March 29, 2006
Senate Passes Pared-Down Lobbying Bill
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, NY TIMES

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WASHINGTON, March 29 - The Senate today overwhelmingly passed its first lobbying restrictions in 11 years, but the measure was so pared down that some of the biggest advocates for tightening the rules were still not satisfied.

The bill, approved by a vote of 90 to 8, came coincidentally on the same day that the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to prison in Miami in a case unrelated to lobbying.

The measure would bar lobbyists from giving gifts and meals to lawmakers and would restrict but not abolish earmarks, the special interest projects that lawmakers sometimes quietly insert into spending bills at the behest of lobbyists and other constituencies.

But the lopsided vote does not necessarily signal that the bill will soon become reality, since the House must also act, and there are differences between the chambers.

The Senate measure toughens disclosure requirements for lobbyists and requires lawmakers to obtain advance approval for the private trips that were a central feature of the Abramoff scandal. But it does not rein in lawmakers' use of corporate jets, and it fell far short of the sweeping changes, including a ban on privately financed travel, that some lawmakers advocated in January after a former Republican congressman admitted to taking bribes and Mr. Abramoff cut a deal with federal prosecutors.

"It's very, very weak," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Mr. McCain predicted that there would be more indictments growing out of the investigation into political corruption, and said that such a development would lead Congress to revisit the issue again.

Mr. McCain was one of the eight who voted against the bill. The others were Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, all Republicans, and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barack Obama of Illinois, Democrats.

Mr. Coburn, Mr Obama and Mr. Feingold had joined Mr. McCain in condemning the bill as too weak.Earlier, the Senate voted, 68 to 30, against an amendment offered by Senator Feingold, that would have extended the ban on gifts and meals to include people working at companies hiring lobbyists.

The bill also does little to break the link between lobbyists and lawmakers' money-raising machines, because senators decided those issues related to campaign finance, not lobbying. As a result, it steers clear entirely of regulating lobbyists who double as fund-raisers, devoting their spare time to running the political action committees of the same lawmakers they hope to influence.

Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who was a major architect of the bill, lamented that it does not address "true meaningful campaign finance reform that breaks the link between the legislative favor-seekers and the free flow of special interest private money." He added, "That would be a much more significant."

The House is expected to take up lobbying restrictions next week. With public approval ratings of Congress at historic lows, Republican leaders in both chambers have been eager to pass some kind of bill well before the November elections, to demonstrate to voters that they are serious about cleaning up business in the Capitol.

But some in tough re-election fights wondered aloud if the measure would help.

"I don't know," said Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, who is facing a tough re-election battle against a Democratic congressman, Representative Sherrod Brown. "People are not really talking to me directly about lobbying. I think they're concerned about some of the, quote, scandal, but I don't have anybody come up to me and say there's a lobbying problem. It doesn't get that specific."

David Stout contributed reporting for this article.

Justice DeLayed
From the Archives
In this November 2004 article, Lou Dubose detailed how Tom DeLay spun one of Washington's most powerful fundraising networks.
Lou Dubose
November/December 2004 Issue

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House Majority leader Tom DeLay is not a physically imposing man. "Five-foot-seven if he's wearing high heels," in the words of Fort Bend County sheriff Milton Wright, whom DeLay once spent $70,000 to defeat in an election because the sheriff had hired a woman whose husband had sued DeLay. Yet in the decade since Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the former exterminator from suburban Houston has achieved the political stature of the historical giants in Statuary Hall outside his Capitol office. He did it on his own, consolidating his political power and using it with a remarkable sense of purpose.

DeLay's rapid ascent has been the result of more than hard work and a keen understanding of politics. He became majority whip and then majority leader by raising massive sums of money -- a total of $12.6 million between 2000 and 2002 alone -- and by strategically spending it on Republican candidates, in effect buying the loyalty of his colleagues. He has domesticated K Street, demanding loyalty and contributions from lobbyists in return for favorable treatment. And all along the way, he has strained, reinterpreted, and sometimes simply side-stepped ethics regulations in Washington and even in his home state of Texas, which has some of the nation's loosest campaign finance laws.

Now, three separate sets of state and federal investigators are looking into whether DeLay and his associates may have finally crossed the line. They are trying to determine how the majority leader's interlocking political action committees (PACs) work in concert with his protégés in the lobbying industry -- a fundraising apparatus the Washington press corps refers to as "DeLay Inc." They are also considering allegations that this elaborate operation broke state and federal laws -- allegations that have prompted DeLay to hire criminal defense attorneys and raise money for a legal defense fund.

Two civil suits filed in Austin allege that DeLay's Texas political action committee raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through illegal means. A parallel criminal investigation by Austin's district attorney, Ronnie Earle, has already led to the indictment of DeLay's top Texas fundraisers -- and Earle is not ruling out the possibility that DeLay himself could be a target of the investigation. And the Senate Indian Affairs Committee has subpoenaed records on two DeLay associates who used their access to "the Leader" to secure $45 million in lobbying and consulting fees from four Indian tribes. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., is also investigating those fees.

By itself, none of the inquiries is an immediate threat to DeLay's power as majority leader. But together, they threaten to expose -- and perhaps even unravel -- the machine he has been building since first getting elected to Congress in 1984.

The muscular tactics that earned DeLay the nickname "the Hammer" have gained the fear and respect of his Republican colleagues. He won his first top leadership position by defeating Newt Gingrich's candidate for majority whip in 1994. After Gingrich resigned as speaker four years later, DeLay used the political machine he had created to make Dennis Hastert, his deputy whip, the only viable candidate in the race. In 2002 DeLay was elected majority leader without a whisper of challenge.

Today DeLay controls a leadership PAC substantially larger than the PAC that Speaker Hastert operates. He directs more campaign money to Republican candidates than does Hastert. He has such firm control of K Street that many lobbying firms won't fill important positions without consulting his office.

Nor is DeLay afraid to openly defy the Bush administration. Since being elected majority leader, he has killed the Bush-backed energy bill because it didn't contain his pet provision; flown to Israel to criticize the president's Middle East policy for being too soft on the Palestinians; and told reporters that the low-income tax credit Bush ordered the Republican Congress to get "to my desk" in 2003 "ain't going to happen." (It didn't.) He can kill or rescue legislation, as he demonstrated when he became personally involved in "whipping" the $400 billion Medicare prescription drug bill last November. "I am the federal government!" DeLay told a restaurant manager last year, according to the Washington Post, when he was asked to put out his cigar to comply with federal law. It's easy to see why he might think so.

As his stature has increased, DeLay's tactics have grown bolder and more aggressive -- and therein may lie the seeds of his present troubles. Buried in the exhibits supporting the lawsuit filed against him in Austin is a letter that encapsulates the civil and criminal investigations threatening him. It's addressed to a Texas-based political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), but the salutation reads "Dear Congressman DeLay." The letter is from the Williams corporation, a natural gas and pipeline company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It says:

On behalf of the Williams Companies, Inc., I am pleased to forward our contribution of $25,000 for the TRMPAC that we pledged at the June 2, 2002 fundraiser.
With best wishes.
Sincerely,
Deborah B. Lawrence
Vice President for Government Affairs
Enclosure: check $25,000

It's difficult to violate Texas campaign finance law. Any individual can contribute any amount to any legislative candidate, as long as the contributions are properly disclosed. It's the system that George W. Bush and Tom DeLay have said they would like to institute at the federal level (though Bush hasn't mentioned it much since the 2000 presidential campaign).

One of very few things you cannot do under Texas campaign finance law, however, is accept a corporate donation to be used in a political campaign, with a narrow exemption for administrative expenses. In September, an Austin grand jury indicted Williams and seven other companies for making illegal contributions to TRMPAC; three DeLay fundraisers, including a key political aide, were also indicted.

The evidence Earle's investigators presented to the grand jury isn't public, but documents connected with the civil suits filed against TRMPAC lay out some of the details of the case. A deposition in one of the suits features accounts of turf disputes between TRMPAC's fundraisers in Texas and Washington, both of whom try to claim credit for corporate donations; letters and testimony in the case also reveal that the fundraisers reassured donors that their contributions were "nondisclosable." All in all, argues Earle, the evidence suggests "an illegal movement to basically steal an election by using illegal secret corporate donations to political campaigns."

Earle is referring to a watershed moment in Texas politics -- the 2002 election in which the state House of Representatives, after a carefully targeted campaign devised by DeLay and his associates, swung to the GOP. The new majority immediately proceeded to draw a new congressional district map designed to give DeLay half a dozen more Republican seats in Congress.

To engineer this fundamental shift in the state's political landscape, DeLay and one of his top aides, Jim Ellis, created a brand-new political action committee -- TRMPAC ("trim-pac"). Its initial contributions were unremarkable -- $50,000 from DeLay's leadership PAC, and $25,000 each from a Texas company and two businessmen including Bob Perry, the Houston home-builder who more recently underwrote the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack ads. But then, aware that past attempts to take control of the state House using only individual donations had come up short, TRMPAC's fundraisers went corporate. In one particularly productive day, September 9, 2002, a Republican state representative and a TRMPAC official visited six corporate offices and garnered pledges for contributions to the committee or its targeted candidates that included $22,000 from the Compass Bank and $25,000 from Reliant Energy. The fundraisers' schedule, obtained by the Texas Observer, includes an hour-by-hour account of the trip -- along with notes explaining the political favors the donors wanted.

The committee spent $1.4 million on 21 races, putting Republicans in control of the House for the first time in 130 years, and toppling the Democratic speaker who stood in the way of an off-year redistricting bill. DeLay personally worked on the maps, creating districts designed to elect five to seven more Republicans to Congress. "I'm the majority leader," he told the Washington Post, "and I want more seats."

Republicans control every statewide office in Texas, so it appeared there was no one -- other than lawyers filing civil suits -- to challenge TRMPAC's use of corporate money. But the PAC's operatives had apparently overlooked Earle, a Democrat who has indicted a Democratic attorney general for bribery, indicted a Democratic speaker for failing to report illegal gifts, and successfully prosecuted Republicans for corruption.

Some of the issues Earle is investigating were first made public by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice, which noticed an interesting discrepancy between the group's federal and state filings: Roughly $600,000 of the $1.4 million TRMPAC spent in its campaign to change the majority in the Texas House had been reported to the IRS, but not to the state's ethics commission. As it happened, the federal records showed that about $600,000 of the group's money had come from corporate contributions, clearly identified as such by the PAC's fundraisers. Texas law allows PACs to use corporate money for administrative purposes -- that is, expenses that would be incurred by any business, such as office space, phone bills, and routine mailings. But phone banks to promote candidates and similar campaign expenses don't qualify.

Ellis, the DeLay aide who helped set up TRMPAC, told the Texas Observer that there was a simple explanation for the discrepancy -- the $600,000, nearly half of the committee's total expenses, had been used exclusively for administrative purposes and therefore didn't have to be reported to the state.

Ronnie Earle doesn't buy it. The 62-year-old district attorney is approaching the end of 27 years in office and has said he would have retired were it not for this case. Earle has the somber countenance of a hanging judge and a sense of humor as arid as his West Texas origins. Investigating the TRMPAC case has been slow, he says, because it's like "watching clowns climb out of a Volkswagen. There are a lot more in there than I imagined." In fact, in addition to the indictments for making and accepting illegal corporate contributions, Earle has won grand jury indictments against Ellis and TRMPAC executive director John Colyandro for an even more serious offense -- money laundering, a first-degree felony. In September 2002, TRMPAC sent the Republican National State Elections Committee $190,000 in what internal emails suggest was "soft," or corporate, money. Three weeks later, the committee sent a total of $190,000 to candidates in Texas House races. Earle maintains that the money was moved through the national committee to conceal its illegal corporate origins; TRMPAC officials have insisted that the corresponding amounts were mere coincidence. The PAC sent the money to the national party, Ellis told the Texas Observer, because "we like what the party does."

In the wake of the indictments, DeLay has maintained that he was not involved in running TRMPAC, and that he is not a target of the inquiry. Earle, for his part, will only say that the majority leader "is not a target if he hasn't committed a crime. Whoever is guilty of a crime will be a target."

But DeLay's troubles aren't limited to Texas. In February, Shawn Martin, an assiduous reporter who covers everything from plane crashes to parish council politics for the small daily in Lake Charles, Louisiana, broke a story that quickly got the majority leader's attention. Two of DeLay's associates, Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon, had extracted a staggering $31 million in lobbying and consulting fees from the 800-member Coushatta Indian tribe of Louisiana -- more than General Electric spent on all of its corporate lobbying efforts in the same three-year period. The pair also had lucrative contracts with tribes in other states, bringing its total for Indian lobbying up to $45 million in less than three years.

DeLay insists that he had nothing to do with Abramoff's activities. If anyone was using his name to make money lobbying, he told reporters at a press briefing in February, he wanted them to "stop it immediately."

But DeLay's attempt to distance himself from Abramoff is a hard sell. Until the Indian billing scandal broke, Abramoff had been one of the most successful lobbyists in Washington. He was also an original member of the "kitchen cabinet" DeLay formed when he was elected majority whip in 1994 -- a position that certainly did not hurt Abramoff's lobbying practice. A tribal leader who has been critical of the fees told the Washington Post that Abramoff frequently talked about his close contacts with DeLay when discussing how he could help the tribes.

Abramoff also was DeLay's go-to guy on Israel issues, and he was instrumental in DeLay's push to make sure U.S. labor law could not be used to cover sweatshop workers in the Marianas, an American protectorate in the South Pacific. (Clothing made in sweatshops in the Marianas can be labeled "Made in U.S.A.") At a 1997 dinner on the Marianas island of Saipan, according to the Dallas Observer, DeLay spoke of "one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington."

DeLay was also a mentor to Mike Scanlon, Abramoff's partner on the tribal contracts, who had been on DeLay's congressional staff and helped run the "war room" DeLay had set up to ensure Bill Clinton's impeachment. Some of the millions Abramoff and Scanlon collected from the tribes appear to have ended up in GOP accounts, most notably a $500,000 contribution that Scanlon's firm made to the national Republican Governors Association in 2002. Abramoff is a Bush Pioneer, having brought in $100,000 for the 2004 campaign. Tribal members have also said they were encouraged to donate to political campaigns and charities supported by Abramoff and Scanlon. One of the pair's clients, the Mississippi Choctaws, for example, pitched in $1,000 to TRMPAC.

The tribal lobbying scandal has provided a rare window into the inner workings of DeLay's fundraising system, especially the majority leader's "K Street strategy." In 1995, DeLay held meetings with lobbyists and showed them lists of their firms' political contributions. He pointed out that Republicans were now in power, and that lobbyists' political giving had better reflect their understanding of that fact. At the same time, DeLay and the House leadership effectively closed their doors to lobbyists who were former Democratic members of Congress and former Democratic staffers. (In 1998, DeLay pulled an intellectual property rights bill from the House floor in retaliation for the Electronic Industries Alliance's hiring of a former Democratic congressman as its director.)

Conservative congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute described the K Street strategy as "Tammany Hall all over again," a system in which even second-tier lobbyists earning $250,000 or less were vetted by the Republican leadership, and then were expected to contribute heavily to Republican candidates. The operation has never before been opened to public view, but the subpoenas in the Abramoff/Scanlon case are beginning to crack open one of Washington's most powerful networks.

Senator John McCain, who holds DeLay in low regard, is now eight months into an inquiry at the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, where he has an investigator working full time on Abramoff and Scanlon. A grand jury in Washington is also looking at evidence related to Abramoff and Scanlon's billing of the Indian tribes and filing subpoenas for the records of businesses and tribes connected to the two lobbyists. Even the moribund House ethics committee has been forced to consider complaints against DeLay, including one that focuses on a $25,000 contribution to TRMPAC from a Kansas utility. Internal company emails indicate that the contribution was made so the utility could "get a seat at the table" in negotiations over the federal energy bill. The committee, 4 of whose 10 members have received contributions from DeLay's PAC, was expected to dismiss that complaint; a more serious problem for DeLay could arise from allegations that a $100,000 bribe was offered to a Republican congressman on the House floor in an attempt to swing his vote on the Medicare bill last November. "That probably didn't happen without the backing of the leadership," says a source familiar with the probe.

Late last year, Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley was reminiscing about the fall of another seemingly invincible congressional figure -- his former boss, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was ousted as House speaker in 1998 not because of any single issue, Blankley said, but because he had been involved in too many fights and had faced too many allegations large and small, until the Beltway cognoscenti knew his power had been badly undermined.

Facing a broad, bipartisan assault on his political machine, and the risk that the paper trail could lead to his office, DeLay may find himself in a similar position. "These guys always skate too close to the edge," says Fred Wertheimer, a veteran campaign finance reform advocate who has lodged complaints against DeLay with Congress and the IRS regarding allegations that DeLay set up a charity to cultivate political influence. "Ultimately, they all fall."

Lou Dubose is the former editor of the Texas Observer, where he followed the career of George W. Bush. He has cowritten two Bush books with Molly Ivins, Shrub and Bushwhacked; he is the coauthor, with Jan Reid, of the just-published The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress.

March 30, 2006
Lobbyist in Congress Furor Is Sentenced in Florida Case
By PHILIP SHENON, NY TIMES

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MIAMI, March 29 - Jack Abramoff, the former superlobbyist at the center of a major corruption investigation in Washington involving members of Congress, was sentenced on Wednesday to 5 years and 10 months in prison on related fraud changes in Florida.

The judge agreed to the prison term, the minimum possible under sentencing guidelines, after prosecutors praised Mr. Abramoff for his cooperation in the Washington inquiry, which centers on accusations that he had tried to bribe public officials, including Republican lawmakers.

In Florida, the case involved charges that Mr. Abramoff and a business partner had defrauded lenders in a gambling cruise-ship line that they bought in 2000 for $147.5 million. Mr. Abramoff still faces sentencing in Washington, where he pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy.

"In the past two years, I have started the process of becoming a new man," Mr. Abramoff said in a brief appearance before Judge Paul C. Huck of Federal District Court here. "As you can imagine, this day is incredibly painful for my family, my friends and me."

Wearing a gray double-breasted suit and speaking in a grave tone, Mr. Abramoff said he was "profoundly remorseful" for his crimes.

For several minutes before the hearing, Mr. Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew whose lawyers have suggested that he will seek confinement in a prison where he can maintain a strict kosher diet and observe other religious requirements, closed his eyes and appeared to pray, his upper body moving rhythmically back and forth.

Adam Kidan, his former business partner, was sentenced at the hearing to the same prison term as Mr. Abramoff. The two men have agreed to make a total of $20.7 million in restitution as a result of the fraud here, which involved faking documents to get a $60 million loan to buy the SunCruz fleet of gambling ships.

A lingering mystery in the Florida case is why the former owner of SunCruz, Konstantinos Boulis, also known as Gus, was gunned down in a gangland-style ambush in February 2001 in the midst of an angry post-sale dispute with the company's new buyers.

Three men were charged last year in the killing, including one linked to the Gambino crime family. All three had financial links to Mr. Kidan. Both Mr. Kidan and Mr. Abramoff have denied any involvement in Mr. Boulis's death.

Federal prosecutors offered no details about the cooperation they had received from Mr. Abramoff since the plea agreement with the Justice Department was announced in January. But their comments on Wednesday should deepen the concern in Washington among lawmakers and others who are under scrutiny over their ties to the lobbyist.

"I've spent a lot of time with both men," said Lawrence D. LaVecchio, an assistant United States attorney in Miami in the case, referring to Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Kidan. "They are both trying to atone."

Mr. LaVecchio said he was planning to ask Judge Huck to delay confinement of Mr. Abramoff for at least six months, allowing prosecutors in Washington to continue debriefing him outside of prison. The judge granted only 90 days' delay but suggested that he was open to another postponement at the request of the Justice Department.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, Mr. Abramoff could have received up to seven years and three months in prison for his crimes here. He faces up to 11 years in prison as a result of his plea accord in the Washington case. Under his agreement with the Justice Department, Mr. Abramoff will be allowed to serve any prison terms concurrently. His overall prison time could be cut at the request of prosecutors.

After the hearing Wednesday, Mr. Abramoff's lawyers, Neal R. Sonnett in Miami and Abbe D. Lowell in Washington, said in a joint statement that "today's sentencing is another step in Mr. Abramoff's sincere commitment to accept responsibility for his actions."

"He will continue to work hard to fully cooperate with the Department of Justice and law enforcement agencies and to make restitution to all victims," they said. "This is the course he set out many months ago and the course he intends to follow and complete no matter how long it takes."

In the Washington case, Mr. Abramoff is accused with another former business partner, Michael Scanlon, of conspiring to provide illegal gifts to members of Congress in exchange for legislation and other actions.

There are clear links between the two investigations. In the Florida case, Mr. Abramoff has acknowledged that he asked that Representative Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican who recently stepped down as chairman of the House Administration Committee, to enter statements in the Congressional Record praising Mr. Kidan and condemning Mr. Boulis over the SunCruz sale. Mr. Ney, who went on a lavish golfing holiday in Scotland that was arranged by Mr. Abramoff, has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury in Washington and has denied wrongdoing, saying he was duped by Mr. Abramoff.

EDITORIAL DESK
The Right's Man
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES, Published: March 13, 2006

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It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.
Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, 'I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us.'

But now -- at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger -- Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of 'rogue state rollback,' anticipating the 'Bush doctrine' of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. 'If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006,' he wrote last year, 'then we must increase our numbers there.' He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell 'agents of intolerance,' met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken 'the appropriate steps under state law' to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo. President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.

He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around that legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.

It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign George W. Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, 'Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.'

NATIONAL DESK
Straw Poll Loses McCain, Its Star
By ADAM NAGOURNEY, NY TIMES, March 11, 2006

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MEMPHIS, March 10 - It was advertised as the great defining event of a campaign that has not really begun.
Nearly 2,000 Republicans gathered here to listen to six potential presidential candidates and then pick their favorite in a straw poll on Saturday. No matter that it is 22 months until a single Republican votes: the Southern Republican Leadership Conference quickly turned into a swirling political circus, complete with candidates, senators, governors, consultants and television crews tromping through the ornate lobby of the Peabody Hotel.

But on Friday, Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the party's leading prospective presidential candidates, announced he would instruct his supporters not to vote for him and to instead write in the name of President Bush, as a show of support.

The move left supporters of Mr. McCain's main rival -- Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, who had been looking for a big hometown win -- sputtering. And it greatly diminished the importance of an event that was, truth be told, of debatable significance in the first place.

'Straw polls are entertaining, my friends, even extremely early ones,' Mr. McCain said in remarks that were prepared for delivery Friday night and that aides distributed with undisguised glee. 'But I think we have bigger things to worry about. So if any friends here are voting for me, please don't. Just write in President Bush's name. For the next three years, with the country at war, he's our president, and the only one who must have our support today.'

Mr. Frist's advisers and the poll organizer suggested that Mr. McCain was acting out fear that he was heading for a drubbing. Asked if Mr. Frist would now do the same thing as Mr. McCain did, an adviser, Jim Dyke, responded in an e-mail message: 'Panic about the outcome?'

Mr. McCain's maneuver reverberated as far away as Washington, where it inspired gallows humor among embattled Bush administration officials, who began contemplating an outcome where, write-in or not, a sitting president is defeated by Mr. Frist on Saturday night.

March 11, 2006
Push to Tighten Lobbying Rules Loses Strength
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, NY TIMES

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WASHINGTON, March 10 - The drive for a tighter lobbying law, just two months ago a major priority on Capitol Hill, is losing momentum, a victim of shifting political interests, infighting among House Republicans and a growing sense among lawmakers of both parties that wholesale change may not be needed after all.

In the Senate, debate on a lobbying bill was derailed this week by the fracas over port security, and it is unclear when the measure will return. A chief architect of the legislation, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said Friday that the bill was "way off track" and that she feared its chances had been jeopardized.

"People have turned to other issues," Ms. Collins said in a telephone interview from Maine. "This was our window, and I'm afraid it will be slammed shut."

In the House, Representative David Dreier of California, the Republicans' point man on lobbying legislation, said reaching consensus on what the bill should include had been more difficult than he had expected.

In January, shortly after the lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges, Mr. Dreier and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert called for tough restrictions, including a ban on gifts, meals and privately financed travel. They said their aim was to have legislation drafted by February. But the new majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, is not keen on the travel ban, and there is still no legislation.

"We have not moved as expeditiously as we would have liked," Mr. Dreier said in an interview. "There is a wide range of views. There are still people who feel very strongly about the need to make some changes, and there are people who are not as enthused."

Members of both parties said that they still expected some kind of lobbying legislation to be passed this year but that it might be narrower than many advocates of tighter rules first called for.

The initial fervor for legislation was fueled by the Abramoff scandal, coupled with the resignation of Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, after he pleaded guilty in another corruption case. With the midterm elections on the horizon, lawmakers seemed in a big hurry for reform. Republicans in particular worried that the ethics issue would turn on them the way it did on Democrats in 1994, when Republicans took control of the House.

"Comprehensive lobbying reform is the right thing to do," Mr. Hastert said in January, adding, "I believe that to regain the trust of the American people in this institution, we must go further than prosecuting the bad actors."

But the next shoe in the Abramoff scandal has yet to drop, and lawmakers say their constituents are far more concerned with issues like health care and the Iraq war. Many express a view offered by Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, who said the Abramoff and Cunningham cases showed that the current laws worked.

"I do sense that there's a little less of a furor about it," Mr. Martinez said. "The people responsible seem to be being dealt with in the justice system, as they should. A lot of this is politically reacting to a situation, and when you get down to it, you realize that there's an awful lot of rules already on the books, and what we need to do is apply them."

Ms. Collins said she sensed reluctance to take bold action.

"People have mixed feelings," she said. "On the one hand, they do recognize that we need to boost public confidence in the integrity of our decision-making. On the other hand, members regard themselves as ethical, and some question whether we should be moving to fix the laws, when it was the laws that were broken."

The initial votes on the Senate bill have shown the limits of the appetite for change. Already a Senate committee has rejected a plan, advanced by Ms. Collins and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, to create an independent office to investigate ethics abuses. And while the Senate did vote this week in favor of a ban on gifts and meals from lobbyists, the real fight will be over whether to limit a much more lucrative perk: private travel, and lawmakers' use of corporate jets.

There has been little political fallout from the Abramoff case, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. A survey by the center in January, the week after Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea, found that just 18 percent of Americans had closely followed the case; by comparison, 32 percent had closely followed President Bush's acknowledgment that he had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct some domestic wiretapping without warrants.

Further, Congress tends to have a short attention span. Without a grass-roots hue and cry of the sort that pushed lawmakers to block the Dubai port deal this week, it was perhaps inevitable that the push for lobbying law changes would diminish.

"Abramoff made it topical and personal," said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, "and as time passes people start thinking about Dubai port deals and the future of the war in Iraq."

Outside observers say it will now take another eruption  the indictment of a member of Congress in the Abramoff inquiry, or a similar scandalous event  to put the issue front and center again.

One expert on money in politics, Prof. James A. Thurber of American University, predicted that any legislation would amount to "lobby lite" unless more lawmakers were prosecuted. And Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has testified frequently on lobbying law changes, said: "The fervor for reform in this case was driven by a fear that a match was about to be lit to dry tinder. They were scared to death they would go back home and people would be waiting as they got off the plane with buckets of tar and bales of feathers."

Representative Adam H. Putnam, Republican of Florida, said lawmakers' interest in tough restrictions was directly related to vulnerability at the polls. "I think this entire Congress is schizophrenic on this right now," said Mr. Putnam, a member of the House Rules Committee, which is charged with drafting lobbying legislation.

Mr. Dreier and Mr. Hastert both said in January that they wanted bipartisan support for legislation. But that could prove difficult in the House, where Democrats are hammering an election-year theme of a Republican "culture of corruption" and are using the lobbying issue to demand more influence within the chamber. Asked if she would be willing to work with Republicans, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, Representative Louise M. Slaughter of New York, said, "I have misgivings about that."

Some in the House are waiting to see what the Senate will do. But when Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, tried to attach a port security measure to the Senate's lobbying bill this week, the lobbying debate came to a halt. Unless the two parties can reach an agreement to dispatch the legislation quickly, the bill may not come back to the Senate floor until April.

"It did lose momentum," said Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the chairman of the Rules and Administration Committee, who is managing the Senate floor debate. But "I think it will come back again," he said, "because we need to do it, we can do it."