the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP campaign organization. Not all rebellious Republicans whose business contributions have dropped blame party leaders, and many have found ways to offset the smaller amounts they’ve raised from political committees. Of the 24 House Republicans who opposed Boehner’s re-election, half have raised more this year than they did in early 2013 and 18 have fatter campaign treasuries than they did then. Florida GOP Rep. Daniel Webster, got 12 votes for speaker in January. His political committee contributions plummeted from $38,000 in the first quarter of 2013 to $3,000 this year. But thanks to a huge jump in individuals’ donations, Webster raised $233,000 overall from January through March of 2015, nearly $100,000 more than in early 2013. He says he’s not aware of GOP leaders steering business money away from him. “I would suspect if people like the job I’m doing, they’re going to give to us,” he said. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Young Southern women most likely to make $7.25 or less, says new report
The typical worker making at or below minimum wage is most likely a young, Southern woman working 35 hours or less in the restaurant/hospitality industry, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey of 60,000 households found that while the largest percentage of workers (21 percent) were in food preparation and food service, the next major cluster of minimum-wage jobs were in personal service industries (6.2 percent): childcare workers, cosmetologists, hotel workers, and lobby attendants. A few other facts from the report: (h/t to The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog) Workers age 25 or younger made up about half of minimum wage earners. About 5 percent of women earned at or below $7.25 an hour, compared with about 3 percent of men. Minimum wage workers tend to have less schooling, with 7 percent of those without a high school diploma earning the federal minimum wage or less. To compare, about 4 percent of workers had a high school diploma, 4 percent had some college or an associate degree, and 2 percent were college graduates. There was little difference along racial/ethnic lines, as about 4 percent of White workers and Black workers earned minimum wage or lower; Hispanic or Latino and Asian workers each made up around 3 percent of the lowest-paid workers. But, even though Alabama is one of five without a minimum wage law, the BLS report showed that the country’s lowest-paid workers were more likely to come from Tennessee (6.8 percent), Arkansas (6.4 percent), Louisiana (6.3 percent), Mississippi (6.2 percent), or Indiana (6.1 percent) than Alabama (4.9 percent). The report comes on the heels of analysis revealing that minimum wage dollars earned in Alabama also have greater buying power, thanks to a low-cost standard of living. Earning $7.25 in Alabama compares to a wage of about $8.23 in other states.
High court same-sex marriage arguments to start Tuesday
Five lawyers will take turns at the U.S. Supreme Court lectern Tuesday for the highly anticipated and extended arguments over same-sex marriage. Among them are the Obama administration‘s top lawyer at the high court, with more than two dozen arguments behind him, and two lawyers making their first appearance before the justices. The cases come from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, all of which had their marriage bans upheld by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati. The justices will hear 2½ hours of arguments on these two questions: whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and whether states must recognize same-sex marriages from elsewhere. Civil rights lawyer Mary Bonauto, backed by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., will argue for the right to marry. Former Michigan Solicitor General John Bursch will defend the state laws. On the second question, Washington lawyer Douglas Hallward-Driemeier will urge the court to rule that states must recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. On the other side will be Joseph Whalen, Tennessee’s associate solicitor general. A look at the advocates: Bonauto has been called the Thurgood Marshall of the push for equal rights for gay and lesbian in the United States. She was the winning lawyer the first time a court granted same-sex couples the right to marry, in Massachusetts in 2003. She hopes her next argument is the last time same-sex marriage is tested in court. The 53-year-old has been at the forefront of the legal fight for gay rights, including same-sex marriage, for more than two decades. But it will be her first argument before the nation’s highest court. In her early days as the civil rights project director at the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, where she has worked for 25 years, Bonauto said she used to say no when same-sex couples asked her to take on their marriage cases in the courts. As recently as late 2012, Bonauto worried that the time was not yet right to ask the Supreme Court to settle the issue once and for all. But that time has now arrived, she said. “There’s no reason to tell these families they should be denied legal respect. It’s our hope that we soon will be able to secure that for people everywhere,” Bonauto said in a recent call with reporters. Bonauto received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship last year. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her wife, professor Jennifer Wriggins of the University of Maine’s law school, and their twin teenage daughters. • • • Bursch made a Supreme Court name for himself as Michigan’s solicitor general, arguing eight cases at the high court in a little more than two years. That record included the contentious dispute over the state’s voter-approved ban on the use of race in college admissions. He defended the ban and the justices sided with him last year. His performance during that argument was typical of his appearances before the court — unflappable in the face of sustained, and at times hostile, questioning from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Same-sex marriage opponents have pointed to Justice Anthony Kennedy‘s opinion in that case, which affirmed the power of voters to decide sensitive issues, as a key point in favor of the voter-approved gay-marriage bans now being challenged. Bursch, 42, now is in private practice at the Warner, Norcross and Judd law firm in Grand Rapids, Mich.. The firm said it is playing no role in Bursch’s argument in defense of state same-sex marriage bans. A graduate of the University of Minnesota law school and Western Michigan University, he was a law clerk to Judge James Loken of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. • • • Hallward-Driemeier cheerfully acknowledged that he would rather not have the court decide the issue he is going to argue — that states must recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. That’s because he would rather have the justices settle the larger issue of the right to marry. “We think there’s a fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry and we think that pretty much ends the question” about recognition, Hallward-Driemeier said on a conference call with reporters. The Harvard Law School graduate is an experienced Supreme Court advocate with no previous ties to same-sex marriage cases. Tuesday’s argument will be his 16th at the high court. Hallward-Driemeier, 48, heads the appellate practice at Boston-based Ropes and Gray. He spent several years at the Justice Department and before that was a law clerk to Judge Amalya Kearse of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. He is a St. Louis-area native who graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. He met his wife, the former Mary Hallward, when both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University in England. When they married, they combined their last names. • • • Verrilli is the most familiar face to the justices among the five lawyers they’ll hear from on Tuesday. He will follow Bonauto in support of a ruling forbidding states from limiting marriage to the union of a man and a woman. Verrilli, 57, has spent nearly four years as President Barack Obama‘s solicitor general, arguing a half-dozen or so cases at the Supreme Court each year. Among them was the epic re-election campaign year fight over Obama’s health overhaul in 2012. The administration prevailed by a 5-4 vote on the basis of a secondary argument Verrilli made before the skeptical court. He was on the losing end of last year’s fight over whether corporations can express religious objections to avoid paying for contraceptives for women covered by employer health plans. Before joining the administration in 2009, Verrilli was a partner at the Washington firm of Jenner and Block. His Supreme Court work included advocating for the rights of death row inmates and representing telecommunications firms in cases with billions of dollars in the balance. A graduate of Yale University and Columbia Law School, Verrilli was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. • • •
