Kerry raps K Street
But senator cozy with lobbyists, too
hillnews.com
January 14, 2004
By Alexander Bolton
To energize his flagging presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has taken recently to denouncing inside-the-Beltway corruption and influence peddling.
Last Friday in New Hampshire, he railed against the influence of lobbyists and pledged to shine light “on the secret deals in Washington.”
But during his Senate career, Kerry has helped special interests, even against the apparent interests of his own constituents. This helped cement ties with lobbyists who donated thousands of dollars to his campaign.
The outsider strategy worked four years ago when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Republican primary by running as a government reformer. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain also received big campaign contributions from lobbyists.
In 1999, Kerry weighed in on an obscure Coast Guard rulemaking process to the benefit of a foreign company represented by Cassidy & Associates, one of the highest grossing D.C. lobbying firms. Shortly after his intervention, he received close to $8,000 in bundled contributions from Cassidy employees.
Kerry’s Senate spokesman, Tony Wyche, said it was absurd to speculate that Kerry’s actions on behalf of the foreign cable manufacturer were in any way linked to lobbying activity or meant to solicit political donations.
But few if any were aware of his selective stance last Wednesday in New Hampshire, when Kerry — now running behind former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and retired Gen. Wesley Clark — sought to seize the mantle of reformer.
“Today big corporations and K Street lobbyists trip over themselves in Washington … to put their money into a particular party to gain access,” he said. “I’m running for president to replace this kind of crony capitalism. … I also am going to require that those lobbyists and those meetings with public officials ought to be a matter of official public record, so they are accountable to the American people and the actions that are taken as a consequence have the light ... the sunlight of democracy that’s shining in on them.”
Kerry reiterated his pledge during an attack on Clark, promising to “require every meeting with a lobbyist or any special interest deal inserted in a bill by a lobbyist be made public.”
“If you want a fighter with a 35-year track record of taking on the special interests, then John Kerry is your candidate,” said his campaign spokesman Mark Kornblau.
However, Kerry sent a letter in September 1999 to Rodney Slater, then secretary of transportation. At the time, Kerry was serving as the top Democrat on the Oceans, Fisheries and Coast Guard Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee.
“We are writing to voice our concerns with the U.S. Coast Guard’s efforts to alter the standards for marine electrical cable,” stated the letter on which Kerry was the lead signatory and in which three House Democrats joined him. “We urge you to reconsider our previous request to rescind the equivalency decision of UL 1309.”
The letter was in response to one Slater sent to Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern (Mass.), Barney Frank (Mass.) and Tim Holden (Pa.), informing them that he would not rescind a decision by the Coast Guard’s Office of Marine Safety, Security and Environmental Protection to expand the types of electrical cables allowed in ships.
Jim Ruggieri, a Coast Guard engineer who issued the regulatory ruling that Kerry and his fellow lawmakers tried to overturn, said members of Congress almost never intervene on such obscure rulemaking.
Ruggieri altered the rule for shipboard cables in accordance with a well-established policy that allowed for “equivalency decisions” whereby standard-setters could make swift changes outside the formal rulemaking process to reflect rapid changes in technology. Ruggieri ruled at the time that there was no technical basis for the standard, which denied certain cables access to the marketplace.
The standards committee that set the benchmark that Ruggeri overturned was disbanded after its members were accused of colluding with an interested party.
The change sought by the lawmakers, which would have limited the types of cables allowed in U.S. ships and would have thereby benefited Draka Holdings NV, a Netherlands-based cable manufacturer, to the detriment of several U.S. companies.
One of those companies, Rockbestos Surprenant Cable Corp., was a constituent of Kerry’s based in Clinton, Mass. Rockbestos pleaded with the Coast Guard in a January 1999 letter not to exclude its cables manufactured to the UL 1309 standard.
To push its case on the Hill, Draka hired Cassidy & Associates through its U.S. subsidiary, paying the firm close to $350,000 between July 1998 and the end of 2000.
Two months after Kerry sent the letter to Slater, Cassidy employees gave Kerry’s Senate campaign 14 checks totaling $7,250, close to the entire amount the campaign would receive during the 2000 election cycle from Cassidy employees.
The total exceeded the combined total of contributions Kerry received from Cassidy employees during the previous three election cycles.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics of that case,” said Ruggieri, who signed a confidentiality agreement after leaving the Coast Guard. “However, the public information records you provided me — FEC records showing multiple contributions by Cassidy on the same day and Kerry’s contradictory statement deploring undue influence via lobbyists — speak for themselves.”
At different times, Draka and Cassidy employees met with a member of Kerry’s staff, Steve Kozak, a fellow from the National Oceanic and Atmospherics Administration, as well as McGovern.
Blaine Hollis, a Coast Guard commander who met with Cassidy and Draka lobbyists and McGovern, provided a detailed account of the session to his agency colleagues.
An aide to Kerry said his boss’s intervention helped a U.S.-based Draka subsidiary,
BIW, which employed over 200 employees, many of whom lived in Massachusetts.
But other Massachusetts companies said they would have been hurt if the Kerry intervention had succeeded.
Speaking of a type of cable that would have been excluded if Kerry had prevailed, Donald Reed, vice president of Rockbestos, said, “This product is a very significant portion of our product manufacture, and it is therefore very important to have this standard approved by the Coast Guard.”
The Coast Guard eventually adopted Ruggieri’s rule change. |
