Good help isn't hard to find - when Congress members use public employees for their personal campaigns

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1993 by Frank Greve

You don't have taxpayer-subsidized workers to helps you keep your job. So why should your congressman?

When Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was indicted last month for using state employees to make campaign fund-raising calls and using a state computer to keep track of contributions, there had to be a few quickened pulses on Capitol Hill. After all, Washington incumbents are accustomed to using their offices for partisan work.

Consider:

* Two weeks before last fall's election, retiring Rep. Glenn Anderson dispatched five congressional aides to California where they campaigned for Anderson's chosen successor, Evan Braude, his stepson, at taxpayers' expense.

* Rep. Les AuCoin, running hard for Oregon's Senate seat, flew eight Hill aides out last fall for a total of 189 days. Taxpayers paid their salaries and airfares because they frequently worked days in AuCoin's district office, says former aide Bob Crane. Nights, weekends, vacations, and comp time they spent campaigning for AuCoin.

* Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Government Operations Committee that investigates federal waste, out-did them both, enlisting 14 members of his staff in one way or another in his Detroit reelection campaign. Among the aides' taxpayer-paid "official representational duties" was handing out thousands of Conyers' press releases at shopping centers and churches shortly before election day.

Overall, at least 70 incumbents summoned two or more federally-paid Washington aides to their districts late in their campaigns, House expense records indicate. Typically, lawmakers claimed, "official business" required their aides' presence. Just as typically, that business ended on election day. Aides who are skilled political fighters and whose futures are riding on their bosses' reelection are one big reason that incumbents won 93 percent of the races they entered last fall, down just slightly from their 95 percent rate in the eighties. "They're part of the permanent campaign, right along with franking. It's a terrible, terrible abuse," says Sara Fritz, a Los Angeles Times political finance analyst and co-author of The Handbook of Campaign Spending.

Most folks don't get publicly-funded assistants to help them keep their jobs, and it's unclear why congressmen should be an exception. But pending campaign reforms do not address campaigning by aides or a second widespread abuse among incumbents seeking reelection: the use of franked mail as a campaign tool. Fund raising aside, those are the two key advantages most frequently exploited by incumbents in their campaigns. The only restraints on incumbent House campaigners - who are generally considered more audacious than their Senate counterparts - is the tough-sounding but toothless House Ethics Manual.

The 493-page guide bars incumbents from using government funds to campaign. But there's a catch: Almost anything is admissable when it's billed as "constituent service." The manual also permits aides to campaign only on their own time. But there's a catch here, too: Lawmakers decide when the workday is done, when aides have earned comp time, and when they can take vacations.

"After Congress lets out in mid-October, it's amazing how many staffers show up in the district hammering in yard signs," says J. Kevin Broughton, a former press aide to Rep. Bob McEwen of Ohio, a member who lost last fall. "It's wrong, but incumbents have an incredible, unfair advantage." Among Broughton's most important assignments last summer, he recalls, was creating a newsletter lauding the boss, who faced a tough primary battle. "It was nothing but glorifying the incumbent, but we disguised it as informing constituents and sent out hundreds of thousands of copies as franked mail," says Broughton.

The ethics manual notes that incumbents cannot use their frank for mass mailings within 60 days of a primary or general election. But that doesn't curb campaigners' use of the frank so much as channel it. In the final week before the deadline last year, pallets of "official communications" awaiting pick-up by postal workers made the corridors outside the House printer virtually impassable. Elections just after redistricting, like the last one, also lay bare the timeless ruse that franked mass mailings are non-political communications with constituents. Inevitably, these letters were mailed not to constituents who elected the member, but to those in the new district whom lawmakers sought to impress. That's fine by the obliging House Ethics committee, so long as some portion of the old district is included in the new district.

Frank Incensed

Most aides are mum or vague about campaign work, but when McEwen's troops vacated their House office, they left some tell-tale clues behind on the office computer. The documents disclosed by his successor, Ted Strickland, began to show how aides helped McEwen without ever leaving the federal payroll.

A press release, for example, begins: "'Ted Strickland's got a lot of nerve,' campaign manager Barbara Briggs said after more bogus charges from the perennial candidate." Briggs' title and her tirade may have made her sound like a campaign staffer, but House financial records indicate that she was on McEwen's congressional payroll at the time, earning $43,000.