Pelosi-Murtha Bond Resilient

By Tory Newmyer, Roll Call

June 2, 2009

Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had served in the House for only six months when she first caught the attention of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.).

It was December 1987, and then-Rep. Austin Murphy (D), whose Pittsburgh-area district neighbored Murtha’s, was facing an ethics reprimand on an array of charges that he had violated House rules. Despite Murphy’s pleas of innocence, a vast majority in the chamber voted for the wrist-slap. Pelosi stood with Murtha and 65 other lawmakers in opposing it.

Over the two decades since, the unlikely bond between the polished San Francisco liberal and the gruff, conservative retired Marine has proved among the most critical to Pelosi’s ascent to Speaker.

Now, as Pelosi pivots from the CIA interrogations flap to face the potentially more vexing problem of how to contain the controversy surrounding Murtha and his earmarking empire, an alliance forged confronting one ethics challenge will be tested by another.

So far, Democrats close both of them say, the cascade of headlines about Murtha’s network and the federal probes of contractors, lobbyists and at least one lawmaker in his orbit have had no effect on their relationship.

“For people who have been here as long and have as deep and abiding a friendship as they do, they know that everybody goes in the barrel at some point,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson (Conn.) said.

But for Democrats, the problem appears to be getting worse. On Friday, Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.), a close Murtha ally, announced his Congressional and campaign offices and some staffers had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury as part of a probe of the PMA Group, a now-defunct lobbying shop with strong ties to Murtha. The development for the first time tied the investigation of the firm to a Member of Congress. The same day, the Navy reported that Kuchera Defense Systems, a Windber, Pa., outfit that Murtha showered with earmarks and that has contributed heavily to his campaigns, had been barred from future contracts amid fraud allegations.

To keep the heat on Democrats as the scandal widens, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced Monday that this week he will introduce his ninth privileged resolution to force an ethics committee investigation of the PMA Group’s ties to senior appropriators.

To date, Pelosi has responded to the Flake resolutions, which have peeled off a steady trickle of Democrats, by trying to limit Caucus defections. But she has faced dissent from within her leadership team over that approach.

Conflicting Strategies

In early spring, shortly after Flake began his campaign, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) argued in two leadership meetings that Democrats should get ahead of the issue by embracing the resolution, sources familiar with those sessions said.

Hoyer even talked to Flake about how to improve the resolution by narrowing its scope, both offices confirmed at the time. But Pelosi and ethics Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) countered that adopting it would set a dangerous precedent, potentially opening many other lawmakers up for similar treatment down the line.

The conversations centered on institutional and political concerns, the sources said, but it is difficult to divorce the argument completely from the personal allegiances behind it: For whatever mix of reasons, the Speaker was advocating a position that protected her longtime friend. As Flake’s resolutions piled up, Democrats lost the opportunity to get out in front of the issue, and Hoyer backed off.

With the PMA scandal’s drumbeat getting louder now, some leadership aides are privately worrying whether Pelosi’s loyalty to Murtha is obscuring her ability to make a tough political judgment to limit the fallout.

Others said she is clear-eyed about the threat but believes her options are limited. “She has a relationship with Murtha, but she’s also protective of her Caucus and the institution,” one Democratic lawmaker said. “She’s decided she’s going to let the ethics process work, and she’s not going to intercede in it, despite the pressures to do so.”

Some senior aides are nevertheless beginning to advocate another approach. These staffers say Murtha should follow the lead of Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), who last year filed an ethics complaint against himself to try to clear his name amid a swirl of reports that he had violated House rules.

“This is about personal responsibility,” one aide said, adding that Murtha “should want to defuse this whole thing. To serve the Speaker well, he would initiate it and take it off the table after weeks and weeks of Members taking tough votes.”

A Simmering Issue

While revelations this winter of federal raids on the offices of PMA and Kuchera jump-started the controversy, Murtha’s ethical record has been an issue for Pelosi from the moment that she secured the Speakership. After capturing the majority in 2006, the Democratic celebration was cut short by a nasty leadership fight for the Majority Leader slot between Hoyer, then the Minority Whip, and Murtha.

Murtha’s camp tried to frame the race as a referendum on the Pennsylvania Democrat’s call for a swift withdrawal from Iraq, but Hoyer’s allies made the case that the choice was over whether the party would follow through with its pledge to “drain the swamp” by enacting sweeping ethics reforms.

Murtha had what could arguably be called a spotty record on the subject. He was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the ABSCAM bribery scandal of the early 1980s, when he was caught on videotape being offered a $50,000 bribe by an undercover FBI agent. Murtha declined the money. But while he was a member of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct at the time, he failed to report the bribe offer to authorities.

In the House, he pushed a rules change to bar outside groups from filing ethics complaints, was one of 12 Democrats to vote against the 2002 campaign finance reform bill authored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), and was one of four Democrats to vote against the party’s 2006 ethics package designed as a stronger alternative to the GOP version.

In campaigning for the Majority Leader job, he told a group of conservative Democrats that he thought the ethics package was “total crap” but would support it out of deference to Pelosi.

The then-Speaker-to-be had pledged to remain neutral in the Hoyer-Murtha contest, but she executed a surprise reversal at Murtha’s request. On the Sunday after the midterm elections, just four days before Democrats huddled to pick their No. 2, she jumped in by sending colleagues a letter endorsing Murtha, then followed up by pressing them in face-to-face meetings.

The move set off an uproar, as critics charged it undermined Pelosi’s campaign promise to get tough on corruption. And as Pelosi’s camp tried to wrangle votes for Murtha, her allies also fought a rearguard action to tamp down the criticism. In one case, her deep-pocketed donors threatened to choke off support for a Democratic-leaning group critical of the move.

After Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was quoted in a front-page Washington Post story blasting Pelosi’s endorsement, she faced a slew of calls from enraged Democratic donors. The threat was serious enough that Sloan penned a letter to the donors, members of a collective called the Democracy Alliance, to explain the group’s position.

She said that CREW’s credibility rested on its reputation for independence and that while the group would continue to call out Democratic missteps, “perhaps there is a way to diminish the likelihood of public confrontations in the future.” Sloan noted that Steve Bing, a billionaire Hollywood producer and Pelosi friend, had arranged for her to meet with Pelosi Chief of Staff John Lawrence.

Sloan, in an interview, said Lawrence did not return her phone calls and the meeting never happened — and her group did end up losing some donors. “We stuck by our position on Murtha through times when it was hard, and obviously there were donors who were unhappy with us over our statements about him,” she said. “But in the end, it established that CREW is not a Democratic front group and that we would be attacking corruption whether it’s Democratic or Republican.”

In the end, Hoyer soundly defeated Murtha, leading observers to wonder why Pelosi would risk diminishing her stature just as she was reaching an historic pinnacle as the first female Speaker. Longtime Pelosi watchers knew the answer: As a fiercely loyal political animal, she was honoring a commitment to a man who had done as much as anyone to help her reach that station.

“There are very few people who have assisted her advance more than Murtha,” said Marc Sandalow, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter who penned the Pelosi biography “Madam Speaker.” “No outside observer thought that was a smart political move, but she was sending a message that she sticks up for her friends.”

A History of Cooperation

Early in Pelosi’s Congressional career, Murtha provided critical help on her first major legislative endeavor: converting the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco into a national park. He helped Pelosi and then-Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) pressure the Pentagon to keep the base open so the military would foot the bill for its cleanup.

And after Pelosi joined the Appropriations Committee, they worked together to get breast cancer research funded through the Defense Department budget. Murtha at a subcommittee hearing two years ago told the story of how he dispatched Pelosi in the mid-1990s to save funding for the effort. Though lawmakers budgeted $200 million for the program, then-Defense Secretary William Perry announced he would only spend $50 million.

“So I called Nancy Pelosi,” Murtha said. “I said, ‘You better call your friend over in the White House.’ Now, she was just a regular Member of Congress. ‘Call your friend at the White House’ — Mrs. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton, I’m meaning — ‘and tell her that he’s already made this announcement. He’s only going to spend $50 million.’”

The next day, Murtha said, Perry announced, “‘I made a mistake. We’re going to spend $200 million.’”

Later, when Pelosi decided to make her first bid for leadership, squaring off against Hoyer for the post of Minority Whip, she turned to Murtha to manage her campaign. An anti-abortion, pro-gun “Old Bull” from the Rust Belt, Murtha helped sell Pelosi to the Caucus’ more conservative Members, who were skittish about elevating a liberal female Californian into leadership.

Pelosi touted Murtha’s support in phone calls with those lawmakers, making sure they knew he was managing her campaign, one former staffer said. After a protracted race, Pelosi finally edged Hoyer out in October 2001. The win set up her successful run for Minority Leader the next year,and her uncontested ascension to Speaker after the 2006 elections, both bids that Murtha managed.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), a close Murtha ally, said the connection between the two is simple: “She likes strong men, and he likes strong women.” Asked whether the latest headlines about Murtha had affected their bond, Moran said, “Not one iota.”