A Chicago community center founded by Rep. Bobby Rush, the only Democrat co-sponsoring the rewrite of the telecom bill, received a $1 million grant from the charitable arm of SBC/AT&T, one of the nation’s largest phone companies.

In Monday’s Chicago Sun-Times, I reported on the cozy relationship between Rush, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and the SBC Foundation, which gave the money to the nonprofit Rebirth of Englewood Community Development Corp. in Rush’s South Side Chicago congressional district.

Using charitable giving to curry favor with a member of Congress is coming under increasing scrutiny, figuring in controversies associated with former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who will be leaving the House, and Rep. Alan Mollohan (W.Va.), who was forced to step aside as the ranking Democrat on the ethics panel.

Yesterday, the energy panel was advancing to the House floor the Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, backed by phone companies eager to get into the cable-television market. The measure is also known as the Barton-Rush bill, named after Rush and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the committee chairman.

Sheila Krumholz, the acting executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that tracks money in politics, told the Sun-Times, “It is a clear conflict for Representative Rush to weigh in on this bill. People can disagree about where to draw the line on contributions and abstaining from votes, but $1 million is definitely over that line.”

Rush and his wife, Carolyn, sit on the board of the Englewood center, which employs his son, Flynn.

The grant money, doled out in stages between 2001 and 2004, was to bankroll a computer and technology training center named the Bobby L. Rush Center for Community Technology. The Rush Center has yet to open.

The foundation delayed writing the final check for a year over concerns that the timeline on the project was slipping. A spokesman for Rebirth of Englewood said it expects the Rush Center to be operating within 12 months.

Rush, in a statement to the Sun-Times, said the real conflict stems from inequities in the telecommunications marketplace that shortchange the poor: “It is a systemic institutional disinvestment in [the] poor by corporate America in communities such as Englewood. We deserve an even playing field.”

In the statement, Rush, seeking to minimize the conflict claim, noted that the $1 million grant “is over half a decade old.”

Communications giant SBC Communications Inc. acquired AT&T last year and switched over to the AT&T name. AT&T spokeswoman Claudia Jones told the Sun-Times, “The people in Englewood should not suffer because they have a congressman on the Energy and Commerce Committee.”

The Barton-Rush measure gives phone companies a national television franchise and avoids the need to get approval from 30,000 local governments, Jones said.

Rush argues that his bill will provide more competition and cheaper services for low-income communities. Critics of the Barton-Rush measure counter that the bill offers no guarantee that a company would go to the expense of building infrastructure to serve poor neighborhoods.

The ethics bill the House is scheduled to take up Thursday would force the public disclosure of a donation by a lobbyist to any entity named for a lawmaker or established by a member of Congress. The Senate bill, already passed, has a similar provision.

Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it