This week’s Washington Post series on earmarks concretizes what we all essentially knew: they’re still at it. “A U.S. senator from South Dakota helped add millions to a Pentagon program his wife evaluated as a contract employee. A Washington congressman boosted the budget of an environmental group that his son ran as executive director. A
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Today, Republic Report inaugurates a regular feature: Sell Out Of The Week. Our weekly feature will highlight lobbyists, politicians, and political operatives who have betrayed their values, and betrayed the public interest in pursuit of special interest money. Although we had a lobbyist in mind for our first week of this series, President Obama’s decision
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The ‘original Tea Partier,’ a gentlemen who has organized and participated in Tea Party rallies in colonial garb since early 2009, spoke to us at CPAC about the corrupting influence of lobbyists. We asked him what the founding fathers would think of all the K Street money flowing to politicians in exchange for earmarks and
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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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