[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 51 (Wednesday, March 25, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H4002-H4003]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             INTRODUCTION OF RESOLUTION REGARDING PMA GROUP

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, in just a few minutes, I will introduce a 
privileged resolution, the purpose of which is to have the House Ethics 
Committee look into the relationship between the PMA Group--a lobbying 
firm that has been raided by the FBI--earmarks received by the raided 
firm for their clients and the source and timing of campaign 
contributions made by the raided firm to Members of the House.
  Mr. Speaker, this will be the sixth resolution that I have introduced 
on the same topic. I want to stress again that this is not a partisan 
resolution. These resolutions have not been introduced at the behest of 
any Republican or of any Democrat. No Member of Congress is mentioned 
in these resolutions. No party is mentioned either. This is a problem 
that this House simply must address.
  The bottom line, Mr. Speaker, is that, as long as Members of Congress 
have the ability, which we currently have, to award no-bid contracts to 
individuals or organizations--nonprofit or for profit--then you are 
going to have problems, and that is what we are seeing with the 
investigations that are going on with the PMA Group.
  The PMA Group is a powerhouse lobbying firm that last year had 
revenues in excess of $17 million. That firm, as I have mentioned, has 
been raided by the FBI, and is now in the process of disbanding. By the 
end of this month, in just a few days, it will be gone, from $17 
million--boom--overnight to nothing because somebody got on to them and 
because they were able to get earmarks for their clients who should not 
have been awarded in this way.
  We simply should not have the ability here in Congress to award no-
bid contracts to anyone, let alone those who turn around and make big 
contributions back to our congressional campaigns. That is what we are 
asking the Ethics Committee to look into.
  Right now, the Ethics Committee has issued guidance, saying that, 
when you want to request an earmark, you have to sign a certification 
saying that you have no financial interest in the earmark that you are 
signing--that you don't have a spouse working for the firm or that 
money is not somehow going to come back to you. The Ethics Committee 
has also said that that does not include campaign contributions.

                              {time}  1700

  Yet we have examples of just thousands of dollars, hundreds of 
thousands of dollars coming back to those who have requested these 
earmarks from the firms who got the earmarks, the lobbying firms who 
requested the earmarks for the client and from political action 
committees established by the lobbying firm. That doesn't reflect well 
on the House.
  As I said, this is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. 
This is a problem that all of us have here, and it needs to be 
addressed by the bipartisan Ethics Committee. That's the purpose of the 
resolution that I will offer in just a minute
  As I mentioned, this is the sixth one. The five prior to this have 
been tabled. I don't know what the fate of this one will be. Perhaps it 
will be tabled as well. But if it is, we need to come back

[[Page H4003]]

and do the same thing because we can't stop until we address this 
issue.
  We are going into a season of appropriations where the Appropriations 
Committee, in fact, the earmark deadline, request deadline, is next 
week. Are we going to continue to allow Members of this body to secure 
no-bid contracts for people who turn around and give them campaign 
contributions? That is a question that should be answered before we go 
into the appropriation season, and that is a reason we need to move 
forward quickly on this.
  We looked at the 2008 defense bill. The PMA group, the firm that 
again has been raided by the FBI, received more than $300 million in 
earmarks for its clients. The 2009 defense bill was a number slightly 
higher than that or still totaling that number but looks to be above 
$300 million. It is worthy to note that that bill, the 2009 defense 
bill which we passed last September, was not even considered by the 
full Appropriations Committee in the House. So it wasn't vetted, there 
was virtually no oversight there, and when the bill came to the House, 
there was no ability for any Member of this body to challenge any of 
the thousands of earmarks that were in that bill, a few thousand of 
which represented no-bid contracts.

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