Republic Report’s Zaid Jilani contributed to this piece. Republic Report is here at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. today, where thousands of conservative activists and politicians are gathering to discuss politics and policy. We’re curious to find out what conservatives think about the issue of money in politics and were excited
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Just two hours ago, the House of Representatives passed the Stock Act, a measure to curb insider trading by lawmakers and some federal officials. The bill Congress voted on today, however, is different than the legislation that passed out of the Senate last week. Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) attached a strong transparency amendment
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For two years, I worked on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to Congressman Alan Grayson.  During this time, Congress passed major legislative initiatives, including most prominently health care reform and the Dodd-Frank package addressing the financial crisis.  Lobbyists infested the place, and a lot of the legislative activity was determined by the enormous sums
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Today, CPAC, the most important conservative convention of the year, opens with an address by Susan Eisenhower. Her grandfather President Dwight Eisenhower represented another era, when many in both parties rebuked special interests. President Eisenhower despised the growing corporate influence lobbies. In 1956, for example, Senator Lyndon Johnson and Congressman Sam Rayburn, backed by aggressive
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Yesterday, Congressman Fred Upton (R-MI) endorsed Mitt Romney for President, just ahead of the Michigan Republican primary. The announcement — which can be found here on the Romney website — omits an important, yet behind the scenes detail. The morning of the announcement, Ben Ginsberg, an attorney with the mega-lobbying firm Patton Boggs hosted a
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Mitt Romney, who has declared his admiration for for-profit colleges while receiving donations from for-profit education executives, boasts as a top education advisor a former George Bush official whose decisions in government helped unleash a decade of waste, fraud, and abuse by the for-profit college industry. Politico posted this invitation to a “POLICY ROUNDTABLE MEETING AND
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 Last week, Republic Report’s Lee Fang revealed that leading defense contractors, including the manufacturers of military drones, were lavishing Rep. Buck McKeon’s (R-CA) wife Patricia — who is running for a state legislature seat in California — with campaign donations. McKeon is Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and received $339,000 from the defense
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The Huffington Post’s Dave Jamieson reports on the case of a powerful lobby pushing to actually lower the minimum wage for a group of workers in Florida. The state senate’s tourism and commerce committee has written a bill, SPB 7210, that would allow restaurants to pay servers as low as $2.13 rather than the current
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