Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Watchdogs want to extend limits on board service by House members

Watchdogs want to extend limits on board service by House members

GOP Rep. Chris Collins of New York at his August 2018 arraignment on insider trading charges.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The prohibition on House members serving as directors of outside groups should include nonprofit and private company boards, not only publicly traded enterprises, three prominent watchdog groups say.

The House has barred its members from such corporate boards only since January. The new Democratic majority changed the rules largely in response to the case of Republican Rep. Chris Collins of New York, charged a year ago with fraud, conspiracy and lying to the FBI in an alleged insider stock trading scheme involving Innate Immunotherapeutics, a biotech company where he was a board member. (Collins was re-elected last fall and is set to go on trial in February.)

The rules change resolution also set up a pair of House members to help the Ethics Committee recommend by the end of the year whether members and their aides should also be restricted from holding other outside positions.


Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer and democracy reform advocacy group, told the panel that House members holding board positions at private entities pose a widespread risk of conflicts of interest. He cited unpublished reporting by The New York Times that at least 60 members sit on the boards of private companies, most of which are limited liability corporations.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

"I would like to again urge you to go a little further than banning members from sitting on publicly owned corporate boards," he said at a hearing in late July. "The same types of conflicts of interest apply to for-profit corporations. And so, I encourage you to take a look at extending the ban to for-profit corporations across the board."

That recommendation was also endorsed in a written statement from Issue One, a cross-partisan political reform group. (It is incubating, but journalistically independent from, The Fulcrum)

Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, the Democrat on the working group, said she was "very concerned" about members' relationship to LLCs. At a minimum, she said she would propose that all partners in such entities be disclosed on congressional financial disclosures.

Donald Sherman, deputy director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said the potential for conflicts of interest also applies to positions at closely held companies.

CREW, Public Citizen and Issue One also asked the committee to consider restricting members from taking board positions at nonprofit organizations, specifically those that lobby the federal government, receive public funds or engage in "dark money" spending to influence elections.

Delaney Marsco, an ethics attorney at Campaign Legal Center, said the new rule banning positions at publicly traded companies was an "important first step" but urged the House to go further, including a ban on members holding positions at companies with federal contracts.

Other recommendations to the working group included further restricting congressional stock trading or ownership. But the Republican member, Van Taylor of Texas, reminded the witnesses that the panel's charge was limited to studying outside positions.

Read More

Donald Trump

President-elect Donald Trump attends the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden in New York on Nov. 16.

Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s legacy of retribution

Say what you will about Donald Trump. The man can hold a grudge.

So, too, apparently, do the neo-Nazis who marched on the Ohio state capital over the weekend. Freshly emboldened by Donald Trump’s re-election and competition with a rival white supremacist group in Ohio, they carried Nazi paraphernalia, shouted racist chants, and provoked a lot of criticism from local authorities.

And so it begins.

Keep ReadingShow less
Victorious Republicans are once again falling for the mandate trap

Sen. John Thune speaks at a press conference after being elected the majority leader on Nov. 13.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

Victorious Republicans are once again falling for the mandate trap

In September, I wrote, “No matter who wins, the next president will declare that they have a ‘mandate’ to do something. And they will be wrong.”

I was wrong in one sense.

Keep ReadingShow less
Red and blue pawns covering the United States
J Studios/Getty Images

Amid a combative election, party realignment continued apace

Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.

The term “realignment” gets used and abused a lot, because people have agreed to use it without agreeing on a definition. Traditionally, realignments are said to have occurred when majority and minority parties switch places. Starting in 1932, FDR pulled blacks and working class and immigrant whites into the Democratic Party, making it the majority party for generations. It’s a sign of how massive that coalition was that it’s been shrinking since the 1960s without Republicans ever becoming the clear majority party, though the story gets complicated with the rise in voters calling themselves independents.

Keep ReadingShow less
Imagine mosaic

The Imagine mosaic in Strawberry Fields in Central Park, a tribute to John Lennon.

Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images

How leaders and the media talk about political violence matters

Dresden is a policy strategist for Protect Democracy. Livingston is director of field support for Over Zero.

Election officials, law enforcement and civil society have been preparing for months — some for years — to ensure that the full election process plays out safely, securely and in accordance with the law. And for the most part, it seems that Election Day was indeed generally orderly. While the election process continues with final counting and certification, the projected result of the presidential election came more quickly and clearly than many of us anticipated.

Keep ReadingShow less