A leading state public interest advocacy organization compared a series of key votes of U.S. Senators during consideration of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act this month and found that Senator Begich supported Main Street over Wall Street 91% of the time and Senator Murkowski supported Main St 18% of the time.

Nationally, 11 Senators received perfect public interest scores, while nearly half voted with Wall Street CEOs more often than with their Main Street consumer constituents.

“We applaud Senator Begich for his outstanding support of key public interest reforms and near-uniform rejection of Wall Street’s demands,” said Matt Wallace, Executive Director for AKPIRG.

The Senator Scorecard from the Alaska Public Interest Research Group charted Senators’ votes on ten key amendments and on the final bill, approved on May 20. Among the amendments considered were the following:

• The Shelby (R-AL) amendment to severely weaken the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Defeated, Public Interest Vote = No).

• The Chambliss (R-GA) amendment to weaken the bill’s shadow markets derivatives reforms. (Defeated, Public Interest Vote = No).

• The Carper (D-DE) amendment to weaken authority of state Attorneys General to protect the public. (Approved, Public Interest Vote = No).

“Looking at how a Senator votes on one final passage vote isn’t enough,” said Wallace. “The Senate spent weeks taking critical votes on whether to improve the bill for Main Street, or, at the behest of powerful Wall Street lobbyists, to eviscerate reforms. Our scorecard examines important votes for consumers and taxpayers.”

The legislation must now be reconciled with a similar bill approved by the House in December. For example, both bills include an independent consumer agency, and while the House bill would carve out car dealers from its oversight, the Senate bill would subject the agency to “paralysis-by-analysis” requirements. The Senate bill’s reforms of the derivatives markets are stronger, but Wall Street lobbyists are lined up to weaken them.

“We will urge the House and Senate conference committee to take the strongest reforms from each bill, so that Main Street consumers who have lost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in home equity and retirement savings will be protected from future meltdowns caused by greedy Wall Street bankers,” concluded Wallace.

Click here to see the Scorecard.

Click here for the Amendment Voting Guide U.S. PIRG issued prior to the votes.

We applaud Senator Begich for his support of the final package, and his consistent votes in the public interest during the floor debate and amendment process. We are disappointed that Senator Murkowski voted against financial reform, and against reining in the Wall Street firms that caused such a huge financial crisis.

We urge Congressional leaders to use the conference process to select the strongest provisions of the House and Senate bills while rejecting the efforts of lurking Wall Street lobbyists to weaken or delay passage of a strong final law.

Today, the Senate declined to vote on the anti-consumer Brownback amendment to immunize car dealers from oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, leaving in place broad authority for the consumer watchdog over non-bank lenders. This is an important improvement over the House passed bill.

Passage of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act includes a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, preserves some authority for state attorneys general to enforce the laws, opens up the shadow markets where derivatives are traded, and ends, once and for all, ‘too big to fail.’

Nevertheless, we continue to watch for further pernicious amendments that will falsely masquerade as improvements to the consumer protection bureau. Make no mistake, amendments to carve-out car dealers who sell loans, private student lenders or other interests are not improvements.  Efforts to eliminate the authority of state attorneys general to protect their own state’s consumers are as serious a threat as the Shelby amendment.

We urge the Senate to reject all efforts to water down reform of the reckless Wall Street practices that cost Americans millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in home values and retirement income.

The Restoring America’s Financial Stability Act, S. 3217, should be strengthened, not weakened.  It must include a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency, it must allow states and their attorneys general to enforce the laws, must open the shadow markets where derivatives are traded, and must end, once and for all, Wall Street’s ability to rely on ‘too big to fail.’”

AKPIRG is scoring this and all important public interest amendments to the financial reform bill.  You can find the public interest amendment voting guide here.  A live ’scorecard’ tracking all amendment votes is available through our federal lobbying arm U.S.PIRG at http://www.uspirg.org/amendment-guide/scorecard.

The Wall Street Reform Amendment Guide: A Senators’ Guide to Public Interest Votes That Protect Consumers, available online here, explains to Senators, their constituents and the media how to understand what is at stake with each set of amendments and why a public interest vote is crucial to America’s financial security.

“We expect many, many amendments – some meant to weaken or even gut the bill and others meant to strengthen the proposed legislation. It is crucial that Senators Murkowski and Begich, their constituents and the media know how they should each vote if they want to protect our economy and our families from another potential meltdown,” explained Matt Wallace, Executive Director for AKPIRG.

In addition to releasing the guide – which was distributed to Senate offices and the media on Thursday –AKPIRG will be tracking votes on amendments on a daily basis and scoring each Senator on their public interest vote. Watch for updates to the page.

“The public needs a voter’s guide and score card to follow Senators and see clearly which Senators are casting their votes for Main Street families and which are voting for Wall Street CEOs,” Wallace concluded.

To see the Amendment Guide online at the U.S. PIRG website, click here.
To download a PDF version, click here.

The DISCLOSE (Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections) Act includes a series of strong and necessary reforms which will help protect American elections from the flood of corporate money made legal in the January 21 Supreme Court ruling.  Introduction of this federal legislation follows the Alaska’s groundbreaking and decisive response with our own state campaign expenditure disclosure bill, enacted by the legislature at the end of session in April.

“The stakes could not be higher, and this bill is must-pass legislation.

Our democracy is truly at risk, and Congress needs to take immediate action to ensure the protection of the rights of individual citizens instead of corporations.” commented Matt Wallace, Executive Director for AKPIRG.

Like Alaska’s new law, the reforms in the bill will increase disclosure information about advertising spending from corporate sources, and create stand-by-your ad requirements for CEOs. In addition, foreign corporations with domestic subsidiaries, federal contractors and TARP recipients who have not repaid their funds will be banned from spending their money on politics.

“The DISCLOSE Act is a critical first step to protect the public.  Regular Americans staunchly disagree with this ruling. There’s no doubt about it,” Wallace added. “The last thing people want to see are corporations with a bigger role in politics.”

AKPIRG also encourages Congress to add Representative Mike Capuano’s Shareholder Protection Act to the final package or move it to the floor in tandem. The Capuano bill will provide an additional level of protection for the public from the flashflood of corporate money and give investors a say in how their money is spent in politics.

Wallace concluded, “The playing field of American politics is far from level. Congress must pass and strengthen the reforms found in this bill to protect regular voters and the 2010 elections.”

“That decision didn’t invent the problem of big-money influence in politics — we all know that big money too often can buy access and influence in politics, and that, in a large part, explains a lot of the cynicism that many citizens feel toward politics in general,” Wallace said. But the decision “did make the problem much, much worse,” he said.

The bill in question, SB 284 (and it’s counterpart in the house HB 409), would add common sense disclosure requirements for corporate and union spending in elections.  What’s more, the bill would require that disclaimers be added to campaign adds revealing the true sources of a groups funding.  This would help mitigate the problem of vitriolic attack adds from front groups with names like “Americans for Truth and Justice”, when they’re really being paid for by big corporations with a vested interest in the result of the election.

This is a state that has been shaken to the core by corruption scandals, with former state legislators and lobbyists serving jail time for buying and selling votes.

This is a federal government in which, not even a month ago, the Supreme Court further opened the floodgates of corporate spending in politics with their misguided and dangerous decision in the “Citizens United” case.

This is an America where average citizens are increasingly outraged at special interest lobbyists wining-and-dining our elected officials to their own personal gain, and that of their fat cat clients.

Now, some Alaska legislators want to change the law so that lobbyists can buy them fancy dinners– without even reporting it?

Wining and dining our elected officials should be banned outright, but to suggest that we should allow our legislators to be taken out for a fancy meal without even a nod to public disclosure is simply outrageous.  Kudos to legislators like Rep. Les Gara and Rep. Mike Doogan for calling this what it is: a bad idea.

But, to the legislators pushing to get spoiled by big money lobbyists in our state’s capitol, I say: buy your own meals.  And if you’re a citizen frustrated by big money influence in politics, I urge you to contact your own legislators and tell them the same.

Here’s some more background on the issue:

Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission

• For more than sixty years federal law has banned corporations from spending their treasury funds directly on elections.

• With it’s Jan. 21, the Roberts Court turned back the clock. Campaign reform advocates say this sets the stage for a deluge of corporate money in politics, and threatens to upend the role of citizens as the central force in our democracy.

• Since the Tillman Act of 1907, Congress has banned direct corporate contributions to federal electoral campaigns. Corporations, unions, and other big money players have since looked for ways to evade the prohibitions by spending money on independent expenditures – ads, mostly, favoring or opposing candidates thinly veiled as issue advocacy.

• In the 2008 election, a group called Citizens United used direct corporate contributions to produce “Hillary, The Movie.” It was a promotional piece intended to be distributed as a pay-per-view movie and advertised on cable, much like a campaign ad.

• The Federal Election Commission took action against the producers for violating the “electioneering communications” provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold.)

• The decision overrules not just 2003’s McConnell v. FEC and 1990’s Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, but also a unanimous 1982 decision upholding Congress’ right to regulate the political activity of corporations differently than that of individual citizens (FEC v. National Right to Work Committee).

You can read the piece on the Anchorage Daily News website, or the text is below:

Murkowski EPA Attach Raises Questions

We all know that big money buys access and influence in politics– that’s a big part of why so few people trust their elected officials to represent their interests, in Juneau or in Washington. Whether the issue is healthcare reform, Wall Street bailouts, or energy policy, those that write the big checks tend to get a good return on their investment.
Sometimes, they even get to get to write their own laws.

That’s the troubling appearance for Senator Murkowski and the big-money lobbyist who helped draft and promote energy legislation on her behalf. According to reports in this newspaper, the Washington Post, and others, powerful energy lobbyist Jeff Holmstead advised Murkowski’s office on the exact wording of a failed 2009 amendment that would have rolled back the clean air act, blocking the EPA from imposing greenhouse gas limits on electric power plants.

Now, Senator Murkowski is considering introducing the same, or a similar amendment, to unrelated “must-pass” legislation. Discussions on said amendment could begin as early as January 20th.

Alaska is on the frontline of global warming–melting permafrost, coastal flooding, and erosion are already pressing issues here, not to mention the huge economic costs of melting ice roads and damages to Alaska’s infrastructure. Senator Murkowski herself says that she’s concerned about climate change. But until the Senator shows herself to be a real leader in pushing for the kind of broad legislative solutions she claims to prefer, it’s fair to ask why she insists that the agency with the mandate and the expertise to begin tackling this problem head on should be stripped of their authority to do so.

But aside from these important issues, and they are important, the most troubling thing about this situation is the appearance of the big-money influence. According to research by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Senator Murkowski has received at least $126,500 from the clients, clients’ employees, and the lobbying firm that employs Mr. Holmstead since 2004. Overall, electric utilities are Senator Murkowski’s biggest corporate campaign contributors, adding $244,000 to her election efforts since 2005. During the current 2009-2010 election cycle, Senator Murkowski has received more electric utility money than any other lawmaker.

Senator Murkowski has pointed out that Mr. Holmstead was only one source of input sought on this subject, and that as a former EPA official, he has considerable legal expertise. Industry groups are also quick to point out that environmentalists are also involved in crafting climate legislation. Both of these arguments are true true and reasonable to a point. It’s certainly common practice for elected officials to seek out advice and input from issue experts when drafting bills. That sort of thing happens all the time, with non-profits, academics, government agencies, and former administration officials alike. But when corporations make big campaign contributions, and then their lobbyists are handed the pen to write legislation that could benefit the corporation’s short term bottom line, it just doesn’t look right.

To get rid of the appearance of this kind of pay-to-play politics, Senator Murkowski could do two things: She could abandon her pursuit of legislation that would that would prevent the EPA from taking a step forward on climate change. Or, she could give back all of the money received from special interests tied to Mr. Holmstead, along with all the other corporate contributions tied to lobbyists seeking to influence crucial energy policy decisions.

In an ideal world, she would do both.

Matt Wallace is Executive Director of the Alaska Public Interest Research Group. AKPIRG is a non-partisan, non-profit, statewide organization researching, educating and advocating on behalf of the public interest. AKPIRG exists to promote the public and consumer interests, especially when inconsistent with moneyed, powerful or other special interests.