The Hillary loophole - Hillary Clinton

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Katherine Boo

Political spouses have a fight to work. They don't have a right to influence-peddle

Over the last few years, the House Sergeant at Arms' quarters may have edged out Brock Adams' office as the tawdriest place on the Hill. Forget the two and a half years of GAO warnings that the House bank had gone haywire. In addition to over-drafting $104,000 worth of his own checks, Sergeant at Arms Jack Russ, a protege of Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, had an aide arrested by the Capitol Hill police as a bachelor-party prank, allegedly ran a private business out of the House stationery room, possibly commanded his police force to wiretap members, and still found time to spread the rumor that Speaker Tom Foley was a closet case.

With opportunities like those, the tiny office's full-time auditor should have had a dream job-an expose a day. But oddly enough, the auditor didn't find much. Or maybe it's not all that odd. For most of 1990 and 1991, the job was filled by one Chris Downey, wife of Rostenkowski's Ways and Means colleague, Tom Downey. As her husband and 330 other members bounced checks, she took home about $35,000 a year as auditor until she was promoted to assistant to the Sergeant at Arms, at $40,000. Her professional experience immediately before coming to the House was operating a Capitol Hill pizza parlor.

Scholars of the bank fiasco should be forgiven for missing this low-profile auditor. She wasn't regularly listed in the staffing reports Congress is required by law to publish. Plus, explains the new Sergeant at Arms, Werner Brandt, she wasn't really an auditor. What did she do for her salary? Her chief duty was presiding over the refurbishment of The Macethe House's four-foot silver and ivory ceremo - House wives

You'd think Chicago representative William Lipinski would have enough to worry about, with his district's spiraling crime rate, crummy schools, and constituents' proclivity for burning crosses on front lawns. But a primary obsession of this Public Works and Transportation Committee member over the years has been securing federal funding for a rail line through southwest Chicago to Midway Airport. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), one of the chief beneficiaries of the project, has been appropriately grateful for his largesse: Shortly after the rail line received several hundred million dollars in federal startup funds, CTA awarded a one-year, $44,000 lobbying contract to Lipinski's wife.

Rose Marie Lipinski has, by all accounts, an IQ well into the three digits. Four years ago, she graduated from law school. But when CTA officials were asked what other virtues justified the creation of a new lobbying post in her honor, they came up with a rather limp rationale: She was a longtime resident of Chicago. In 1991, shortly after Ms. Lipinski was hired, the CTA received an additional $13.4 million in federal discretionary funds for the Midway airport project.

A working-woman issue? "I don't think anybody ever saw her do anything," laughs Natalia Delgado, a lawyer for Genner & Bloch and former CTA board member. "She never reported to the board on anything."

Minor scandal? Apparently not: Our definition of propriety has "evolved" along with wives-of's occupations. When Billy Carter was hired as a lobbyist by the Libyan government way back when, he became an instant symbol of incipient corruption. When The New York Times' credible account of Hillary Clinton's intervention in the Arkansas S&L deal was published, on the other hand, she became a symbol of unfair press persecution. Yet the breadth we give to wives-of's careers isn't just a fuzzy matter of public acceptance. In some cases the approval is official. Before Rose Marie Lipinski began lobbying her husband's committee on behalf of CTA, the Lipinskis queried the only institutional watchdog on these matters, the House ethics committee, and received its okay.

Our willingness to tolerate such questionable arrangements may stem from a strange confluence of old- and new-school thought on working women. To the dinosaurs, wives' jobs simply might not seem all that important; why not provide some harmless pastime for politics' gracious ladies? To the younger and more enlightened-many of whom are, or are married to, women who work-it's something else.

While Billy Carter's hiring by Libya couldn't possibly be construed as an equal rights issue, Rose Marie Lipinski's hiring can. "It's tricky business," says Congresswatch's Michael Waldman, explaining why his good-government group, like Common Cause, doesn't monitor spousal conflicts. No good liberal wants to impinge upon a woman's right to work.

Of course, conflict of interest is a notoriously slippery concept. As ethics committee members surely rationalized in the case of the Lipinskis, the extra income paid to the wife was likely to have no effect on the husband's voting: Lipinski has never been averse to pork (although his wife's contract might inspire him to work a little harder for the project). The harmony of interest is not so neat in the case of New York representative Norman Lent, ranking minority member of the Energy and Commerce committee. One of the hot issues before his committee is legislation affecting the Baby Bells, which are fighting newspapers and the cable industry over control of online data services. But those papers and cable operators aren't likely to get much help from Lent, whose wife lobbies for one of the biggest babies, NYNEX.