By Carolyn Betts, Esq.
WHAT CONGRESS IS GOOD FOR THESE DAYS
Not much, it seems, given that we have what essentially amounts to a single-party system (i.e., the corporatist party). However, the Bush Administration needs Congress’s imprimatur in order to carry out the proposed highway robbery in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (better known as the “$700 billion bail-out”). Yesterday, Congress voted the wishes of the American people for a change. My suggestion is that each of us finds out how our congressional representative voted (see the vote count, which we will be posting elsewhere on the blog from time to time as available) and acts accordingly. I called my congresswoman this morning with a “thank you, hang in there and I’m sending a contribution because I believe in voting with my money” message. Catherine reports she is sending a $100 campaign contribution to her congresswoman. If your congressional representative was a sell-out to the corporadoes, perhaps an “I’m sending a campaign contribution to your opponent” message would be a good idea. Money talks.
Having lived and worked in Washington, DC for over 16 years, I can assure you that if the lines to the Capitol are flooded with calls from furious constituents (or, on the other hand, praise and campaign contributions), somebody notices. Do you believe the media when they tell you the Republicans who voted against bail-out bill were just teaching Nancy Pelosi a lesson because she was mean to them?
CONTACTING YOUR CONGRESSPERSON
In every Congressional office there is at least one “staffer” who tracks constituent mail and telephone calls and keeps a tally of the pro and con reactions of constituents to pending legislation. At any one time, at least the staffer whose subject matter area is covered, and probably the congressman or senator, knows this number. If you are lucky, your representative is a sponsor of legislation or chairman or ranking member of a committee that will report out legislation. The “ranking” member of a committee is the top member in the minority party and the chairman, of course, is the top member of the majority party. Ordinarily, every member of the committee, however, will get to vote on the terms of the legislation and may have some control over the drafting. Majority party members have more power, of course. Members of other committees generally will only get to vote “yes” or “no” on the legislation in the form in which it is voted out of committee (although the legislation is still subject to change until the final bill is passed by both houses). There may be another chance for changes if, as is usually the case, differences between the versions passed by the Senate and House must be resolved in the Conference Committee. But who knows how the House and Senate will be short-circuiting the usual process in an attempt to cram down the bail-out before anyone has a chance read it, digest it and fully comprehend the potential costs and other consequences.
You want to use your time and energy wisely. To that end, I’ve put together a ranking, based on my experience around Capitol Hill, setting forth my best guess as to the order of importance of a single communication received by a congressional, from most effective to least effective in getting your point across. But remember, when time is of the essence, quicker is better than perfect. Excellence is the enemy of the good.
(1) Anything from a significant campaign donor, whether or not a constituent
(2) Anything from a constituent campaign donor or campaign worker
(3) Personalized, handwritten letter (not a rant and rave by an apparent lunatic) from a constituent, particularly a constituent identified as a member of a big group (e.g., union member)
(4) Telephone call to the local office from a constituent (or anyone from the correct telephone area code or exchange)
(5) Telephone call to the Washington office from a constituent
(6) Personalized email from a constituent (i.e., anyone who provides a name and address with the correct zip code)
(7) Form letter from a constituent
(8) Email campaign communication (i.e., form email or online petition) from a constituent
(9) Any communication from a non-constituent, non-donor
The reason your communication is so important is that Members of Congress pay good money to marketing firms who tell them that every constituent who calls in or writes represents X% of the representative’s constituency. The more trouble you go to in taking action (i.e., writing a personal letter versus signing a pre-printed form letter or petition), the higher is the “X” factor. Beware, however, that the most you can expect is that your communication will be a check mark in the “yes” or “no” column on a pending vote—so make sure it’s clear which column the staffer who reads/hears your communication should check. If you must engage in a more complex analysis involving shades of gray, do it up front, with brevity, as in “I favor this part of the bill” and “Please vote against that part of the bill.”
HOW DO YOU SEND AN EMAIL TO YOUR REPRESENTATIVES?
Go to www.house.gov or www.senate.gov, find your state, select the representative you want to contact, go to the contact page and enter your name, address and zip code. If you do not enter a zip code that is in the member’s district, you cannot send an email through this facility. This takes less than five minutes unless you write a very thoughtful email. Do it now. The rest of this article is most useful if you want to go beyond that.
IMPORTANCE OF SPONSORING COMMITTEE
The benefit of having a representative on the sponsoring committee of legislation is that that person will have staffers who know the subject matter and likely are involved in bill drafting. The member also will have a direct line to the staffers on the committee itself, usually attorneys, who do the drafting (or cut and paste the words given them from lobbyists). If you have some clout or represent a constituent group of importance to the member, you might get a meeting with a staffer in the local office. Given that the bail-out bill is being ram-rodded through Congress, however, I think it’s safe to assume that it is unlikely that anyone other than representatives of huge special interest groups will get face time with staffers. These subject matter committees, however, do not have control over the purse, which is a matter for the appropriations committees and, thus, do not report out the bail-out portion of the bail-out bill. They would be responsible for other non-monetary statutory provisions. Keep in mind that there as been a lot of talk about including other matters in the bail-out legislation, for example, taxation of securities market trades, amending the bankruptcy laws to allow bankruptcy judges to “jam down” the loans and increasing oversight. All these matters implicate many committees in addition to those working on the funding portion of the bail-out bill.
SUBJECT MATTER JURISDICTION OVER MAJOR NON-FUNDING PROVISIONS
In the case of the bail-out bill, the House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Barney Frank, and specifically its Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises and/or Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit appear to have subject matter jurisdiction over the bail-out bill. One could only hope that the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy, Trade, and Technology are also involved. This legislation appears to be at the committee rather than subcommittee level at this point, however. You can see the committee’s latest statements and drafts of the House version of the bill (H.R. 3997) and summaries and section-by-section summaries at http://financialservices.house.gov/. A word to the wise: watch out for summaries. The current bail-out summary, for example, doesn’t define what “troubled assets” are. Go here to send an email message to this committee: The current version at this writing is the House amendment to the “amendment of the Senate to the amendment of the House to the amendment of the Senate” of the original bill, and this is only the beginning. Go here http://financialservices.house.gov/who.html to see a list of the many members of this committee.
In the Senate, the name of the analogous committee is the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, chaired by Chris Dodd of Connecticut. The committee home page with current Senate version of the bill, a summary and a section-by-section summary can be accessed here: http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?fuseaction=Home.Home. Go here to contact the committee: http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Form. Go here to see a list of members of this committee: http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Information.Membership.
FINER POINTS ON APPROPRIATIONS
In theory, Congress can only appropriate funds within the federal debt limit. The bill would raise the debt limit to $11.315 trillion. There is also a law affectionately referred to on the Hill as “PAYGO” [click here for Wikipedia’s explanation of PAYGO], which provides that Congress cannot pass a law involving US credit unless it can “find” funds to cover the potential liability. The Congressional Budget Office will “score” the bail-out bill and determine what is the potential liability under agreed assumptions. Reading CBO’s explanation of the costs of a given version of the bill is most informative [see CBO’s letter to Barney Frank , for example, in which we are told that $700 billion is the amount that may be outstanding at any one time]. So, if you are into that sort of thing, you may be interested to see how CBO scores different versions of the bill and what assumptions are used. The devil is in the details, as they say. Sometimes making absurd assumptions is the only way the guys on the Hill can make the numbers work for PAYGO. CBO can be expected to be a real thorn in the side of the Administration in getting this bill passed. Much to the consternation of Paulson and his tribe, who fought for off-balance-sheet treatment, CBO has already declared this to be an on-balance-sheet item.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is chaired by Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Go here to see this committee’s web page. Go here to see its members. The House Appropriations Committee is chaired by Dave Obey of Wisconsin. Go here to see this committee’s web page and go here to see its members. At this writing, there is no draft of a bail-out bill on the Appropriations Committee site, so we are left to assume that the substantive committee (Financial Services) is taking the lead and that the appropriations bill would follow if the House and Senate pass the substantive bill.
The Financial Services Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations in the House has jurisdiction over funding of the US Treasury. In the Senate, the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee (chaired by Dick Durban of Illinois) would have jurisdiction. Whether subcommittee membership is relevant in this highly visible, highly political piece of legislation is anybody’s guess.
HOW CAN YOU GET A COPY OF PENDING LEGISLATION?
The Library of Congress’s “THOMAS” webpage for tracking of pending legislation is at http://thomas.loc.gov/. Frankly, I find this page difficult to use if I don’t know the exact name or number of a bill. However, this is the definitive source and is where I would look for the language of the conference committee bills and the final legislation when it is enacted. There will be side-by-side comparisons of the House and Senate versions of the bill, assuming they are different. In the meantime, an easier way to find the current version(s) of the bail-out bill is to go on the web pages of the appropriate committees. Remember, there should be both a House version and a Senate version of at least two bills: the appropriations bill and the bill with the substantive authorizations.
HOW I KNOW THESE THINGS
I worked and lived in the DC area for about 16 years. I lived on Capitol Hill for six years and belonged to a church six blocks from the US Capitol, where I got to know a lot of Congressional staffers and lobbyists. I’m probably one of the few people who has lived next door to two Members of Congress (they were married to each other). I lobbied and testified before committees of the House and Senate in connection with an age discrimination bill that arose out of a seminal US Supreme Court case in which my mother was the plaintiff. The bill ultimately was adopted as the Older Workers Benefit Act of 1990. A subsidiary of the law firm at which I was an associate and then partner lobbied Congress on housing-related issues. I also worked a lead financial advisor to the Federal Housing Administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and in that capacity, have worked with the financial and budgetary ramifications of a various budget, appropriation and legislative proposals. What I know only scratches the surface, but I offer it in hopes that you will use this as a jumping-off place.