Report: Top committee members rake it in from interested industry

By Bernie Becker - 11/16/11 11:48 AM ET

Does taking over the top spot on a House committee lead to a financial windfall for lawmakers? A new report suggests it does.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), looking at 10 separate House panels, found that the top Republican and Democrat had seen their fundraising totals from the industries they oversee grow at a steep rate between the 1998 election cycle and the 2010 cycle.

In all, CREW found, these chairmen and ranking members saw their industry contributions jump almost sixfold while their fundraising in general rose 230 percent.

The good-government group, which used data from the Center for Responsive Politics, suggested that its findings essentially show that industries are legally bribing top lawmakers.

“Congress would be a lot more transparent if it just put a for sale sign on the front of the Capitol,” Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, said in a statement.

CREW found, among other things, that financial industry donations to Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the House Financial Services chairman, rose by 620 percent between 1998 and 2010 – more than two and a half times the jump in his total contributions.

Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture panel, saw a similar increase — a 711 percent jump in donations from agriculture groups, compared to a 274 percent upswing overall.

Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the ranking member at Financial Services, and Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the chairman at the Energy and Commerce Committee, also saw significant increases in industry donations.

CREW also said that their research found that committee leaders were sometimes more likely to vote in an industry’s favor than colleagues from the same party.

But the group’s findings were also not across-the-board.

Peterson, for instance, voted 7 out of 10 times with industries regulated by the Agriculture Committee in 2007 and 2008, the same exact percentage as the average Democrat.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), now the ranking member at Energy and Commerce, also got more than 10 times as much from related industries in 2010 than he did in 1998. But Waxman’s overall fundraising grew by a factor of 11.

And Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, now the top Democrat at Natural Resources, saw his industry contributions jump by more than 2,500 percent in the dozen years examined.

Still, the $47,400 Markey received from industry groups in the 2010 cycle amounted to just over 3 percent of his total contributions. The Massachusetts Democrat had brought in $1,800 from those groups in 1998.