It's never too late to enter the political cash race.

Exhibit A: Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., who's served in Congress since 1989, and at age 76, is the 14th oldest member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

After nearly a quarter-century without a leadership political action committee, McDermott joined hundreds of his congressional colleagues and formed one on March 8, according to Federal Election Commission records. 

McDermott is calling his new fundraising vehicle the Common Good Fund, and its treasurer is Phillip Lloyd of Seattle.

McDermott's leadership PAC will operate separate and apart from his campaign committee. And through it, McDermott may raise up to $5,000 per year from individuals and other PACs and spend accumulated money for various purposes — travel, communications, donating to political brethren — that don't directly fuel his own re-election campaign.

Not that McDermott has needed much cash to get re-elected, having not faced significant competition in years.

During the 2012 election cycle, for example, his campaign spent just north of $600,000 — well below the more than $1.6 million incumbents on average spent on their re-election campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

A McDermott spokesperson could not immediately be reached for comment on why, after all these years, the congressmen is forming a leadership PAC this month.

But if nothing else, he'll be keeping up with the kids: The House's youngest member, Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., last month formed a leadership PAC of his own.

Once typically the domain of more senior members of Congress, leadership PACs have proliferated during the past decade, with freshmen members routinely operating them.

Shaun McCutcheon, the Alabama Republican who is the lead plaintiff in a case to overturn the government’s existing biennial limit on campaign contributions, has thrown his financial support behind Larry Grooms, a conservative state senator vying for the GOP nomination in South Carolina 1st Congressional District’s special election.

McCutcheon donated $1,776 to Grooms on Friday, according to documents recently filed with the Federal Election Commission. It’s McCutcheon’s first federal-level donation of the 2013-14 election cycle — the South Carolina primary is today — and if he has his way, it’ll be the first of a multitude.

McCutcheon’s legal challenge to the existing biennial aggregate contribution limit is slated to be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court later this year. And as far as he’s concerned, removing the cap is “a free speech issue,” McCutcheon told the Center for Public Integrity last week while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md.

“I just want to donate to more candidates,” he said, adding rhetorically: “Why am I not free to spend money however I want?”

McCutcheon argued that removing the biennial limit would benefit non-incumbent candidates because they’d have a greater chance of scoring a donation from donors who have the means — if not today the legal right — to spread their cash far and wide.

The change would also bring individuals’ federal-level donation rights in line with those of political action committees, which do not have to abide by an overall donation limit.

“If we win, we’ll create more competition in the political market,” McCutcheon said. “We the people will have more influence.”

Campaign finance reformers, however, assert that lifting the overall campaign contribution limit would give more power to the nation’s wealthiest people and further marginalize the political strength of those without much money to spend on politics.

There is currently a $123,200 overall limit on federal-level campaign contributions during the two-year 2013-14 election cycle. That’s about two-and-a-half times the current U.S. median household income.

This biennial limit is two-pronged. There is a $48,600 to limit on combined donations to all candidates and a $74,600 limit on all combined gifts to political action committees and parties.

Donations to super PACs, which can legally accept donations of unlimited size, are not affected by the aggregate contribution limit.

Very few Americans hit the biennial limit. During the last election, the Center for Responsive Politics calculated that just 0.1 percent of American adults gave at least $2,500 to a federal candidate or committee.

The McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission case does not address the legality of maximum donations to individual candidates. Contribution limits to candidates and party committees are adjusted upward for inflation every election cycle. Currently, a person may donate up to $2,600 per election to one candidate, up from $2,500 during the 2012 election cycle.

Individuals are also currently allowed to give up to $32,400 to a national party committee such as the Republican National Committee and $5,000 per year to individual PACs.

Participation in the South Carolina race by McCutcheon, whose profile as a campaign finance deregulator has blossomed of late, comes as votes are being cast today in the Republican primary to replace Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C.

Gov. Nikki Haley elevated Scott to the U.S. Senate after the resignation of Sen. Jim DeMint, who now heads the Heritage Foundation.

The frontrunner in the GOP primary is former Gov. Mark Sanford, who left office in 2011 amid a sex scandal involving a mistress in Argentina.

As of today, Sanford has raised about $415,000 as he mounts his political comeback, with donors including businessman David Koch and investor Foster Friess, who each gave $2,500.

For his part, McCutcheon's preferred candidate, Grooms, has raised about $346,000, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of FEC records through publication time.

Other candidates in the race include state Rep. Chip Limehouse, former Charleston County Council member Curtis Bostic, former state Sen. John Kuhn and Teddy Turner, the son of media mogul and environmentalist Ted Turner. Records show that the younger Turner has raised nearly $503,000, with about 70 percent of that sum coming from his own pocket.

Only three super PACs have reported activities in the race, with Grooms and Bostic the sole beneficiaries.

A super PAC called the “Coastal Conservative Fund” spent about $12,000 on pro-Bostic media, while two groups have been touting Grooms, the “Palmetto Conservatives Fund” and the “Conservative Campaign Committee” (which was formerly known as the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama).

Pro-Grooms super PACs have collectively spent about $13,000, records show, with the bulk majority of that coming via the Conservative Campaign Committee.

Purdue University — among the strongest lobbying forces in higher education — will soon slash its government affairs efforts in Washington, D.C., two federal lobbyists familiar with the decision tell the Center for Public Integrity.

The decision, confirmed to the Center by a Purdue official, will involve terminating its contract with a large outside lobbying firm and shrinking the budget of its office in Capitol Hill.

The school's D.C.-based in-house lobbyist, Director of Federal Relations Lisa Arafune Pickett, is also leaving the university.

"Yes, we are downsizing our effort," said Chris Sigurdson, the university's assistant vice president of external relations. "We're looking to save money, and we're looking for ways to keep Purdue more affordable." 

Sigurdson said he did not know precisely how much money the university would save by shrinking its lobbying efforts, but he described the cuts as "considerable" and "in progress."

FaegreBD Consulting, which along with its predecessor firms have lobbied for Purdue since the 1990s, will no longer represent the university, Sigurdson said.

Purdue has yet to file a formal lobbying termination report with the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, congressional records indicate. A  representative from FaefreBD Consulting could not be reached for comment. 

Deborah Hohlt, a D.C.-based lobbyist whose recent clients have included Indiana's state government and Indiana University Health, Inc., will lobby on Purdue's behalf on a contractual basis, Sigurdson said.

Since 2003, Purdue has spent at least $400,000 annually on federal-level lobbying efforts and more than $800,000 in both 2007 and 2008, according to disclosure documents filed with the U.S. Senate.

Last year, the school spent $525,000 to lobby the federal government on a range of issues, from science and agriculture to budgetary matters and transportation, according to federal data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Such spending consistently ranks it ahead of all but a handful of American universities in terms of annual federal lobbying spending. 

Purdue's lobbying reductions hit as university President Mitch Daniels, Indiana's former governor, this week eliminated merit raises for senior administrators and other top officials. Daniels also this month vowed to freeze student tuition for two years.

Asked if Daniels' own political acumen reduced Purdue's need for a professional lobbying force, Sigurdson said the university made "an informed decision."

Daniels, who Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney reportedly considered as a vice presidential running mate, became the school's president in January. As the director of the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush, Daniels earned the nickname "The Blade" for his aggressive proposals to trim the federal budget.

In a letter the university released Monday, Daniels detailed foreshadowed more budget cuts for Purdue.

"Over the next weeks and months, we will assess current practices and expenditures across all central university units," he wrote. "We should all be asking each other questions like: What are we doing that once made sense but no longer does? What are we doing in multiple places that could be done less expensively in one? Most important, what are we doing that does not in any clear and meaningful sense further our core missions: teaching, research, engagement and affordable access?"

Daniels himself earns a base salary of $420,000, although performance incentives detailed in his contract could cause that to increase. 

Natural gas executive James Willard Kinzer of Kentucky is one of more than 100 small business owners listed online as supporting Curtis Bostic, the former Charleston County councilmember who appears to have advanced to a runoff against former Gov. Mark Sanford following Tuesday's 16-way GOP primary in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District.

But he's much more than that.

Not only did Kinzer donate the legal maximum to Bostic's underdog campaign, he pumped $30,000 into a pro-Bostic super PAC called the "Coastal Conservative Fund." The group is likely named as such since the 1st Congressional District stretches along the Palmetto State's coast.

Records filed with the Federal Election Commission show that Kinzer personally gave the super PAC $10,000 on February 13, the day after Quality Natural Gas, LLC, a Kinzer family owned company, contributed $20,000. The two donations account for the entirety of the money the super PAC has reported raising.

The Kinzer clan, furthermore, accounted for more than half of the money that Bostic raised from individuals ahead of Election Day, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of FEC records. 

Six members of the family, including its elderly patriarch, each donated $7,500 to Bostic on February 11 — a combined total of $45,000. Bostic reported raising just shy of $90,000 ahead of Election Day, on top of the $150,000 he loaned his campaign. 

The Kinzers' contributions were earmarked not just for Tuesday's election. Some of the money will go toward the anticipated April 2 primary runoff, in which Bostic is expected to face Sanford, who raised about $415,000 for the primary. Still more is designated for the May 7 general election, in which the runoff winner will face Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert.

If Bostic, who earned 13 percent of the vote in the primary, fails to beat Sanford, who earned 37 percent, he will be required to refund the funds contributed for the general election.

The Kinzer-funded Coastal Conservative Fund spent about $12,000 on an advertisement touting Bostic as a "Christian conservative" who "sticks up for taxpayers," records show. Bostic appears to have edged out conservative state Sen. Larry Grooms — like Bostic, he aligned himself with tea party activists — by less than one percentage point. A mandatory recount is scheduled for Friday.

Kinzer, who will turn 85 next month and could not immediately be reached for comment, is a noted philanthropist as well as an award-winning motorcycle hill-climber. At the age of 79, he started drag racing.

The natural gas industry, though, has been his domain for decades. 

He got his start drilling in the natural gas business in the 1950s, and Kinzer family companies now operate more than 2,000 wells in Appalachia's Big Sandy River Basin.

"Natural gas continues to be an abundant clean-burning natural resource that can lead to complete foreign energy independence," Kinzer wrote in a 2011 article. "We need to continue to work on a pipeline infrastructure that can supply gas to all areas of the country and develop new technologies in liquefied natural gas and compressed natural gas."

For his part, Bostic touts himself as being "pro-domestic energy," on his campaign website, where he vows to push for the construction of "state-of-the-arts nuclear power plants" and expand "domestic production of oil and natural gas."

A truly great journalist died this past week, although you may never have known much about him. His name was Murrey Marder. He was 93.

Marder was “one of the most significant journalists of our time,” as Charles Lewis, founder of The Center for Public Integrity, wrote recently in an eloquent tribute to Marder’s life and work.

“He was utterly tenacious about the truth,” Lewis wrote. “Not only did it outrage him when those in power lied, but it also especially gnawed away at him when the national news media would just stenographically report, and thus repeat, those lies.”

Lewis has created a superb oral history project and website about the role of journalism in American history called Investigating Power. One of the featured moments of truth recounted by Lewis concerns Marder, as a reporter for the Washington Post in the early 1950s. He may have done more than anyone else to bring down the demagogic reign of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, according to Lewis. Marder essentially chronicled and scrutinized McCarthy’s every major utterance and official action for four full years.

In 1953, when Sen. McCarthy was at the height of his power, Marder wrote a series of stories in the Post about McCarthy’s reckless charges portraying an Army Signal Corps Center at Fort Monmouth, NJ, as a “nest of spies.”  Marder made it clear this was empty rhetoric. “Nothing that can be independently ascertained from information available here or in Washington indicates that there is any known evidence to support such a conclusion .”

And as an interactive timeline makes clear, Marder’s important investigative work was followed four months later by Edward R. Murrow’s famous “See It Now” program on McCarthy. (Murrow’s CBS program was featured in the 2005 movie “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) And, a month after Murrow weighed in, in April 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings began to be televised live, leading to McCarthy’s condemnation by the Senate later that year — and his eventual demise.

Although Marder went on to help cover the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and conduct other investigations, it is the downfall of Sen. McCarthy for which he will be best remembered. It all started with Murrey Marder’s work. He stood up to lies with courage, facts and the truth.

In Sen. Ted Cruz’s twisted vision of economic history, Ronald Reagan cured double-digit unemployment by cutting spending and reducing the federal debt, and Jimmy Carter was guilty of “out-of-control regulation.”

In the real world:

• Total federal spending soared during Reagan’s deficit-plagued first term, and the national debt nearly doubled. His budget director later resigned and wrote a book criticizing Reagan’s failure to cut spending.
• And Carter signed landmark bills freeing airline, railroad and trucking rates from federal regulation, easing regulation of natural gas prices and eliminating federal regulation of interest rates paid by banks to small savers.

These are only a few of the disconnects between economic reality and Cruz’s oversimplified, often inaccurate attempt to paint President Obama’s record as the “exact opposite” of Reagan’s. The freshman Texas Republican said during his March 16 keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (starting about 22 minutes and 20 seconds into the recording):

Cruz: [Obama is] one of only two presidents, post-World War II, to face double-digit unemployment. And for the last four years economic growth under President Barack Obama has averaged 0.8 percent, less than 1 percent. There is only one other period post-1950 where we have had four years of less than 1 percent economic growth. That’s from 1979 to 1983. Coming out of Jimmy Carter following the same policies of out of control spending, out of control debt, out of control taxes, out of control regulation. That’s the only other period. President Reagan came in facing that stagnation and he implemented policies the exact opposite of Barack Obama’s.

In fact, it’s interesting: 79 to 83, economic growth was 0.8 percent. Today, it’s 0.8 percent for the exact same period because Obama didn’t learn the lesson from Reagan that if you want to turn the economy around you cut taxes, you reduce spending, you reduce the debt, and you don’t send regulators like locusts to destroy small businesses and jobs.

It’s true that the unemployment rate peaked higher and dropped faster during Reagan’s first term than it did during Obama’s. Under Reagan, it hit a high of 10.8 percent and had come down to 7.3 percent by the time he started his second term. Under Obama, the rate hit 10 percent and only drifted down to 7.9 percent as of his second inauguration.

It’s also true that economic growth was better during Reagan’s first term than it has been under Obama. In the last year of Reagan’s first term (calendar year 1984) the nation’s gross domestic product (adjusted for inflation) was 13 percent higher than it was four years earlier. In 2012, GDP was only 3 percent above where it had been the year before Obama first took office.

But Cruz is simply wrong to claim that the “lesson from Reagan” was that “you reduce spending, you reduce the debt” to turn the economy around. Reagan increased both. Historical budget figures from the Congressional Budget Office show that clearly.

• Federal outlays (total spending) rose by 40 percent under Reagan’s first four budgets (fiscal year 1985 vs. Carter’s last budget for fiscal 1981). That was two-and-a-half times faster than the rate of inflation, which rose 16 percent during the same period, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
• And far from cutting debt, Reagan borrowed more heavily than previous presidents. In Reagan’s first term, debt owed to the public increased by nearly 91 percent by the end of fiscal year 1985, compared with what it had been at the end of Carter’s fiscal 1981.

Furthermore, as mentioned, Cruz errs badly when he attempts to blame Carter for “out-of-control regulation.” As mentioned, Carter signed numerous deregulation measures. One free-market-oriented commentator chose the occasion of Reagan’s 100th birthday to praise Carter, not Reagan, as “deregulation’s hero.” Thomas A. Firey, senior fellow as the Maryland Public Policy Institute, wrote: “It was the peanut farmer from Georgia who pushed the United States toward a market economy, not the one-time actor from California.”

On spending, ironically, Obama’s record has indeed been the “exact opposite” of Reagan’s in one little-noticed respect. Under Obama, federal spending is actually falling, something that never happened under Reagan. Total federal outlays went down 1.7 percent last fiscal year. And in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the CBO projects a scant rise of 0.4 percent — much less than the projected rate of inflation (see Summary Table 2).

To be sure, despite the recent decline in spending, Obama’s deficits are large compared with Reagan’s, in relation to the size of the economy. Reagan’s biggest deficit was 6 percent of GDP. All of Obama’s have been larger than that, and the smallest was 7 percent in fiscal 2012. The CBO projects a deficit of 5.3 percent of GDP for the current fiscal year, but that would still be higher than in all but one of Reagan’s fiscal years.

(One reason for the larger deficits: Reagan — for all his tax-cutting — still enjoyed larger revenues than Obama, relative to the size of the economy. Under Reagan, revenues were 18.4 percent of GDP during his final fiscal year. Obama inherited revenues of only 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2009. They hit 15.8 percent last fiscal year. After his “fiscal cliff” tax deal, raising rates on upper-income households, the CBO projects they will rise to 16.9 percent in the current fiscal year — still lower than in any of Reagan’s eight years.)

Meanwhile, the total debt owed to the public continues to pile up, causing alarm. Measured as a percentage of GDP, it hit 72.5 percent in the last fiscal year and the CBO projects it will rise to over 76 percent this year. During Reagan’s time, it never exceeded 41 percent (in fiscal 1988). So it’s no wonder that leading economists are urging all sides to do more to cut the deficit through “a combination of spending reductions and tax and entitlement reforms.”

If Cruz and his fans want to argue that the current budget mess is entirely Obama’s fault, they are entitled to that opinion. But claiming that Reagan cut spending and debt or that Carter was an “out-of-control” regulator is simply the exact opposite of historical fact.

– Brooks Jackson

Cruz and His Lizard Boots

Cruz and Rand Paul got laughs at the federal government’s expense at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, but the facts don’t jibe with the jokes.

• Cruz accused the EPA of “trying to use a lizard to shut down oil and gas production” in West Texas to set up a one-liner about lizard boots. But the jab — an old campaign joke — no longer has any basis in fact. The federal government decided against listing the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard as “endangered” in June 2012.
• Paul, meanwhile, monkeyed around with the truth when he claimed the federal government is spending $3 million on research “to discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth.” Paul mischaracterized research that aims to improve prevention and treatment of drug abuse in humans.

We’re not here to throw a wet blanket on the levity, but facts are facts.

Cruz, a Texas Republican, recycled a joke about lizard boots from last year’s campaign (at the 26:53 mark of the video). But in setting up his punch line, Cruz misstates the facts to fit his narrative about an out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency.

Cruz, March 16: We need to rein in the EPA. You know, in West Texas, the EPA is trying to use a lizard to shut down oil and gas production. You know my view of lizards? They make darn fine boots.

Cruz told that same joke at a Feb. 1, 2012, candidate forum. The American-Statesman (of Austin, Texas) quoted Cruz at that forum as saying: “That’s our lizard, and they make darned fine boots.”

But here’s the problem: It’s simply not accurate anymore to say that a lizard is threatening oil production in West Texas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (which is in the Interior Department, by the way, not the EPA) proposed listing the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard early last year as “endangered.” At the time, state officials and oil industry representatives warned that such a decision would hurt oil production in the Permian Basin in West Texas. However, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined on June 13, 2012, that it would not put the lizard on the endangered list.

In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar praised the “voluntary conservation efforts” of state agencies and the oil industry to help protect the lizard. Salazar said the cooperation proved “we don’t have to choose between energy development and the protection of our land and wildlife — we can do both.”

State Comptroller Susan Combs called the decision a “major victory for Texas jobs and our energy economy.” The Texas Oil and Gas Association said it was “pleased” with the decision.

So, for now, oil production in West Texas is safe from the threat of lizards. However, a new threat lurks. The Fish and Wildlife Service is now considering listing the Lesser Prairie Chicken as a “threatened species.”

Texas Railroad Commissioner David Porter warned in a Dec. 5, 2012, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that such a designation “would make drilling all but impossible” in the Permian Basin. But he remains hopeful. “Since Texas was able to produce a plan for the lizard that would work for environmentalists and operators alike, there is reason to hope that a similar plan being drafted for the Lesser Prairie Chicken will work,” he wrote.

Perhaps Cruz could have used the Lesser Prairie Chicken as a punch line in a joke about federal government overreach. But we doubt the chicken makes for good boots.

Rand Paul: Monkeys on Meth

In his speech, Paul criticized President Obama for canceling White House tours in response to “sequester” budget cuts and instead offered examples of federal spending that should be cut first. (Obama since had said that he is open to resuming White House tours for student groups.)

Paul, March 14: So what I ask the president, if he wants to let the school children back in the White House, what about the $3 million that we spend studying monkeys on meth? Does it really take $3 million to discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth?

It’s an example the Kentucky Republican has used before, and it is a reliable laugh line, but he misrepresents the research.

Paul’s press office did not return our calls seeking backup for his claim, but it’s true that the National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded more than $3.8 million in federal grants since 2000 to a research project that studies the effect of methamphetamines and other illicit drugs on rhesus monkeys. But as you might imagine, there’s a lot more to the research than trying to discover if “monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth,” as Paul described it.

According to a description of the latest research project, “Primate Model of Drug Abuse: Intervention Strategies,” led by Marilyn E. Carroll at the University of Minnesota, “the main objective of this research is to develop nonhuman primate models (rhesus monkeys) of critical aspects of addiction that will yield useful information for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse.”

Specifically, the most recent experiments seek “to evaluate vulnerability factors in drug abuse, such as sex and phase of the menstrual cycle (hormonal status), that are related to the development and persistence of drug abuse.” As part of the research, rhesus monkeys — used because results are very close to those found in humans — are administered oral drugs such as phencyclidine (PCP) and methamphetamine (meth) and smoked drugs such as cocaine, heroin and meth. Then, “behavioral and pharmacological interventions will be applied as treatment models in males and females and in females during different phases of the menstrual cycle.”

Ultimately, researchers wrote, the research is intended to “further our understanding of addiction-prone vulnerability factors and treatment for drug abuse.”

When we asked about Paul’s comments on the primate research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse released the following statement:

National Institute on Drug Abuse, March 18: Drug abuse and addiction are a major burden to society. In economic costs alone, tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug abuse are estimated to exceed $600 billion dollars annually in the United States related to health care, crime, and losses in productivity—not to mention immeasurable social costs such as those related to child neglect and family dissolution. Behavior therapy is the cornerstone of drug addiction treatments, particularly for those cases where FDA-approved medications do not exist (e.g., cocaine). Unfortunately, such treatments have been only partially successful, calling for additional research to develop more effective treatments.

The researchers in this study are using a primate model to study aspects of addiction that can yield useful information for preventing and treating drug abuse by recognizing critical gender differences in the response to drugs and to treatment, and in the propensity for relapse. Such differences may pertain to hormonal factors that modify the effects of drugs. For example, drug cravings and withdrawal symptoms have been shown to intensify at specific points in the menstrual cycle. This type of research is needed to identify such critical aspects of drug abuse and addiction that could affect the efficacy of drug addiction treatments and thus improve outcomes for both men and women.

One can argue whether it is worthwhile for the federal government to be studying the effects of addictive drugs on monkeys as a way to combat drug addiction for humans. But Paul misrepresents the study by describing it as simply trying to “discover that monkeys, like humans, act crazy on meth.”

– Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley

Palin’s Constitutional Stretch

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said that the Senate was “in violation of Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of our U.S. Constitution” by failing to “pass a budget.” She’s referring to a budget resolution. But that constitutional clause doesn’t mention a budget or a budget resolution, which was not required of the Senate until the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The responses to Palin’s interpretation from constitutional scholars ranged from “completely invalid” to “kind of a stretch.”

Palin made her comments in a March 16 speech at the annual conservative conference (10:30 mark):

Palin, March 16: .. while we’re breaking [middle-class Americans'] budget, the Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to pass a budget. That was how many years ago that they did? How many trillions-in-debt ago? All in violation of Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of our U.S. Constitution. No budget for 4 years. No budget for four years is not just bureaucratic bungling. Refusing to pass a budget is government refusing to declare what it intends to do with the people’s money.

Palin made a similar claim in April 2012, but said it was the president who was in violation of the Constitution, not Congress.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 doesn’t say anything about a Senate budget resolution, which isn’t surprising since it didn’t exist until the 1974 Budget Act. Here’s what the brief clause does say:

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

What does that mean? The Congressional Research Service, in its lengthy analysis of the U.S. Constitution, says that the clause “is a limitation upon the power of the Executive Department and does not restrict Congress in appropriating moneys in the Treasury.” The CRS goes on to say that the Supreme Court “has also recognized that Congress has a wide discretion with regard to the extent to which it shall prescribe details of expenditures for which it appropriates funds and has approved the frequent practice of making general appropriations of large amounts to be allotted and expended as directed by designated government agencies.”

In other words, Congress doesn’t have to spell out how every penny should be spent — it can leave some details to federal agencies — and the president can’t spend money without Congress appropriating it. And Congress has appropriated money every year through appropriation bills, which can be found going back to 1998 on the Library of Congress website.

As for budget resolutions, the Senate has indeed failed to pass onesince 2009 for fiscal 2010. The 1974 Budget Act, which laid out a timetable for the congressional budget process, isn’t strictly enforced  — since the act, Congress has met its budget resolution deadline only six times. And Congress failed to complete action on budget resolutions for fiscal years 1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007, as well as in recent years.

Of course, the Constitution can be interpreted in different ways. Could Palin’s claim — that the Senate violated the Constitution by not passing a budget resolution — be valid?

Not according to Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Tribe told us via email: “Her interpretation is completely invalid.”

Louis Fisher, a constitutional scholar who worked for the Library of Congress for four decades as a specialist in separation of powers and constitutional law, told us Palin’s claim “seems like a big stretch to me.” Fisher noted that “Congress complies with that clause in Article I by appropriating funds each year, even if the Senate does not produce a ‘budget.’ ” He added, as we explained above, that the budget resolution “did not exist until the Budget Act of 1974.”

Douglas O. Linder, professor of law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, said, “I think it’s kind of a stretch to be honest to say it’s a violation of that section. … I think most constitutional scholars and most courts would disagree with her.” Linder added that that’s “not to say there’s absolutely nothing to her argument.” There are various interpretations to constitutional matters, after all.

Palin also said that “[r]efusing to pass a budget is refusing to declare what [Congress] intends to do with the people’s money.” But as Fisher said, Congress passes annual appropriations bills. Budget resolutions aren’t laws — they’re outlines for spending, which is actually set in appropriations bills. As the Washington Postexplained this year, “A budget isn’t necessary.”

The Democratic-controlled Senate Budget Committee argues that the Budget Control Act is indeed the budget for fiscal 2012 and 2013. It says the act “is even more extensive than a traditional budget resolution,” because it’s the law, can be enforced and requires discretionary caps for 10 years.

We’ll leave it to our readers to decide whether the Senate should have passed a budget resolution in recent years. But Palin’s claim that the legislators violated the Constitution doesn’t square with the relatively short history of budget resolutions — and scholars doubt a court would agree with her.

– Lori Robertson

Knight Science Journalism at MIT's Tracker blog writes about The Center for Public Integrity’s latest collaboration with PBS' NewsHour in our Toxic Clout series. 

The story investigated the lack of regulation of the toxic chemical compound chromium (VI) found in the drinking water for Hinkley, Calif., almost 20 years after a class-action lawsuit. The suit was made famous in the Hollywood movie Erin Brockovich. 

Regulators have been slow to act on the problem of chromium (VI) in Hinkley and elsewhere in the country because chemical industry scientists have cast doubt on whether or not the chemical is toxic.

The Center's David Heath and Ronnie Greene partnered with NewsHour science reporter Miles O'Brien to tell this story and others in our Toxic Clout series.

KSJ Tracker praises this collaboration as a way to tell this story that may not have otherwise been told. The blog's author, Deborah Blum, writes:

"In a media world in which these kinds of collaborations increasingly support in-depth reporting, this is an outstanding example of such work - thoroughly reported, beautifully told, and revealing. … It may never be the subject of a movie starring Julia Roberts. But it's a strong reminder that this is not just a story about the lives of people in a little desert community but it's the story of our own lives as well."

President Barack Obama's new nonprofit advocacy group wants to know what its donors do professionally and for whom they work.

But don't expect to ever see the information.

Organizing for Action, launched by former Obama campaign officials earlier this year, confirms it will not publicly release donors' employer and occupation data despite collecting it through its online donation form.

"Our voluntary disclosure will be posted on our website with the exact dollar donation, name and city and state of the donor," Organizing for Action spokeswoman Katie Hogan told the Center for Public Integrity.

As a practical matter, a lack of employer and occupation information makes it more difficult for the public to determine the corporate, union or special interest ties donors may have.

It also complicates confirming their identities, particularly when they have common names. A similar issue arose when Obama's inauguration committee released the names of its donors, but no other identifying information.  

For contributions by standard mail, Organizing for Action asks donors include their "full name, address, phone number and email address" with their checks, according to the group's website. 

Organizing for Action — the successor organization to Obama's re-election campaign — is not compelled by law to release any of its donor information because it was established as a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" nonprofit group and falls under the auspicies of the Internal Revenue Service. It may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but electing politicians cannot be its primary purpose.

In contrast, political candidates and election-focused committees such as super PACs that register with the Federal Election Commission must disclose name, address, city, state, employer and occupation information for all donors giving more than $200 during an election cycle.

Government watchdog groups and campaign finance reform advocates cried foul when Organizing for Action didn't immediately detail whether it would disclose its donors — and if so, to what degree.

They've also criticized the group for what they consider the selling of access to Obama. Individuals who give or raise $500,000 or more will reportedly be invited toquarterly meetings with the president.

Common Cause, for one, called on Obama to shut his lobbying group down entirely. Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center accused Obama of violating the Ethics in Government Act by soliciting money on Organizing for Action's behalf.

With such criticism failing to fizzle, Organizing for Action National Chairman Jim Messina, who served as Obama's 2012 campaign manager, this month declared in a CNN.com opinion column that "every donor who gives $250 or more to this organization will be disclosed on the website with the exact amount they give on a quarterly basis." 

Messina also noted that Organizing for Action has "decided not to accept contributions from corporations, federal lobbyists or foreign donors." It is, however, courting labor unions, which are organized under IRS rules as 501(c)(5) nonprofit corporations.

Most 501(c)(4) nonprofits involved in electioneering or issue advocacy — liberal or conservative — don't release donor information in this manner, nor do they self-impose limitations on the kinds of donations they receive.

Organizing for Action conducted a closed-door "founders' summit" last week in Washington, D.C., as part of a plan to create a nationwide network of Organizing for Action chapters.

Organizing for Action says it has no plans to enter electoral politics, instead exclusively focusing on touting Obama's agenda to the nation. Gun control and immigration reforms have ranked among the issues it's so far pressed.

The Center is publishing two major investigations next week that you can read here and will hear on NPR as well as other partners.

On Sunday, we are partnering with NPR and The Kansas City Star to look into the “drowning” deaths of people working around grain storage bins. The investigation found that federal regulators have routinely slashed fines in these cases, including a 2010 grain bin accident in Mt. Carroll, Ill., that took the lives of a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man. A third worker, 20, barely escaped.

You can read that story Sunday here on our website on and in the Sunday Kansas City Star. NPR’s All Things Considered airs the grain story on Tuesday and you can also hear it on Wednesday's Morning Edition. If you miss either NPR story or the story in the Kansas City Star, we'll share those in next week's Weekly Watchdog.

The grain death story is part of our Hard Labor series on workers’ rights.

Coming midweek as part of our Consider the Source project, the Center will investigate the money behind all expense-paid seminars for federal judges.

Our lengthy investigation reveals that the top sponsors of judicial travel are some of the world’s largest oil and pharmaceutical companies and a relatively small number of right-wing, “free market” nonprofit organizations.

Seminars attended by judges have titles such as the “Moral Foundations of Capitalism,” which is sponsored by a cadre of corporate and nonprofit backers and taught by professors known for their free-market, anti-regulatory views.

The investigation also uncovered instances of judges’ ruling in favor of the sponsors of the seminars they attended. You can read the investigation here, on our website.

He may not be nicknamed the "Big Unit" or able to throw a baseball 100 mph, but Randy Johnson is pitching campaign finance disclosure in ways few Republicans do.

“I don’t see anything inconsistent with full, prompt disclosure and being a Republican,” Johnson, who served as the assistant general counsel at the Federal Election Commission for a year in the 1970s, told the Center for Public Integrity.

“I don’t feel out of place,” added Johnson, now a commissioner in Hennepin County, Minn. “The people who are opposing fuller, more open disclosure are the ones who ought to be feeling out of place.”

First elected in 1978 and re-elected 10 times since, Johnson holds the distinction of being the longest-serving commissioner in the Minnesota county since it was founded in 1852.

In Washington, D.C., Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have repeatedlyblocked Democratic-sponsored legislation that would add new reporting requirements for those that fund political ads. McConnell has argued that the plan is a tactic to intimidate Democrats’ political opponents.

And the FEC, where Johnson used to work, often deadlocks on the most contentious campaign finance issues before it, with Republican commissioners typically allied against expanding disclosure requirements. The six-member commission — five today because of a vacancy — is structured to be evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees.

There has been a surge in political ad spending by nonprofits, which are not legally required to publicly disclosure their donors, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

The Center for Responsive Politics calculated that more than $300 million in political spending was reported to the Federal Election Commission by groups that did not disclose their donors during the 2012 election cycle alone. Conservative groups accounted for more than 80 percent of these expenditures.

And during the 2010 midterms, nonprofits organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code outspent super PACs by a 3-to-2 ratio, a joint Center for Public Integrity and Center for Responsive Politics investigation found. Super PACs are required to disclose their donors.

This trend troubles Johnson.

“If you really want to influence public policy issues ... if you want to be a major actor, I think you have to be willing to let people know that you are trying to be a significant actor," he said.

Added Johnson: “It has the potential to get worse if there are even larger amounts of money that go into supporting candidates or opposing candidates secretly.”

Johnson also warned that the flow of unlimited money and secret money into electoral contests doesn’t stop at the federal level.

“I’m becoming even more concerned about what the effect could be in judicial elections,” Johnson said.

And at the county level?

Johnson said he’s also wary — though he hasn’t seen any problems yet.

“The First Amendment is extremely important to me,” said Johnson, stressing that free speech and campaign finance disclosure are not incompatible. 

“Let everybody put their ideas into the marketplace and usually the better ideas will prevail,” he continued, adding that when “only one group of people have the means to put their ideas in the marketplace, I’ve got less confidence that the best ideas will prevail.”

A recently released advertisement from the American Petroleum Institute says "new energy taxes" are "not a good idea," "short-sighted" and "definitely going to kill some jobs."

The trade group has spent $76,700 touting this message on the Washington, D.C., Fox affiliate during the past two weeks, according to recordsfiled by the station with the Federal Communications Commission.

That sum has purchased 61 television spots, the documents indicate — all during morning, evening or late-night news programs.

The two advertisements on Fox News Sunday alone set the American Petroleum Institute back $10,000 a piece.

The ads hit as lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been debating fiscal measures, including the tax incentives given to the oil and gas industry. This week, the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives both passed a short-term budget deal, but budgetary fights remain in Congress' future.

The American Petroleum Institute is the main trade organization of the oil and natural gas industry and a powerful lobbying force. Its membership includes more than 500 companies, including major oil companies like ExxonMobil, BP America, Chevron and Shell Oil, as well as smaller suppliers and pipeline operators.

In recent years, its annual budget has been in the $170 million to $200 million range, Internal Revenue Service documents indicate. In 2012 alone, it spent more than $7 million on federal lobbying, according to records filed with the U.S. Senate.

In 2010, the group also established a political action committee. According to records filed with the Federal Election Commission this week, its PAC has raised $36,800 so far this year and doled out $2,000 to federal lawmakers: $1,000 a piece to Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who won't stand for re-election until 2016.

A Mississippi school district under scrutiny for excessive punishment of black students has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to enact new disciplinary policies, train school police officers in “bias-free” policing and stop involving officers in minor campus behavioral disputes.

“We commend the Meridian Public School District for taking this huge stop toward ensuring that its schools are safe and welcoming to all students – and that education is a road to success instead of a pipeline to prison,” said Jocelyn Samuels, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Right Division.

At a Friday briefing with reporters, Samuels said the division hopes that school districts nationwide will look to the Meridian agreement as a model for addressing complaints of overly harsh and sometimes racially disproportionate discipline.  As the Center for Public Integrity reported previously, Meridian, Miss., police told federal investigators that they were functioning as a “taxi service” to ferry students to jail for allegations of defiance and disrespect.

Separately, the civil rights division still is pursuing a lawsuit it filed last October against the city of Meridian, Lauderdale County and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services. The suit alleges that criminal-justice and law-enforcement officials were jailing students for days without probable cause hearings and without sufficient access to counsel to explain their rights.

Samuels said the division hopes that “by virtue of implementation of the consent decree,” Meridian’s school district will now stop sending so many students to jails and into the criminal-justice system.

“Some of the infractions we saw (in Meridian) were failure to tuck in one’s shirt,” Samuels said.

She and other division attorneys detailed what they found in an investigation that stemmed from parents’ complaints of disproportionate suspensions and arrests of Meridian’s black students. About 86 percent of the district’s 6,100 students are African-American.

Federal attorneys found that Meridian’s black students were five times more likely to be removed from school as punishment than white students referred to supervisors because of comparable disciplinary problems.

The new agreement, or consent decree, to make changes in Meridian’s disciplinary policies must now be ratified by a U.S. district court. The plan is to incorporate it into an existing federal school desegregation decree that goes back to the 1960s.

In a statement, the Meridian Public School District said its board of trustees unanimously approved entering into the consent decree with the Department of Justice and private plaintiffs.

 “Discipline, in the past, has been more assertive and focused on consequences,” Meridian Public School District Superintendent Alvin Taylor said. “But now we will look into the cause of student behavior and put measures into place to help prevent those misbehaviors.”

The district this year began to employ a “positive behavioral intervention and support” model for dealing with student misbehavior.  The idea is to reward good behavior, and to use counseling and other types of intervention to get to the root causes of students’ problems at school.

The consent agreement spells out, in detail, alternatives to be taken prior to resorting to suspensions of students and a system of appeals and meetings to ensure progress toward improving behavior. It also places specific limits on police intervention in Meridian’s schools.

The agreement says: “Incidents involving public order offenses committed by students, including disorderly conduct, disturbance/disruption of schools or public assembly, loitering, trespass, profanity, dress code violations, and fighting that does not involve physical injury or a weapon, shall be considered school discipline issues to be handled by school officials, rather than criminal law issues warranting MPD (Meridian Police Department) involvement, unless MPD involvement is necessary to protect the physical safety of students or school personnel, or public safety.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., has this evening introduced an amendment to the Senate budget bill that would require senators to electronically file campaign finance reports, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

The move comes a month after Tester re-introduced legislation toward the same goal.

Senate campaign committees are the only federal political committees not required to file their financial disclosure reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission. As a result, it can take weeks, if not months, to get detailed information about who is bankrolling senators and Senate hopefuls.

"This is one other way to tackle this problem, trying to get senators and Senate candidates to file online," Tester spokeswoman Andrea Helling told the Center for Public Integrity. "We are pushing for a vote but whether or not we get one is to be determined."

Tester's e-filing amendment is one of more than 600 amendments have been filed as part of the budget bill's "vote-o-rama," though few will ultimately receive an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

With numerous amendments of all sorts being offered, it’s difficult to know at this juncture which ones will receive consideration, said Matt McAlvanah, communications director for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

“In general, she’s been supportive of transparency,” McAlvanah said of Murray.

Representatives for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., could not be immediately reached for comment.

Tester's "Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act," S. 375, presently has 28 bipartisan cosponsors, including Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Thad Cochran, R-Miss. and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

"It's 2013 and high-time for the Senate to bring its campaign finance reporting into the 21st century," Tester said when he re-introduced the bill in February.

Senior Political Reporter Dave Levinthal contributed to this report.

MT. CARROLL, Ill. – Will Piper and Alex Pacas were being buried alive.

It was July 28, 2010, just before 10 a.m., and the young men strained to breathe as wet corn piled up around them in Bin No. 9 at the Haasbach LLC grain storage facility. A co-worker, Wyatt Whitebread, had already been pulled under.

The ordeal in Bin No. 9 played out over 13 hours as hundreds of townspeople maintained a vigil outside. In the end, Whitebread, 14, and Pacas, 19, were dead. Piper, 20, avoided suffocation by inches.

Whitebread, compact and athletic, was happy to have summer work. Pacas, slight and musical, was an aspiring electrical engineer just days away from returning to classes at Hamilton Technical College in Davenport, Iowa. He’d started at Haasbach the day before.

“He prayed for his life,” survivor Piper said of Pacas’s last moments. “He said all he wanted to do is see his brothers graduate high school. And then he spouted off the Lord’s Prayer very quickly, and shortly after that one last chunk of corn came flowing down and went around his face.”

The three had been hired to keep corn flowing in the bin, one of 13 in the Haasbach complex on Mill Road in Mt. Carroll, population 1,700. They’d been sent in with pick axes and shovels that morning to break up corn piled 10 to 24 feet high in the bin and knock clumps from the walls. No one had told them they needed to wear safety harnesses – stored in a red shed nearby – to keep from sinking.

“I had no idea that someone could get trapped and die in the corn,” Piper told investigators with the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Grain storage in the United States is surging, in part because of the boom in biofuels. Yet at worksites, farmers and commercial operators keep making the same mistakes. Workers, some of them young, keep drowning in grain or getting hurt.

The practice known as "walking down grain" is illegal. Federal penalties for employers who permit or require it, however, are routinely pared. Since 1984, OSHA has cut initial fines for grain-entrapment deaths by nearly 60 percent overall, an analysis of enforcement data by the Center for Public Integrity and NPR shows. And even in the worst instances of employer misconduct, no one has gone to jail.

Twenty-six people died in entrapments in 2010, the worst year in decades. At least 498 people have suffocated in grain bins since 1964, according to data analyzed for the Center and NPR by William Field, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University.

At least 165 more people drowned in wagons, trucks, rail cars or other grain storage structures. Almost 300 were engulfed but survived. Twenty percent of the 946 people caught in grain were under 18.

“At some point we’re going to have to decide whether these incidents are just accidental … [or] somebody’s really making horrendous decisions that approach a criminal level,” said Field, who has studied entrapments since 1978 and served as an expert witness in grain-death lawsuits and as an industry and OSHA consultant. “It’s intentional risk-taking on the part of the managers or someone in a supervisory capacity that ends up in some horrific incidents. The bottom line is if you ask them why they did it, it was because it was more profitable to do it that way.”

After the Mt. Carroll accident, OSHA sought to make an example of the farming families that owned Haasbach by proposing a $555,000 fine for 25 alleged safety violations.

The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division tacked on a $68,125 fine for the illegal employment of Wyatt Whitebread and three others who were too young to be working in a hazardous setting like a grain bin. OSHA sent its case to the Department of Justice and the state’s attorney in Carroll County, Ill., for possible criminal prosecution.

Although Haasbach paid the full amount for the child labor violations, the OSHA fine was reduced to $200,000. The Justice Department declined to prosecute, according to a Labor Department document provided to the Center in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The state’s attorney “indicated lack of interest” in pressing charges, the document says.

Haasbach has been dissolved. Its officers declined through their lawyer to comment.

In an interview at their home, Wyatt Whitebread’s parents spoke of their lingering disquiet. They have brought a wrongful-death lawsuit against the principals of Haasbach and the company that leased the facility at the time of the accident, Consolidated Grain and Barge Co.

“I guess I’m vengeful,” said Gary Whitebread, a large-animal veterinarian. “I want [the defendants’] life to be affected like mine. I want them not to be able to go about their daily business like nothing happened.”

“You know, if nothing happens of this, then boys that age are expendable,” said Carla Whitebread, a high school Spanish teacher. “There’s no recourse for it. It didn’t hurt the company at all. And if nothing else happens, then why not hire 14-, 15, 16-year-old boys and just put them in there . . . what’s the difference? It’s not going to cost you anything.”

Panic in Bin No. 9

Until Haasbach LLC acquired it in 2005, the grain-storage complex where Wyatt Whitebread and Alex Pacas died had been owned and operated by Consolidated Grain and Barge, a Louisiana firm with grain operations in 70 locations, mostly in the Midwest. The complex, about 10 miles east of the Iowa line, has a storage capacity of 2 million bushels.

Haasbach was formed by three farming families in northwestern Illinois; two of them, the Haases and the Harbachs, had operational control of the Mt. Carroll facility. After taking charge – “We purchased it for the storage of our grain rather than building more storage at home,” Willard Harbach explained in a deposition – Haasbach leased it back to Consolidated, which handled the weighing and inspection of the corn and dictated its condition. Haasbach’s and Consolidated’s corn was intermingled.

The corn crop stored in the summer of 2010, harvested the year before, was unusually wet, making it prone to clumping. People had to be sent into the bins to break it up; the Haasbach manager, Matthew Schaffner, needed extra help.

That summer, Schaffner’s daughter, Marti Jean, loaded trucks and cleaned out bins at Haasbach for $8 an hour. Then 15, M.J., as she was called, recruited her friend, Wyatt Whitebread, to work in the bins. He started July 19. Will Piper started the next day. At Piper’s suggestion, Matt Schaffner brought on Alex Pacas – known to friends as Paco – on July 27.

“Our job was to break up the rotten chunks of corn that prevented the corn from flowing into the center of the bin,” Piper said in an interview. “The training I received was just from Wyatt, telling me how to break up the corn, the best way that he did it. Later that day Matt came up and just kind of expressed to stay away from the center hole in the bin so that we didn’t get sucked up into that.

“But there was no safety training or anything like that.”

On July 28, Piper, Pacas, Whitebread and a fourth worker, 15-year-old Chris Lawton, showed up around 7 a.m. and were sent into Bin No. 9. It was a hot, humid day. Conditions inside the bin were oppressive.

About 9:45 a.m., Matt Schaffner opened the second of three holes in the bottom of the bin with the aim of improving the corn’s flow.

“It created kind of a quicksand effect,” Piper said. “So we worked around it and we were aware of it, and after a while … Wyatt ended up getting caught up in it and started screaming for help. Me and Alex went in after him, and we each grabbed one side of him under his armpits and started dragging him out, and got pretty close to the edge of the quicksand and then we started sinking in with him.”

Lawton scrambled out of the bin and went for help; he was so distraught he could barely speak. M.J. Schaffner turned off the conveyor that was running under the bin and making matters worse by drawing down the corn. She told her father that Piper, Pacas and Whitebread were stuck.

“And it was just me and Alex standing there up to our chests completely, just trapped in the corn,” Piper said. “And Wyatt was underneath. I was hopeful that he was still alive, but at this point I’m pretty sure that he suffocated pretty quickly. The pressure underneath the corn was just too great.”

Matt Schaffner climbed into the bin and began digging frantically to reach Wyatt. “After, like, 30 seconds of digging he realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere and there was no hope,” Piper said. “So he set his shovel down and I told him to go back outside so that the rescuers knew what bin to go in.”

Schaffner climbed out of the bin. The corn kept flowing around Piper and Pacas. “After a little bit [Pacas’s] hand was sticking up above the grain and I could just see his scalp, and his hand stopped moving,” Piper said. “And the corn was up to my chin at that point. And it was slowly trickling down … and I was about to be covered, too.”

Piper believes he was saved by the two inches of height he had on Pacas and a bottomless plastic bucket a firefighter had jammed over his head to keep the corn away from his face. The rescuers began vacuuming away the corn, a process that took about six hours. They were able to yank Piper out by the arms at about 4 p.m. He was put on stretcher and airlifted to a hospital in Rockford, 60 miles away.

Outside the Haasbach complex, a crowd was gathering. “We just sat on the grass, crying, and just waited and more people came,” said Lisa Jones, a mother of six who knew Whitebread, Pacas and Piper. “Church people came and brought food and water.”

Teenagers, many of them Whitebread’s classmates at West Carroll High School, filled the parking lot at the Land of Oz, a convenience store across the highway.

Jones stayed with Pacas’s mother, Annette, as the hours passed. Jones’s husband, Matt, a funeral home owner and the Carroll County coroner, was getting regular updates on the rescue effort and relayed the information to his wife by cell phone. “We knew it wasn’t good,” Lisa Jones said. Rescuers cut a series of triangular-shaped holes into the side of the steel bin, near the bottom, to help drain the corn. As it spilled out onto the ground, volunteers shoveled it away.

Word came that one of the workers was alive, though “they didn’t know which one,” Jones said. “And so all of the families were just sitting there, waiting, and then, finally, we knew Will was alive. And then they brought Will out and … he had, like, indentations all over his skin from corn.”

“The chaplain called us over and he said they got Will out and he was face to face with Alex and Alex is deceased,” Annette Pacas said. It took another six hours for Alex’s and Wyatt’s bodies to be recovered.

“One of the things as a mom I’ve really struggled with is that my son died in terror,” Pacas said. “He didn’t die in peace.”

Gary Whitebread fixates on a detail he missed in the days prior to his son’s death.

After Wyatt broached the idea of working at Haasbach, Gary drove to the site. He saw workers sweeping corn from a near-empty bin; that, he understood, was what Wyatt would be doing. He allowed Wyatt to take the job.

In the Whitebread household, Gary did the laundry. During the brief period Wyatt worked at Haasbach, “my washer would be full of corn,” Gary said. “And I’d reach in his pockets and there’d be corn in his pockets. And that should have been a red light to me. I mean, if you’re sweeping an empty bin out or standing in corn maybe up to your knees, you’re not going to have corn in your pockets.”

Piper, the survivor, continues to struggle. “I guess the incident itself wasn’t the worst part about it,” he said. “It was the fact that I lost Wyatt and Alex. … They were both like family, like brothers, to me.”

Tall and thin, with close-cropped red hair, Piper was a self-described “band geek” in high school who held jobs at the Dairy Queen in Mt. Carroll, the Metform Machine Components factory in nearby Savanna and a Minnesota ski resort before signing on at Haasbach. He and the dark-haired Pacas, also a musician, were inseparable.

“He was the one person I shared everything with,” Piper said. His goal is to raise money for a permanent headstone for Pacas’s grave at the Oak Hill Cemetery; a teetering, weather-beaten plastic marker stands there today.

Wyatt Whitebread, younger and sandy-haired, was a mischievous charmer. “He would gather people to play baseball or soccer or blow up my backyard,” Lisa Jones said, laughing. “I spent a lot of time saying, ‘Wyatt!’ And he’d just smile real big and then you weren’t mad anymore.”

Aftermath: citations and litigation

The OSHA investigation into the Mt. Carroll accident began the evening of July 28 and culminated not quite six months later with the issuance of three citations alleging 25 violations by Haasbach, including failing to train the four young workers in Bin No. 9 in “safe work practices” and failing to turn off the conveyor under the bin.

Twelve violations were classified as willful, suggesting Haasbach either disregarded or was “plainly indifferent” to the law. An internal OSHA document obtained by the Center and NPR offered justification for the willful violations: The people in charge of Haasbach had worked around grain for 30-plus years, the document says, and had heard about grain entrapments.

All told, OSHA wanted Haasbach to pay $555,000 in penalties.As often happens, the final amount was whittled down.

A Center-NPR analysis of OSHA data shows that 179 people died in grain entrapments at commercial facilities – bins, rail cars, etc. – from 1984 through 2012. The fines initially proposed in these cases totaled $9.2 million but were cut to $3.8 million, a reduction of 59 percent. Given that some of these cases are still open, the fines could drop lower still.

The five largest fines, which ranged from $530,000 to $1.6 million, were cut by 50 to 97 percent.

Haasbach wound up paying $200,000 for the violations in Mt. Carroll, a 64-percent discount.

In an interview, OSHA chief David Michaels explained: “We had them open their books and we determined that $200,000 was the appropriate fine. The company also agreed to go out of business and to notify OSHA if they ever went back into business, so we could conduct very strict oversight of them.”

Carla Whitebread was unimpressed.

“I mean, for the company, that amount of money doesn’t make any difference at all,” she said. Indeed, data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, show that the seven-member Harbach Family Partnership received $6.5 million in federal farm subsidies from 1995 through 2011, Haas and his son $1.4 million.

“When I first saw the fine of half a million, I bawled,” Annette Pacas said. “A half a million dollars and you killed two kids and ruined a third. And now it’s down to [$200,000] … It’s disgusting.”

The Whitebreads, Annette Pacas and Will Piper have lawsuits pending against Haasbach and its lessee, Consolidated Grain and Barge. In court documents, each defendant blames the other for the accident.

Haasbach partner Robert Haas faulted Consolidated for storing corn with a moisture content exceeding 15 percent.

“They would always put grain in the bins in Mt. Carroll at 16 percent,” Haas told Kevin Durkin, lawyer for the Whitebread and Pacas families, in a deposition. “You get over 15 you almost know you’re going to have problems. [The corn] starts to rot. It will mold. It will stand up. It will just, you know, do everything that you don’t want it to do.”

Haas said he considered the facility a “farm entity,” beyond OSHA’s jurisdiction. Under questioning by Department of Labor lawyer Denise Hockley-Cann, however, he acknowledged that no crops or livestock had ever been raised on the property.

In the Labor Department deposition, Haas described Consolidated as “a commercial grain buyer” and suggested that it bore responsibility for the job site. “Whatever has got to be done with the grain, Consolidated calls the shots,” he said.

Another partner, Willard Harbach, testified that he knew safety harnesses were kept on site but thought they were used to protect workers from falls, not to keep them from sinking into piles of corn. Both he and Haas said they were unaware that teenagers, some underage, worked in the bins.

“I now know that it’s illegal” to allow a 14-year-old to work in a commercial bin, Harbach said in a deposition taken by Durkin. Harbach added, incorrectly, that if Haasbach were a farm entity – which, in his eyes, it was – employing a 14-year-old “would not be illegal.” The Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits children younger than 16 from working in hazardous settings on farms.

Haasbach maintains that the families of Whitebread and Pacas are entitled only to workers’ compensation, not damages, because comp is the exclusive remedy for employees under Illinois law. Should this argument prevail, each family would receive only funeral expenses, capped at a certain amount. Gary Whitebread said he understood that Wyatt’s death would be worth $5,000 under workers’ comp – not enough to pay for the funeral.

In its answer to the lawsuits, Consolidated – whose representatives declined to be interviewed for this story – denied that it managed the Mt. Carroll facility, although it kept a small office there and had employees on site.

“The danger of ‘walking down grain’ without employing proper safety precautions was known to Consolidated Grain and Barge and its employees involved in grain handling and grain storage,” the company stated in a court document. “However, Consolidated Grain and Barge was not involved in grain handling in the operation of Bin No. 9 on the date of the occurrence.”

Consolidated contended that Whitebread’s and Pacas’s negligence contributed to their deaths, Piper’s negligence to his near-suffocation.

In his own deposition, Will Piper said there was no way the Consolidated employees could have missed what was happening: He and other workers were entering bins without harnesses. “They’re not stupid,” Piper said. “They watch us climb the ladders. What else would we be doing?”

Matt Schaffner told the Labor Department’s Hockley-Cann that he did the hiring and handed out work assignments at Haasbach. He testified that he cautioned Wyatt Whitebread, Alex Pacas, Will Piper and Chris Lawton to stay away from the center of the inverted cone inside any of the bins and to wear dust masks.

Schaffner spent about five minutes on safety training for each of the workers, he said: “It was a pretty straightforward job.” The harnesses hanging in the nearby shed weren’t discussed, Schaffner said.

Annette Pacas finds this inexcusable. “The harnesses that would have saved these kids were in a shed on the property, collecting dust and cobwebs,” she said.

Pacas’s sister, Catherine Rylatt, was so shaken by the accident that she formed the Grain Handling Safety Coalition and speaks regularly at agricultural conferences. She believes the Haasbach partners got off lightly.

“If the criminal case is gone, I think it’s a missed opportunity and it pisses me off,” said Rylatt, who lives near Dallas.

Carla Whitebread, a retired Army major and helicopter pilot, said she understood that when Consolidated owned the operation, prior to selling it to Haasbach in 2005, the company used its safety equipment. “And to the best of my knowledge, on the day that Haasbach took over they just quit doing it. I don’t know why they wouldn’t have done it,” she said. “And I can’t believe that they put the boys in there, being so young.”

Said her husband:  “Anybody that worked in that office that knew kids were going into that bin without safety equipment should be held responsible. This is a multi-, multi-failure thing.”

‘Cost of Doing Business’

OSHA’s Michaels says the grain storage industry was on the agency’s radar even before Mt. Carroll. “We’ve been very, very hard on this industry,” he said. “We now do triple the number of inspections that we were doing four years ago. We continue to issue fines in excess of $100,000 over and over again.”

On May 29, 2009, 14 months before the Haasbach accident, 17-year-old Cody Rigsby suffocated in a grain bin in Haswell, Colo. Like Wyatt Whitebread and Alex Pacas, Rigsby became entrapped while walking down the grain; three other teenagers, exposed to the same hazard, made it out alive.

OSHA proposed a $1.6 million fine against the bin’s owner, Tempel Grain Elevators LLC of Wiley, Colo. The U.S. attorney’s office in Denver brought criminal charges against Tempel, and a plea agreement was reached in 2011: the company would pay $50,000 to settle the OSHA case and another $500,000 – all of which would go to Rigsby’s family – to close out the criminal case. It would serve five years’ probation.

OSHA characterized the case as a victory.

Victim advocate Ron Hayes, who believes the criminal case against Tempel should have resulted in jail time, sees it as a failure. Authorities “had the perfect opportunity to send a clear message out to the grain facilities and CEOs of this country that we will not stand by and let you continue to kill our workers,” he said.

For Hayes, it’s personal. Around 1:30 p.m. on Oct. 22, 1993, he got a call at the X-ray clinic he managed in Mobile, Ala. His 19-year-old son, Patrick, had suffocated in a Florida grain bin. When Hayes and his wife, Dot, arrived at the scene, around 5 p.m., “they had just taken Pat’s body to the morgue,” Hayes said. “And, you know, I was really surprised because the company was still working. And I felt like this was a major disaster and I couldn’t understand why they were still working and didn’t feel like there was anything wrong.”

Pat Hayes had been sent into the bin, operated by Showell Farms Inc., with two other men to “walk down” the corn – keep it flowing. A screw-like device known as an auger, used to move corn out of the bin and into trucks, was running at the time, loosening the pile. Pat Hayes sank in up to his knees, and his co-workers weren’t able to pull him out as the corn began to cover him.

Showell Farms paid a $42,000 fine for Pat Hayes’s death, 92 percent less than the $530,000 recommended by the OSHA inspector in the case.  What began as willful violations were downgraded to “serious” ones, a move an OSHA reviewer later deemed inappropriate.

“After a careful in-depth review of this case,” the agency’s William Mason wrote in a confidential 1994 memorandum, “it is my strong belief that willful violations occurred.” The Labor secretary at the time, Robert Reich, publicly apologized to Ron Hayes.

Hayes left the X-ray clinic and became a full-time advocate for families of workers killed on the job. In that capacity he met with Michaels and three other top OSHA officials in October 2010, three months after the Mt. Carroll accident.

“And in that meeting, [OSHA chief of staff] Deb Berkowitz says, ‘Ronnie, can you help us figure out how we can stop these workplace deaths and injuries?’” Hayes recalled. “I said, ‘The only way you’re going to fix this is to put somebody in prison.’ ”

That has proven difficult. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, an employer who commits flagrant violations that cause or contribute to a worker’s death faces at most six months behind bars, a misdemeanor. By comparison, some environmental crimes – polluting a river or killing an endangered animal, for instance – are felonies.

“Sending a 14-year-old into a grain bin without proper safety equipment should be as unacceptable as discharging a pollutant into a waterway that kills fish,” said Jane Barrett, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Labor Department data show that there have been at least 19 fatal and non-fatal grain entrapment incidents since 2001 that drew willful citations, which trigger consideration of federal charges. Eight of these cases were referred to federal prosecutors. Three resulted in charges and guilty pleas, though no jail time; one is still under review.

Gary Shapiro, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, had no comment on the Haasbach case, a spokesman said. Carroll County State’s Attorney Scott Brinkmeier declined to be interviewed.

Brinkmeier could have sought involuntary manslaughter charges against the Haasbach partners, said J. Steven Beckett, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law.

“I think it’s a case that should have been prosecuted,” Beckett said. “Somehow, these deaths are just a cost of doing business.”

Chris Hamby contributed to this story.

Should farms be regulated?

Corn storage on farms and in commercial structures doubled between 1978 and 2010, climbing from 5.4 billion bushels to a record 10.93 billion bushels, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With growth has come tragedy: worker entrapment deaths in corn or other grains – wheat, barley, soybeans – hit a recent peak in 2010, a Center for Public Integrity-NPR investigation found. In at least 51 incidents that year, 26 bodies were recovered. More than two-thirds of the entrapments occurred on farms, as did four of six incidents involving workers under 16.

Commercial operations are overseen by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Most farms aren’t – but perhaps should be, some say.

“We’ve got farmers who are building more space and bigger space, and it’s going to cause more issues,” Jeff Adkisson, executive vice president of the Grain and Feed Association of Illinois, which represents commercial operators, said at a grain bin safety conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last fall. “I think it’s time for industry, for government, for all of us to pause and have the conversation again about who is exempt and who is not exempt from some of the standards.”

Adkisson and others in the grain-storage industry have said for years that the bulk of entrapments occur on farms. This is based largely on the work of Purdue University professor William Field, who has put 70 percent of the incidents with reported locations on farms, 30 percent at commercial facilities.

But the Center and NPR found 60 fatal and five non-fatal cases in an OSHA enforcement database that were not included in Field’s studies. All occurred at commercial operations.

In response, Field redid his numbers. He found that 52 percent of the entrapments with known locations took place on farms, 48 percent at commercial facilities.

The number of commercial grain bins in the U.S. has plummeted, from a peak of 15,305 in 1979 to 8,801 at the end of 2012, according to records kept since 1978. Commercial storage capacity rose from 6.99 billion bushels to 10.2 billion bushels during the same period.

On-farm grain storage increased from a low of 10.9 billion bushels in 1997 to 13 billion bushels today, according to records kept since 1987. USDA data show that about 306,000 farms have one or more storage structures, Field said. “Some of those may have 20 structures,” he said. “So we’re talking about several million facilities."

Randy Gordon, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, said his group and its state affiliates have redoubled safety efforts. “The OSHA standards, we think, are very adequate to address this danger,” he said. “There was an unfortunate spike [in deaths] that occurred but we have hopefully turned that corner now and we’re on the downward trend.”

Farms –- most of which are unregulated by OSHA –- remain the great unknown: Are their owners doing enough to prevent grain entrapments? Do they know how?

Bringing them into the fold wouldn’t be easy.

During a question-and-answer session at the Cedar Rapids conference, Tiffin, Iowa, farmer James Meade rose.

“The bottom line to me is, don’t pass a law that I won’t obey because I won’t obey it,” Meade said, clearly exercised.  “I’ll tell anybody that. I’ll tell the OSHA guy that comes up to my place I’m not going to do it.” The statement drew murmurs of disapproval – and no applause – from the audience.

Meade’s sentiment was echoed by thousands of farmers in 2011 and 2012 in response to a proposed Department of Labor rule that would have limited the work activities of children on farms beyond existing restrictions on hazardous jobs – no driving tractors, for example. Federal law already includes age restrictions for grain-bin work on farms (no one younger than 16) and at commercial sites (no one younger than 18).

The rulemaking, according to the department’s Wage and Hour Division, was driven by studies showing that “children are significantly more likely to be killed while performing agricultural work than while working in all other industries combined.”

This written comment was typical: “From your bureaucratic overreach in an area of family farming life that the government has NO business being in, you are trampling my rights … YOU don’t love my child any more than I do … You people are nuts!”

Chastened, the department announced the withdrawal of the rule last April. “To be clear,” it said in a statement, “this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration.”

Catherine Rylatt, who became a well-traveled grain-safety advocate after her 19-year-old nephew, Alex Pacas, died in an Illinois bin in 2010, has grown weary of employer rationalization and resistance.

At a conference in St. Louis last month, Rylatt tried to impart her safety message to an 18-year-old member of the Future Farmers of America. The young man pushed back, saying he didn’t think farmers would follow even the simplest of rules imposed by government.

“The kid is 18, and he’s already got the attitude of a 60-year-old farmer,” Rylatt said. “It’s scary, is what it is.”

ATLANTA — Georgia legislators split the difference when they toughened juvenile justice laws in 1994. They stiffened sentences for the most violent crimes, sending some teens to adult prisons. But lawmakers also gave courts discretion to keep some of the serious offenders in the state’s juvenile facilities.

Two decades later, though, a new data analysis shows Georgia's juvenile system has turned out just as high a percentage of repeat offenders as its adult prisons. Whether teens spent time in youth detention centers or adult lock-ups for targeted violent crimes, the analysis found, their felony recidivism rates have been virtually identical.

The findings come as Georgia policy-makers debate proposed reforms intended to rehabilitate non-violent juveniles in their communities rather than in state detention. The move would free up costly bed space so that violent teens could remain behind bars — prisoners, some say, of a system that remains ill-equipped to help them straighten out their lives.

Some Georgia law-enforcement leaders believe violent juveniles should be locked up and off the streets, at least for a while. “The best way I can tell you to protect the public is to take [violent youths] out of society,” says Douglas County District Attorney David McDade.

McDade, a key member of a state panel studying juvenile justice reform in Georgia, says he doesn’t oppose rehabilitation programs for violent offenders. But scarce public resources must be spent first, he said, on other young offenders who are more likely to mend their ways.

Other observers contend Georgia cannot continue to lock up violent youths in the hope that they’ll turn over a new leaf upon release.

"Do we believe that we can change people when they're younger so they don't commit further crimes?” said Tom Rawlings, the state’s child advocate under ex-Gov. Sonny Perdue. “If that is the belief, then we have to start acting like it.”

Otherwise, Rawlings said, "we're essentially spending a ton of money locking up offenders in expensive hotels and then, at the end of their stay, telling them, 'We'll leave the light on for you.'"  

Beginnings

In 1994, as part of the School Safety and Juvenile Justice Reform Act, Georgia legislators created dual tracks for youths 13 to 16 years old who were charged with one of the the so-called Seven Deadly Sins: murder, armed robbery with a firearm, rape, voluntary manslaughter, aggravated sexual battery, aggravated sodomy and aggravated child molestation. Adult courts would assume exclusive jurisdiction to prosecute and sentence those offenders. Prosecutors, before indictment, could transfer them to Juvenile Court, where they would face a maximum sentence of five years (up from 18 months in the previous law.)

Critics feared the get-tough tactics would misfire, fostering a new class of career criminals by locking up salvageable youths side-by-side with hardened offenders in adult prisons. "You are creating an animal," Rep. Denmark Groover (D-Macon) warned colleagues at the time.

More than half of all such cases were returned to juvenile authorities under SB440, as the 1994 law is still known, according to the analysis, a joint project of the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Youth Today and the Center for Public Integrity. In general, that's because court officials believed those offenders’ cases were less severe and the juvenile system theoretically promised them a better chance of turning their lives around.

But that has not turned out to be the case. Overall, about one in four youths confined for an SB440 crime committed another felony within three years of release, according to the analysis. The rate was 24.6 percent for offenders leaving a youth facility and 24.7 percent for those released from an adult prison.

Just as alarming, recidivism for offenders leaving juvenile detention for lesser crimes — a rate that the state calculates more broadly — is even higher.

"The DJJ recidivism rates are terrible, and clearly suggest we are doing something wrong — both wasting taxpayers' money and helping neither the young offender nor protecting the public," state Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver (D-Decatur) said.

Behind the numbers

The JJIE analysis looked at the post-release records of 625 youths who served time between 1994 and 2008 for armed robbery, aggravated sex crimes or other SB440 offenses. Recidivists were defined as those offenders who, within three years of release, committed another felony for which they were subsequently convicted.

Armed robbers, the most common SB440 offenders, were substantially more likely to reoffend if they were transferred to Georgia's juvenile system, the analysis found. The recidivism rate was 44 percent for armed robbers released from juvenile detention and 31 percent for those leaving an adult prison.

Age may explain why recidivism was not lower for the juvenile system than for adult prisons. Statistics show juveniles' crime rate increases steadily as they get older, peaking at 18 or 19 and then declining precipitously as they become adults and mature in their 20s. SB440 offenders serve longer sentences in adult prisons — often a 10-year minimum — but no more than five years in the juvenile system. On average, the analysis found SB440 offenders were 24 on release from an adult prison but just 15 when leaving a juvenile facility.

Despite the age differences, there may be another reason why the juvenile system’s recidivism rates weren’t lower, said Rawlings, the former child advocate who is a longtime critic of SB440. Detention in either an adult or youth prison, he said, won't guarantee rehabilitation if a juvenile offender returns to the same environment and peer group upon release.

"The question should be: What can you do for these children to give them a fresh start?" said Rawlings, a former juvenile court judge. "You can't just say we're going to lock them up and they're going to learn a lesson."

Juvenile justice expert Jeffrey Butts said he's not surprised that JJIE's analysis found the similar recidivism rates. "It's a finding I would predict in all states," he said.

In part, that's because society holds a false expectation about juvenile lockups, "a fantasy that incarceration is treatment," said Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "We lock them up and then we convince ourselves it's good for the kids too."

Some prison rehabilitation programs can be effective, Butts said, but "there's nothing inherent about locking someone up and controlling their movement that is rehabilitative." In fact, recent research shows that imprisonment longer than six months has no effect on whether a juvenile commits another crime later on.

Butts also cautioned against reading too much into recidivism comparisons without knowing why young offenders were prosecuted in one system or the other.

"Without context, it doesn't mean anything," he said.

Community-based treatment

The Georgia Legislature is now considering recommendations of a juvenile justice task force to move most non-violent juvenile offenders out of secure detention into programs based in their communities — potentially saving the state $70,000 a year or more for each youth.

The panel hasn't talked much about sentencing alternatives for SB440 offenders. But task force co-chairman Michael Boggs, an appellate court judge and former Republican legislator, said he's open to exploring "evidence-based" alternatives that other states have found effective.

Georgia's recidivism rates show clearly that rehabilitation efforts in youth prisons have been ineffective, Boggs said. "We know 'Scared Straight' doesn't work," he said. "We know boot camps don't work."

The trick would be overcoming lawmakers' fears that they'd be labeled "soft on crime" if they vote to return violent juvenile offenders [to their communities for treatment.

Proponents of alternative sentencing also must challenge the notion that violent offenders are beyond help "so the only goal should be to protect the public — meaning lock him up with no attempts at rehabilitation," Rep. Oliver, a member of the task force, said.

Perhaps the bigger obstacle is a lack of commitment to spend money on 'bad' teenagers," she said. "Most General Assembly members don't believe they know any families with teenagers who are actually impacted by SB 440."

Still, Boggs said, policy-makers may soon be ready to have that debate.

"I really think we are on the verge of going into some difficult areas that heretofore might have been politically impossible," he said.

Findings

Under SB440, offenders 16 or younger automatically go before a Superior Court judge if they are accused of one of those seven crimes. If a judge signs off, however, prosecutors and defense attorneys can agree — based on the defendant's mental health, education, family background or other circumstances — to send a case to juvenile authorities. The juvenile system may hold offenders for up to five years or until the offender’s 21^st birthday.

State officials have reported increasing recidivism among all youths leaving juvenile prisons in recent years as the detained population specifically has grown older and more violent, a product of more commitments and longer sentences for SB440 offenses. The state Department of Juvenile Justice says youths 18 and older — who were just 7 percent of its prison population in 2000 — now make up 40 percent. The portion who are labeled as "designated felons," whose offense would be a serious crime if committed by an adult, is now 96 percent, up from about one-third a decade ago.

The trend may have reached critical mass in 2010 and 2011, as a wave of violence swept through Georgia's youth prisons, culminating in the November 2011 beating death of a 19-year-old in his Augusta cell. Unannounced inspections of offenders' cells statewide later turned up cellphones, tobacco, homemade weapons and other contraband. Gang graffiti was commonplace in many facilities.

That edgier environment — which some prisoners compare to that of adult lock-ups — can harden youths and explain why some return to crime. But criminal justice professionals and advocates say many ex-offenders, once they've gone home, also aren't getting proper schooling and mental health care that could help them put their lives back together.

DJJ, by providing medication, therapy and other services, has become the state's de facto mental health care system for many of those juveniles. Half or more of youths in detention have been diagnosed with a behavioral health disorder, often one that played a role in their crimes.

In fact, judges frequently transfer SB440 cases to the juvenile system because they know adult prisons do not offer similar services. Those programs are considered particularly helpful to children who have trouble respecting sexual boundaries.

Once offenders leave a DJJ facility, though, they must rely on Georgia's severely underfunded system for mental health care - ranked 49th per-capita in a 2009 survey by the Kaiser Foundation. As a consequence, many no longer have access to treatments or drugs prescribed for their conditions.

"When they don't take medications, when they don't have a strong support system to reinforce what they need, they're going to come into contact repeatedly with the justice system," Douglas County Juvenile Court Judge Peggy Walker said.

Georgia is spending at least $82 million to settle a federal complaint regarding the state's inadequate care for mental health patients. Treatment for juveniles, though, was excluded from terms of the settlement.

Schooling

Public schools also can present a roadblock to rehabilitation. Offenders take classes in DJJ's accredited school system while they're in confinement but, after release, they're typically shunted into alternative schools or barred from re-enrolling for up to a year.

In many communities, students in alternative schools must fend for themselves, sitting at computer terminals while they plow through instructional workbooks. A teacher is generally available to answer questions but does not lead the instruction.

"It's really about self-motivation," said Randee Waldman, director of Emory University's Barton Juvenile Defender Clinic. "A lot of our kids are not self-motivated. That's why they're there in the first place."

Many should be in a special-education program. "If you stick them in front of a computer and tell them to learn, it's a challenge," Waldman said.

Offenders say local school systems often steer them away from seeking a high school diploma. They're encouraged instead, Waldman said, to work toward a GED that won't help them nearly as much to land a decent job. "Quite frankly, it's an ... easy way out," she said. "It's a shortcut, and kids like to take shortcuts."

Frequently, alternative school is only offered for a half-day, allowing students to fall even further behind their grade level. Half-days also leave many ex-offenders idle and without adult supervision at a time of day when they need it most.

Judge Walker, a former schoolteacher, bemoans the increasing reliance on alternative schools for ex-offenders, who face long odds trying to land a decent job without an education.

"I don't understand how we're doing anything except pushing children out of school," she said. "The one opportunity that children have is education. We've cut off their one opportunity for success."

DJJ officials recognize that education and mental health issues are closely linked to recidivism. But the agency has only recently started to track whether ex-offenders are in school or receiving mental health treatment.

Racial disparities

Recidivism in the juvenile justice system seems to carry a disproportionate impact on minority communities, JJIE's data analysis found. African-American offenders detained there for SB440 crimes were 2.7 times as likely as whites to be convicted of another felony within three years of release.

There is no evidence that race is the reason that some youths commit more crimes than others. Rather, ethnicity can serve as a "proxy," criminal justice experts say, for poverty, lack of educational opportunity, unsafe neighborhoods and other factors that can contribute to recidivism.

The racial disparity found in the data analysis did not surprise DJJ officials. Disproportionate numbers of minorities come into contact with the juvenile justice system at every stage — police, courts and rehabilitation, recently retired DJJ assistant commissioner Jeff Minor said. He noted that other states have also found a racial imbalance in their juvenile justice populations.

Georgia's racial recidivism gap, though, appears larger than in other states that track such numbers. Studies found recidivism among black juveniles was slightly higher than for whites in Delaware and Missouri. In Washington state, the rates for both races were roughly the same.

The disparity in Georgia holds true even among youths whom DJJ classifies as having the same likelihood for recidivism, the JJIE study found. Among medium- and high-risk offenders, for example, 57 percent of black youth reoffended within three years, compared to just 15 percent of whites.

We’re just a bit more than six months away from when Americans will have to begin making decisions about purchasing health insurance, but, according to a survey released last week, more than two-thirds of people who are currently uninsured don’t have much of a clue how Obamacare will affect them, including the fact that coverage will soon be mandatory.

On October 1, as required by the law, states must have online insurance marketplaces (known as exchanges) up and running so their residents can shop for coverage. Some states will be operating the exchanges on their own, but most have decided to either partner with the federal government to operate them or have the feds do all the work.

After October 1, the next most important date Americans need to know about is January 1, 2014. That’s when the mandate to have coverage goes into effect.

Making sure Americans become aware of that mandate and sign up for coverage before the end of the year will be an enormous undertaking, which is why Obamacare also includes a provision authorizing a broad range of organizations to serve as “navigators” to educate people about the law’s requirements and help them find plans that meet their needs.

The law states that entities eligible to be navigators — and to receive government grants to do the navigating — include “ trade, industry, and professional associations, commercial fishing industry organizations, ranching and farming organizations, community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups, chambers of commerce, unions, resource partners of the Small Business Administration, other licensed insurance agents and brokers, and other entities” the Feds deem capable.

In the past, agents and brokers have largely had the marketplace all to themselves because there have been no other formally recognized “navigators” to help people decide what kind of insurance policy makes the most sense for them. The agents and brokers have made a good living as middlemen between consumers and insurance companies because the insurance companies they represent pay them a commission for every policy they sell.

As you can imagine, agents and brokers are not happy that all those other organizations will be able to help folks “navigate” the health insurance world. And so they are trying to get laws passed at the state level that for all practical purposes would make it difficult, time consuming and expensive for any of those other groups to qualify as navigators.

The agents and brokers initially tried to get a committee of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to adopt language to protect their interests. When that committee rebuffed them, they began pleading their case to another NAIC committee and also directly to state lawmakers.

As a result, bills are being introduced all over the country that might as well be described as the “Agent and Broker Income Protection and Enhancement Act.”

Take the measure introduced recently in the Missouri legislature by Rep. Christopher Molendorp — who happens to own the Christopher Molendorp Insurance Agency in Raymore, Mo. Like most of these bills around the country, Molendorp’s would establish restrictive licensure requirements that all would-be navigators would have to meet. And it would prohibit navigators who are not licensed agents or brokers from providing any advice to individuals or employers about specific plans or pointing out which ones might be better or worse than others.

This clearly is not what Congress intended, but the Affordable Care Act gives states fairly wide latitude to set up the navigator programs within their jurisdictions.

In fact, Jay Angoff, a former Missouri insurance commissioner who served as head of the Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight at the Department of Health and Human Services, says bills like Molendorp’s would be a disservice to consumers.

“The beauty of the exchange system is that, if it works, you don’t have to use an agent,” Angoff said during a recent panel discussion on how states are implementing Obamacare. “You can go directly to the Internet, you don’t have to use an agent. If you want to use an agent, you can, but you don’t have to. I would hate for exchanges to build in the extra expense that requires people to use an agent that raises the price of insurance to be more than it should be based on the electronic system.”

But that is exactly what will happen if bills like Molendorp’s are enacted. Agents and brokers are hoping that the bills will even make it unlawful for people to buy coverage on the exchanges without first going through a licensed agent or broker.

Consumer groups are working at the state level to keep the bills from passing, but agents and brokers have a lot of clout in many state legislatures. If the consumer groups lose, premiums of policies purchased through the exchange will be much more expensive than necessary.

Count at least two reasons why the newly formed "Stand With Rand PAC" is notable.

First, it's a hybrid PAC— a relatively rare, but increasingly popular vehicle that combines the advantages of a traditional political action committee and a super PAC. Under one roof, a hybrid PAC may raise limited amounts of money in one account to donate directly to politicians and unlimited amounts in another to advocate for politicians (or against their opponents) through independent advertisements.

Secondly, the committee, the name for which salutes Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., form via the "MyPAC" ready-made hybrid PAC service offered by DB Capitol Strategies — a campaign law and consulting firm that in 2011 prompted the creation of hybrid PACs in federal court case Carey v. FederalElection Commission.

DB Capitol Strategies is charging clients $695 through its MyPAC service to form hybrid PACs. It heavily promoted its service this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Md., in part enticing Chantilly,Va.-based accountant Bill Willenbrock to sign up and operate the Stand With Rand PAC.

Willenbrock says he wanted to form a PAC since last year, and Paul's recent Senate filibuster and CPAC speech gave him strong impetus.

His Stand With Rand PAC won't just support Paul, but become an "effort to stand for other candidates who stand for liberty," Willenbrock said, offering Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah., as examples.

Stand With Rand PAC is "in its embryotic stage" and doesn't yet have a fundraising goal, but Willenbrock hopes to raise enough money to produce advertisements — both in and out of election season — that "educate the public on conservative principles," he said.

"I don't feel like representatives in Congress, a lot of them, are conveying a conservative message," he added.

There are 67 hybrid PACs in operation today, according to a running list maintained by the Federal Election Commission.

As the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments this week in two cases concerning gay rights, advocacy powerhouse Human Rights Campaign has been rallying its base by word — and by dollar.

"This is our moment," Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin wrote Sunday in an email to supporters. "Tuesday is the culmination of years of work. The millions like you who have pitched in, spoken out and recruited friends to our cause have helped bring us to this point, but we're not at the end of this journey yet."

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the Human Rights Campaign spent $1.37 million on federal lobbying last year — more than any other group focused on LGBT issues.

The Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest advocacy group focused on the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, also operates a political action committee.

In February, its PAC doled out a combined $7,000 to five members of Congress, according to records filed last week with the Federal Election Commission.

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska; Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill.; Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif.; and Dirigo PAC, the leadership PAC of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, each received $1,000, records indicate.

The PAC's top beneficiary in February was Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who on Sunday announced via her Tumblr page, that her views have "changed over time," and she now supports marriage for same-sex couples.

The Human Rights Campaign's PAC cut McCaskill a check for $3,000 on Feb. 28 to help retire debt that she racked up during her 2012 re-election against Republican Todd Akin.

The Supreme Court is today hearing arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a challenge to California's Proposition 8, which voters passed in 2008 to define marriage in the state as between one man and one woman.

On Wednesday, the high court will hear arguments in United States v. Windsor, a challenge to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

Party like a rockstar? Try lobby like a rockstar.

Rockstar, Inc., maker of the eponymous beverage, has hired a well-connected team of Podesta Group lobbyists — nine in all — to press federal lawmakers on "legislation and oversight regarding energy drinks," a new filing with the U.S. Senate indicates.

This is the first foray into federal lobbying for the Las Vegas-based company, which offers a caffeine- and additive-filled product line with brands such as "Rockstar Juiced" and "Rockstar Punched."

And it comes as the Food and Drug Administration is investigating the safety of energy drinks. Lawmakers, including Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have also expressedconcern about the beverages.

A group of doctors is likewise lobbying the FDA on the topic this month, writing in a letter that the agency should take "prompt action to protect children and adolescents from the dangers of highly caffeinated energy drinks." 

Rockstar, Inc., joins fellow energy drink maker Monster Energy Co., which late last year signed Podesta Group and Covington & Burling to lobby on its behalf, and Red Bull North America, Inc., which inked Heather Podesta + Partners last fall.

Podesta Group spokeswoman Missi Tessier confirmed that her firm would be lobbying for Rockstar, Inc., on the federal regulation of energy drinks, but did not elaborate further. Representatives from Rockstar, Inc., did not reply to requests for comment.

Rockstar, Inc.'s lobbying team, according to the company's filing with the U.S. Senate, includes several people with significant experience working for Congress. They include:

• Israel Klein, former communications director for Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and press secretary for Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.
• David Marin, former press secretary and legislative director for ex-Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va.
• Sean McLaughlin, former chief of staff and general counsel for the House Judiciary Committee
• David Morgenstern, former chief of staff and legislative director for Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
• Elizabeth Morra, former press secretary for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.
• Stephen Northrop, former health policy director for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
• Nora Connors, former legislative assistant for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Firm leader Tony Podesta himself is also listed as one of Rockstar, Inc.'s registered lobbyists.

Podesta Group's lengthy list of recent clients also includes other beverage companies, including Heinekin USA and Diageo North America, maker of such beer and liquor brands as Guinness, Jose Cuervo, Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Captain Morgan.

The beverage industry — both makers of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks — has a long history of lobbying Capitol Hill.

This is, perhaps, no better illustrated than in 2009, when companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, and their affiliated trade groups, spent exponentially more than usual in a successful effort to parry some congressional members' efforts to levy a soda tax to help fund health care reform initiatives.