[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 171 (Wednesday, November 1, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H11664-H11665]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ALLIANCE FOR JUSTICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana [Mr. McIntosh] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McINTOSH. Mr. Speaker, in the past few months observers in this 
House may have noticed a lot of floor time being dedicated to attacks 
on our Subcommittee on Regulatory Relief, my character, and the 
character of the staff. These attacks have centered around a hearing 
that was held at the end of September in our subcommittee. The 
gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Clinger] addressed some of those 
issues in his 5-minute remarks earlier. I wanted to explain to the body 
today exactly what happened at that hearing so that each Member can 
decide what is at stake in this discussion.
  For several months now, I have been working to enact a law that is 
designed to prevent the taxpayer subsidy for lobbyists here in 
Washington. For years it has been one of Washington's dirty little 
secrets that thousands and thousands of groups receive taxpayer grants. 
A small subset of them have become quite wealthy and use that money to 
hire their lobbyists to promote more and more spending here in 
Congress.
  Now, along with the gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr. Istook, and the 
gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Ehrlich, now Senator Simpson and Senator 
Craig, we have a bill that will put an end to that and put an end to an 
outrage of the taxpayer subsidizing the lobbyists here in Washington. 
But as President Reagan has said, it gets dangerous if you get between 
the hog and the bucket. So many of those lobbyists are now attacking us 
personally as we move forward with that effort.
  The House Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, which I chair, has held 
four hearings into this, into the use of taxpayer funds by lobbying 
groups here in Washington. The last hearing was on September 28. At 
that hearing, the subcommittee invited one of those lobbyists, Nan 
Aron, who is President of the Alliance for Justice, to testify. The 
Alliance for Justice is a nonprofit charity that has annual revenues of 
about a million dollars.
  The Alliance for Justice spends most of its time educating other 
nonprofit special interest groups on how to engage in lobbying.
  The Alliance for Justice has about 30 members. Many of those members 
receive millions of dollars in Federal grant money and end up paying 
dues to the Alliance for Justice which end up funding their lobbying 
activity.
  In many ways, this is a money laundering scheme in which the taxpayer 
dollars go out as grants to groups and end up subsidizing the efforts 
of lobbying by the Alliance for Justice.
  Hillary Clinton's Children's Defense Fund, the American Arts 
Alliance, the Consumer Union, the Teachers Union and National Education 
Association, and the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense 
Fund are but a few of those members who contribute to the Alliance for 
Justice.
  In preparing for this particular hearing, I asked the staff to 
prepare a series of questions for the Alliance. Where do they receive 
their money? Do they receive an indirect subsidy from members who 
receive Federal grants? The Alliance responded only in part to those 
questions and said they did not receive any Federal money themselves, 
but they declined to answer what type of subsidies their members 
received.
  So I asked my staff to illustrate the point to prepare the following 
chart, which is a blowup of the letterhead of that group that shows 
that several of their members do indeed receive Federal grant moneys 
totaling over $7 million.

  Now, the purpose for this blowup was to demonstrate how this money 
laundering scheme operates in this particular group. As we engaged in 
the hearing, we asked the chart to be available in the hearing room, 
and the committee staff also prepared a smaller 8-by-11 version of this 
chart to make available to the press and to the public who may not be 
able to see it.
  The plan was that we would demonstrate the poster and then place the 
flier in the committee room so that anybody who was interested could 
have a copy.
  Unfortunately, what happened was the fliers ended up out on the press 


[[Page H 11665]]

table in advance of the poster. This created some confusion because it 
was claimed by Ms. Aron and members of her group that it looked like it 
was their letterhead that was being used to make this point, because 
now that it was an 8-by-11 piece of paper, it looked like it was a 
Xerox of their letterhead. I think most people who will look at this 
document will know that this is not any type of alleged forgery but is 
in fact a demonstration of how this money laundering scheme works.
  Now, my staff ended up answering questions about who prepared the 
document. We immediately told people when asked at the subcommittee 
hearing, this is a document that we have prepared, based on research in 
our subcommittee on how the taxpayer dollars are used. And I apologized 
later that night to Ms. Aron for any confusion with the use of their 
letterhead. But nonetheless, the attacks continue because they do not 
want the American taxpayer to see how their money is being used.

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