|
Doyle would bow out of probe |
|
By Susan Crabtree and Jackie Kucinich
|
|
Posted: 06/28/07 07:35 PM [ET] |
Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) will recuse himself should the House ethics committee review Rep. John Murtha’s (D-Pa.) earmark activities.
Doyle, who sits on the panel, said through a spokesman that members of the same delegation rarely participate in an ethics inquiry of each other. There is no indication that such an investigation has been launched, and Doyle would not discuss matters before the committee.
“It’s common practice for members of the committee who have someone from their home state before them to recuse themselves from taking part in the investigation,” Doyle spokesman Matt Dinkel wrote in an e-mail. “Mike’s objectivity wouldn’t ever become an issue should questions about Mr. Murtha or any other Pennsylvania member come before the committee because he would automatically recuse himself.”
Dinkel said this was one reason Doyle felt free to vote with Democrats against Rep. Mike Rogers’s (R-Mich.) resolution to reprimand Murtha after Rogers accused him of threatening his earmarks in retaliation for trying to kill one of Murtha’s earmarks. House rules state that lawmakers cannot make spending projects conditional on how another lawmaker decides to vote.
Doyle was the sole member of the ethics committee to vote against the Rogers resolution. His colleagues on the committee — both Republican and Democratic — voted present. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), the chairwoman, did not vote.
Dinkel said Doyle told him the day of the vote that he wanted to register his displeasure at what he saw as political posturing by the Republicans, and he figured he was free to do so because he knew he would recuse himself if the issue came before the ethics committee.
Doyle is a longtime ally of Murtha, the dean of the Pennsylvania delegation. They also share some campaign contributors; many lobbying firms that donate heavily to Murtha and whose clients are recipients of millions of dollars in earmarks from him are also among Doyle’s top contributors.
Murtha’s relationship with the two lobbying firms, KSA Consulting and the PMA Group, came into question on Monday following a report about earmarks he obtained for the firms’ clients.
The story reported that some of these clients had opened small offices in Murtha’s hometown of Johnstown, Pa., but maintained larger operations outside the state.
Like Murtha, Doyle has tried to spur the economy in his western Pennsylvania district with earmarks to groups that help companies and institutions obtain government contracts — although the earmarks are much smaller sums than many of Murtha’s.
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has assailed the practice of directing earmarks to organizations to help them or other companies get more federal money. He defines these as federal subsidies for federal contracts.
Using earmarks, Doyle almost single-handedly created the Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology, which aims to “become a bridge between the [Department of Defense], its prime contractors” and small businesses, according to its website.
“The Doyle Center will revitalize [Pennsylvania’s] economy by providing small local manufacturers with the tools they need to participate in military contracts with big defense contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon,” Doyle said in a 2003 release.
(The same year, Murtha created the John P. Murtha Institute for Homeland Security at Indiana University of Pennsylvania by directing $20 million its way.)
In the release, Doyle said he obtained a $1.5 million earmark for the Center to “examine a defense system’s supply chain for ways to improve the development and delivery of the needed parts.”
Edwards J. Sheehan Jr., the senior vice president and chief financial officer of Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC), is the chairman of the Doyle Center’s board of governors. Murtha essentially created CTC, a nonprofit technology innovation center originally based in his district, through earmarks in the late 1980s and has directed millions of earmarks its way in the years since. CTC has paid PMA Group $1.68 million since 1998 for lobbying work on appropriations bills.
The creation of a center that bears Doyle’s name is another layer to three other nonprofit organizations devoted to a similar mission of helping spur economic development in the area: the Pennsylvania Technology Council, the Pittsburgh Technology Council and Catalyst Connection.
All four groups share the same address and many of the same officers. The Doyle Center handed over a large portion of its earmark money in 2003 and 2004 to Catalyst Connection for research, according to nonprofit tax forms filed with the IRS and made available on guidestar.com. (Tax records for later years were unavailable.) The majority of the other funds that make up the Center’s budget for those years was directed to Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne Universities, also for research.
Catalyst Connection received $330,000 from the Doyle Center in 2004, a portion of a larger $1.36 million earmark that made up the Center’s entire budget for that year, the tax documents show.
Catalyst Connection and the Pittsburgh Technology Council have hired a Pennsylvania-based lobbying firm, GSP Consulting Corp., to represent them on “defense appropriations,” according to lobbying disclosure records. Their registered lobbyists include former staffers of several members of the state’s delegation, including Murtha and Doyle.
Doyle’s spokesman said his boss is proud of the Doyle Center’s work but deferred questions about its relationship to Catalyst Connection and the contract the Center gave the Catalyst Connection to the officers of both groups.
Kevin Lane, a spokesman for the Center, Catalyst Connection and the technology councils, said that while Catalyst Connection is a regional economic development organization, the Center focuses on “information technology and software tools” for small manufacturers — tools that will “eventually be available to all manufacturers across the U.S. who desire to participate in the defense supply chain.”
The $330,000 worth of research Catalyst Connection provided the Center was “extensive,” Lane wrote, and focused on “determining the needs of small manufacturers, in order to enable them to participate in the supply chains of the U.S. Department of Defense.”
That process also involved “online surveys,” “site visits,” “pilot or demonstration projects” and “research and evaluation of off-the-shelf software as technology tools needed to participate in supply chains.”
Lane stressed that no federal or state funds were used in enlisting the services of GSP Consulting.
|
