Last December, the California Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal filed by a couple who had accused financial giant Wells Fargo & Co. of predatory lending.

One justice, who owned stock in the bank, recused himself from the case. But Justice Kathryn Werdegar, who owned as much as $1 million of Wells Fargo stock, participated — and shouldn’t have.

The Center for Public Integrity learned of Werdegar’s financial stake thanks to California’s relatively strong financial reporting requirements for justices. But California’s law is an exception.

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia received a failing grade in a Center evaluation of disclosure requirements for high court judges. And not a single state earned an A or a B.

Yet despite the dearth of information, the Center still found 35 examples of questionable gifts, investments overlapping with caseloads as well as other entanglements.

After reviewing three years of personal financial disclosures, the Center found judges who authored opinions favoring companies in which they owned stock. The Center found judges who ruled on cases even when family members were receiving income from one of the parties. And it found judges who accepted lavish gifts — like a $50,000 trip from a lawyer.

The Center also found that enforcement of disclosure rules is spotty. Twelve states, for example, rely on self-policing disciplinary bodies — made up of high-court justices themselves — to enforce the courts’ ethics rules.

Much has been made of the potential corrupting influence of campaign contributions on judicial elections. But little attention has been paid to the personal finances of the 335 judges in the state courts of last resort and how those holdings may influence decisions handed down from the bench.

States more lax than feds

After seeking input from leading judicial ethics experts, the Center created a grading system based on a slightly tougher version of disclosure requirements for federal judges. Federal disclosures scored an 84 out of 100 possible points for a letter grade of B. (See full methodology.)

Federal disclosures fell short because they are not available online and judges can report the value of investments in broad ranges rather than exact amounts.

Not one state equaled or bettered the federal system’s score. The two highest-scoring states — California and Maryland — got Cs. Six other states earned a D, while the rest failed.

In many states, it’s practically impossible to glean any meaningful information from judges’ financial disclosures.

In Kentucky, a state that earned just 15 points, judges are not required to provide the names of companies in which they have a financial interest. They report family stock ownership in companies in broad categories such as “insurance,” “entertainment” and “energy.”

The District of Columbia requires judges to complete an eight-page disclosure form, but only releases one page to the public.

Ohio asks justices to disclose who gave them gifts, but doesn’t ask what the gifts are or how much they are worth, creating a form that doesn’t distinguish between a keychain and a Cadillac.

Maryland, Missouri and Minnesota require requesters to pick up reports in person while judges in Montana, Utah and Idaho aren’t required to file any disclosure reports at all.

“Forty-seven other states have them. What’s wrong with you guys?” asked Les Abramson, a University of Louisville law professor who specializes in judicial ethics.

Investment entanglements

The Center identified 14 instances in the past three years of justices participating in cases involving companies whose stock was owned by the justices themselves or their spouses. (See complete list.)

Justices also ruled on cases in which they or their family members received oil and gas royalties or farming subsidies from parties to the litigation.

Like federal jurists, state justices are permitted to own stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate and other investments. But state codes of conduct, modeled after American Bar Association guidelines, advise judges to manage their investment portfolios to avoid frequent recusals and limit their business associations with people who are likely to end up appearing in the judges’ courtrooms.

Judges can avoid conflicts by investing in mutual funds rather than individual stocks and bonds. Blind trusts — which contain assets unknown to the judge and are controlled by an outside party — are another strategy used to avoid conflicts.

Still, direct stock investments are relatively common among the judges on the states’ highest courts. Of the 273 supreme court justices required to disclose stock holdings, 107 reported owning stock, or just under 40 percent.

North Carolina Justice Robert Edmunds is one of many judges who reported family ownership of shares in dozens of companies.

The Center found that he ruled in favor of two companies in which he owned stock — Abbott Laboratories and Wells Fargo & Co.

In an interview, Edmunds told the Center that it was not a conflict of interest for him to preside in those cases.

“Our ethical rules allow participation if the ownership is de minimis,” he said, using the Latin term to describe a trivial amount. “It was so minuscule. … It effectively means whatever decision I make will not have any impact on my financial situation.”

North Carolina’s forms only require that investments worth at least $10,000 be reported, but do not ask for an exact amount.

He declined to provide the value of his holdings in those companies.

“Our job is to make decisions and not to try to get out of cases,” he said.

Arkansas Justice Paul Danielson used the same logic to defend an opinion he wrote in a 2012 case involving XTO Energy, a natural gas company.

The same year Danielson wrote the court’s opinion in favor of XTO, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corp., the justice reported his wife earned between $1,001 and $12,499 in income from the company. He reported the same range of income from XTO in 2011.

Danielson said his wife earned the XTO income in the form of oil and gas royalties tied to land she inherited from her family. He said he didn’t need to recuse himself from the XTO case. “It certainly wasn’t going to affect my decision,” he said.

“If I had Wal-Mart stock worth $100,000, I’d get off a Wal-Mart case,” Danielson said. “But I won’t get off a case for silly reasons.”

What constitutes a conflict?

But how much stock, real estate or other interests is enough to influence a judge’s rulings on the bench? And who gets to decide? The answer varies from judge to judge, and court to court.

In Massachusetts, judges evaluate both the dollar value of the financial interest and whether the interest comprises a substantial portion of the judge's total economic holdings to determine whether an investment requires stepping aside from a case, said Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court spokeswoman Jennifer Donahue.

The federal recusal statute, however, says that a judge may not sit if he or she or certain family members have even one share of stock in one of the parties involved in a case.

“The appearance of impartiality is as important as the fact of impartiality,” said Abramson, the Louisville law professor, who is married to Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Lisabeth Abramson. “It’s really about how the public perceives the judiciary.”

Some states — like Florida, Wyoming and Connecticut — do not include information about spouses, domestic partners or dependent children.

Ethics experts call such omissions unacceptable, noting that the financial interests of a spouse or minor child could directly benefit the judge.

But Montana Court Administrator Beth McLaughlin said disclosure could “provide information about a spouse or child’s place of employment or home, which is simply ridiculous and can pose a very real risk to judicial families.”

At the federal level, judges must report their family members’ investments, gifts and liabilities. Federal judges, however, are protected by the U.S. Marshals Service as needed, including a 24/7 response to threats. Federal judges can also choose to have security systems installed in their homes at the government’s expense, according to U.S. Marshals spokeswoman Lynne Donahue.

State court systems generally don’t have such formal programs. Judges can request help from state or local law enforcement agencies, though.

State judges’ financial disclosures also may not yield much sensitive security information about families beyond what a cursory search of the Internet might uncover — or what the judges already share.

In the online biographies on Montana Supreme Court’s own website, some justices have disclosed their children’s names or ages, which is more than most of the toughest disclosure forms require.

A $50,000 vacation?

In 2012, Arkansas Justice Courtney Goodson accepted a $50,000 trip to Italy from Arkansas attorney W.H. Taylor, according to Goodson’s financial disclosure. The year before, Taylor paid for Goodson’s $12,000 “Caribbean Cruise.”

Goodson’s trip to Italy was by far the most expensive gift reported by supreme court justices in 2012. But she wasn’t the only judge to accept something of value.

In fact, judges reported receiving everything from meals and Indianapolis 500 tickets to country club memberships and expense-paid trips to attend conferences. In some cases, gifts received by judges stood out because of their sheer value, or because the gift giver could have ended up before the court.

Out of 335 judges, 248 are required to report at least some information about gifts or reimbursements they receive, but only 201 are required to disclose the dollar value of the gifts. Of that number, 82 judges reported receiving roughly $279,000 in freebies, with a median value of more than $1,800 per judge.

Twelve states don’t require any disclosure of gifts received or expenses reimbursed.

Some states have gift limits or restrictions. The state of Washington’s rules are especially strong, limiting gifts to $50 or less. Still, the limits are not without problems due to exceptions or loopholes.

Washington judges can receive “unsolicited tokens or awards of appreciation” worth more than $50 yet still not have to report them. In Iowa, officials face restrictions but can receive gifts worth any amount on their wedding or 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries.

And West Virginia restricts public officials from accepting gifts worth $25 or more from lobbyists or parties who are likely to come before them, meaning judges have to anticipate who might end up in their courtroom.

Joan Parker, executive director of the West Virginia Ethics Commission, acknowledged that the statewide gift laws do not always “match up nicely” with judicial ethics standards. Additionally, West Virginia’s public officials may accept limitless food and drinks as long as the donor is present.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in ethics, said gifts should not be banned. “The solution is transparency and reporting.”

Most states only require gifts above a certain dollar amount to be reported and the starting points vary widely, from as little as $50 in Virginia to as high as $1,000 in New York and New Jersey.

In Goodson’s case, the two trips she received from the Arkansas attorney were allowed under the state’s rules. However, they raised eyebrows after media reports earlier this year revealed that Taylor’s clients include John Tyson, the chairman of Tyson Foods, Inc., a food-processing giant based in Arkansas. Taylor and John Goodson, the justice’s husband, have collaborated on several lawsuits.

In an emailed statement to the Center, court spokeswoman Stephanie Harris wrote that Goodson will recuse herself from cases involving Taylor, who is also the judge’s personal attorney. “And out of an abundance of caution,” Harris’ email said, “she will continue to recuse in cases involving Tyson.”

Henry Chambers, a professor of law at the University of Richmond, said that such an extravagant gift from an attorney to a judge might suggest a greater systemic problem with the state’s legal community.

“I just can’t imagine that there are very many legal cultures around the country where that would be viewed as anything but crazy, horrible judgment. You shouldn’t have to have a rule on something like that,” Chambers said. “That’s something where you’ve just got to clean up the legal culture.”

Sometimes judges don’t step aside from cases involving gift givers.

In 2012, for example, Be-Be Adams, a registered lobbyist for Barrick Gold of North America, gave a $250 gift to Nevada Supreme Court Justice Ron Parraguirre, presumably a ticket to a charity gala.

Less than two months after the benefit, Parraguirre’s court received a still-pending case referred by a U.S. Court of Appeals, involving one of the company's mines.

His assistant, Roxanne Doyle, told the Center on his behalf that the gift posed no conflict.

“That information was disclosed pursuant to the rules,” she said. “It has no effect on his rulings.”

Gillers, the NYU professor, said judges often tell him they feel that people wrongly assume that a gift or an investment means they can be corrupted.

“I say, it’s not about you, and it’s not about your incorruptibility. It’s about the public’s confidence in unbiased decision-making,” he said. “You can have a just opinion, but if people think it’s unjust because of some undue influence, then the administration of justice has suffered.”

Who needs disclosure?

But discovering “undue influence” requires robust, easy-to-access financial disclosures — something few states have and which some state officials find unnecessary.

In Montana, where judges don’t file personal financial disclosures, officials say judges are subject to the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct and that’s enough to discourage bad behavior. “Frankly, we believe the rules provide a solid guideline for justices to avoid financial conflicts or potential conflicts,” said McLaughlin, the state court administrator.

Minnesota’s court spokesman John Kostouros said his state, which earned just 17.5 points in the Center’s study, does not need the types of disclosure rules that are necessary in states such as Illinois or New York.

“You really have to watch public officials in those states,” Kostouros said. “Minnesota has a very low tolerance for corruption.”

However, Cynthia Gray, director of the American Judicature Society’s Center for Judicial Ethics, said financial disclosures are a crucial tool for courts to share with the public to help demonstrate the integrity of their judges.

“It’s important for the public to know that [judges] have no basis for their ruling other than the law or the arguments in a specific case,” she said.

In addition, disclosure reports in many states are difficult to obtain. For example, 11 states require judges to file multiple public reports, often kept in different offices. Reports are sometimes filled out in illegible handwriting or so heavily redacted as to reveal little useful information.

Most states supply disclosure reports upon request by mail or email, sometimes for a processing or copying fee — like the federal government. Only eight states post all of their supreme courts’ financial disclosure statements online. Another four post at least some sets of their reports online.

(See all available 2012 disclosures.)

“It’s indefensible not to put them online,” said Gillers, the NYU professor. “It’s just a way of making it harder for the public to learn what the judge has an obligation to reveal. So it’s a way of cutting back on the disclosure obligation without omitting the information you have to file.”

Janet Wright, former counsel of Delaware’s Public Integrity Commission, said the state agency does not post financial disclosure reports online, fearing they could be used to “phish” for account numbers or create a false identity.

Gillers does acknowledge the safety concerns of putting judges’ phone numbers or home addresses on the documents but little else.

“The price of becoming a public servant, including a judge, is that you give up some privacy rights,” he said. “You don’t forsake all of your privacy, but here the loss of privacy, to the extent of identifying your investments, is low. Some would consider it to be nearly nonexistent and therefore not troubling at all.”

Furthermore, some of the states with the most detailed disclosures have not hesitated to go online. California and Hawaii, among the top-scoring states for their relatively robust disclosure rules, put their reports online. Additionally, more states are moving in that direction. Wyoming posted its reports online after the Center asked about them.

New Mexico, however, went in the other direction. It stopped posting disclosures online this year because the statute only calls for making them accessible to “citizens” of the state, said the secretary of state’s spokesman Ken Ortiz.

Spotty enforcement

Disclosure requirements are worthless without enforcement.

Thirty-six states have meaningful authority to enforce penalties on judges who file disclosures improperly, with penalties ranging from fines to jail time. However, 12 states have only self-policing mechanisms to enforce disclosure rules for their top state judges. They are Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Vermont.

In those states, a judicial commission can investigate complaints about the high-court judges but those same judges must ratify the commission’s decision or decide which penalties to hand down.

Wyoming has such a system, but it has taken steps to avoid justices ruling on their peers.

While the state Supreme Court is the ultimate stop for judicial misconduct cases, the state constitution calls for creating a special court made of up of district judges to rule on any investigations involving Supreme Court justices. The state even had to use it, said Ronda Munger, the court system’s spokeswoman, for a justice who ultimately agreed to retire from the bench.

“It was a good process. It was not a nice process,” she told the Center. “We really wish it didn’t happen.”

But sometimes even after a judge has been admonished, the problems do not end.

In 2007, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler was officially warned by a state commission about conflicts of interest for her work in a lower court after she was reported to have presided in more than 22 cases involving companies in which she owned stock.

She apologized for the ethical violations, saying they were unintentional.

Yet the Center found that, as a Supreme Court justice, she again ruled on a case in which she had a financial stake in one of the parties.

Ziegler took part in a 2012 decision involving Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson after the drug companies were accused of charging inflated drug prices to the state’s Medicaid system. The court decided against the companies on two of the three legal questions presented in the appeal. Ziegler reported owning more than $50,000 worth of each company.

The justice did not return multiple calls for comment.

Meanwhile, in California, the reaction to the potential conflict raised by the Center was quite different.

The California Supreme Court said it will review its internal procedures meant to detect potential conflicts of interest, noting that something went wrong when it failed to discover Justice Werdegar’s financial interest in Wells Fargo.

“The justice regrets the error,” said court spokesman Cathal Conneely.

The Center for Public Integrity reviewed the rules governing financial disclosures for the highest ranking state judges in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Grades were based generally on rules for federal judges, but under advisement of ethics experts, there were some differences. For example, more credit was awarded for filings made available online and for states that require dollar values of assets to be reported in exact figures instead of ranges. Under these standards, the federal judicial requirements earned an 84 out of 100 possible points. The Center also only gave credit for disclosures that were made publicly available. In states with multiple filing requirements, the Center based the final state grade on publicly available forms.

Grading Scale:

90-100                  A
80-89                     B          
70-79                     C       
60-69                     D    
Less than 60        F

Part I.

Is the judge required to disclose his/her household income? (20 points)

 Judge's outside, non-investment income sources and amounts are reported. (10 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose income source and exact amount of income, it receives full credit (10 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose income source but exact amount of income is not required, it receives half credit (5 points).
• State receives no credit if neither income source nor exact income amount is disclosed.

 Spouse's non-investment income source is reported. (10 points)

• Amounts need not be reported to receive full credit.

Part II.

Is the judge required to disclose investments (including real estate) for judge, spouse and dependent children? (20 points)

 Description of the investments/assets is disclosed. (5 points)

• If state requires judge to identify investments/assets held by the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (5 points).
• If state requires judge to identify investments/assets held by the judge and either the judge’s spouse or the judge’s dependent children, but not both, it receives 3.75 points.
• If state requires judge to identify investments/assets held by the judge only, it receives half credit (2.5 points).

 Income from the investments/assets during the reporting period is disclosed. (5 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (5 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 3.75 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for the judge only, it receives 2.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose income amounts in a range for the judge, spouse and dependent children, it receives 2.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose income amounts in a range for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 1.875 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose income amounts in a range for the judge only, it receives 1.25 points.

 Gross value of the investment/asset at the end of the reporting period is disclosed. (5 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (5 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 3.75 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose exact income amounts for the judge only, it receives 2.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose income amounts in a range for the judge, spouse and dependent children, it receives 2.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose income amounts in a range for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 1.875 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose dollar amounts in a range for the judge only, it receives 1.25 points.

 Transactions during the reporting period are disclosed. (5 points)

• If state requires judges to disclose transactions on investments held by the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (5 points).
• If state requires judges to disclose transactions on investments held by the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 3.75 points.
• If state requires judges to disclose transactions on investments held by the judge only, it receives 2.5 points.

Part III.

Is the judge required to disclose gifts and reimbursements made to judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children? (20 points)

 The source of the gift is disclosed. (4 points)

• If state requires the source of gifts to the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children be disclosed, it receives full credit (4 points).
• If state requires the source of gifts to the judge and either the judge’s spouse or the dependent children of the judge but not both, it receives 3 points.
• If state requires the source of gifts to the judge only, it receives 2 points.

 Description of gifts is disclosed. (3 points)

• If state requires that the description of gifts be disclosed for the judge, spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (3 points).
• If state requires the description of gifts be disclosed for the judge and either the spouse or the dependent children of the judge but not both, it receives 2.25 points.
• If state requires the description of gifts for the judge only, it receives 1.5 points.

 Dollar value of gifts is disclosed. (3 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose the exact value of gifts made to the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (3 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose the exact value of gifts made to judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 2.25 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose the exact value of gifts made to judge only, it receives 1.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of gifts in a range for the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives 1.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of gifts in a range for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 1.125 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of gifts in a range for the judge only, it receives 0.75 points.

 The source of reimbursements is disclosed. (4 points)

• If state requires that the source of the reimbursement be disclosed for the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (4 points).
• If state requires the source of the reimbursement be disclosed for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 3 points.
• If state requires the source of the reimbursement for the judge only, it receives 2 points.

 Description of reimbursements is disclosed. (3 points)

• If state requires that the description of the reimbursements be disclosed for the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (3 points).
• If state requires the description of the reimbursements be disclosed for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 2.25 points.
• If state requires the description of the reimbursements for only the judge only, it receives 1.5 points.

 Dollar value of reimbursements is disclosed. (3 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose exact value of reimbursements made to judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (3 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose exact value of reimbursements made to judge and either judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 2.25 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose exact value of reimbursements made to judge only, it receives 1.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of reimbursements in a range for the judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives 1.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of reimbursements in a range for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 1.125 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose value of reimbursements in a range for the judge only, it receives 0.75 points.

Part IV.

Is the judge required to disclose liabilities of the judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children? (20 points)

 Creditors are disclosed. (8 points)

• If state requires that creditors for the judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children be disclosed, it receives full credit (8 points).
• If state requires that creditors be disclosed for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 6 points.
• If state requires that creditors be disclosed for the judge only, it receives 4 points.
   

 Description of liabilities is disclosed. (6 points)

• If state requires that the description of liabilities for the judge, the judge’s spouse and dependent children be disclosed, it receives full credit (6 points).
• If state requires the description of liabilities for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 4.5 points.
• If state requires the description of liability for the judge only, it receives 3 points.

 Value of liabilities is disclosed. (6 points)

• If state requires judge to disclose exact amount of liabilities for judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives full credit (6 points).
• If state requires judge to disclose exact amount of liabilities for judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 4.5 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose exact amount of liabilities for judge only, it receives 3 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose amount of liabilities in a range for the judge, judge’s spouse and dependent children, it receives 3 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose amount of liabilities in a range for the judge and either the judge’s spouse or dependent children, but not both, it receives 2.25 points.
• If state requires judge to disclose amount of liabilities in a range for the judge only, it receives 1.5 points.

Part V.

Are judges held accountable for filing timely and accurate reports? (10 points)

 Delinquent filers are subject to penalties. (5 points)

• State provides a penalty for failure to file accurate reports in a timely fashion.

 State has meaningful enforcement authority. (5 points)

• “Meaningful enforcement authority” is defined as a governmental body with power to penalize delinquent filers that is not controlled by the judge’s peers.

Part VI.
Can members of the public easily access the financial disclosures? (10 points)

1. Annual judicial filings are available online. (10 points)
2. Annual judicial filings are available by mail, fax or email. (5 points)
3. Annual judicial filings are available only to those who pick them up in person. (2.5 points)

A liberal, labor union-backed nonprofit that’s not supposed to be primarily political spent $23.7 million last year in the run-up to national elections — 46 times what it spent in 2011, a non-election year, according to its new Internal Revenue Service tax return.

And although it describes itself as a grassroots group, a single $6 million donation from an unnamed source made up one-fourth of Patriot Majority USA’s $23 million in 2012 revenue. More than half of its haul, $12 million, came from anonymous donors that gave more than $1 million each, its tax return indicates.

Patriot Majority USA states on its website that it advocates for “comprehensive campaign finance reform that increases transparency and limits the influence of greedy special interests who ... buy elections.”

Unlike super PACs and traditional political campaign committees, nonprofits such as Patriot Majority USA aren’t required to disclose their donors because they supposedly exist to primarily promote the public good and social welfare. But nebulous Internal Revenue Service rules have led these “dark money” groups to proliferate and spend millions of dollars on politics. The agency proposed tightening the rules last week.

For its part, Patriot Majority USA reported spending $9.3 million on politics — almost 40 percent of its expenses. It reported the political spending was for “expenditures and grants for issue advocacy to educate voters on candidates’ views.” More than half of its $1.4 million in grants went to groups considered politically active such as American Working Families Action Fund and No on 3 Inc. in Florida, a group that opposed a constitutional amendment changing the way state revenue caps are set.

Patriot Majority USA also fields a super PAC — Patriot Majority PAC — that spent just a small fraction of what its nonprofit sister group did during 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Patriot Majority USA’s overall expenses are nearly three times that of an arguably better-known liberal nonprofit group Priorities USA, which has ties to President Barack Obama.

And although the group doesn’t disclose its donors, the Huffington Postreported labor unions contributed $2.3 million to Patriot Majority USA last year, based on calculations from Department of Labor filings. The Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care, a trade association, also gave the group $750,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Patriot Majority USA was formed in 2008 and technically spun off into a separate entity in 2011. When it applied to do that, it told the IRS it didn’t plan to hire employees and would instead rely on a “large base of volunteers” to developing and disseminating the organization’s message.

This hasn’t proven true. The organization reported no volunteers last year and paid its founder and president, Craig Varoga, $144,053 last year for 25 hours of work per week, according to its 2012 tax return. Other expenses reported include $11.6 million on a “media buy,” $2.5 million for direct mail production and $1.5 million on voter registration efforts.

Varoga, who was national field director for Gen. Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign, did not respond to questions from the Center for Public Integrity.

Varoga instead emailed a statement that his group “has been recognized by the IRS and has a very well defined, multi-year, bipartisan primary purpose, which is to work on economic solutions and encourage job creation throughout the United States.”

He wrote that it spent most of its energy last year on a national advocacy campaign including a bus tour and ads promoting voters’ rights and fighting policies promoted by billionaires David and Charles Koch and other conservative interests.

Conservative interests easily outspent liberal groups last year. Three of the largest liberal “dark money” nonprofits reported spending a combined $73 million on their latest tax returns, less than half of the $189 million spent by Karl Rove-created nonprofit Crossroads GPS alone.

Patriot Majority USA is already a major player in 2014 federal elections. This summer, it kicked in more than $544,000 for ads against Republicans running for U.S. Senate seats in Arkansas and Kentucky, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Michael Beckel contributed to this report.

I know of few other news organization that would do this: spend nearly nine months and countless hours going over every personal financial disclosure statement from a total of 335 state supreme court justices. That’s more than 4,000 pages from all 50 states going back three years. That’s what the Center for Public Integrity has just accomplished. Then we issued a grade for every state, making all of this information public.

The result is a new comprehensive report showing that 42 states and the District of Columbia received a failing grade for their disclosure requirements for high court judges. Not a single state earned an A or a B. The two highest-scoring states — California and Maryland — got Cs. Six other states earned a D, while the rest failed.

The Center’s investigation found multiple examples of questionable gifts, investments overlapping with caseloads as well as other entanglements. The Center found judges who authored opinions favoring companies in which they owned stock. We found judges who ruled on cases even when family members were receiving income from one of the parties. And we found judges who accepted lavish gifts — such as an Arkansas justice who accepted a $50,000 trip to Italy from a lawyer.

We also found that:

• Judges in three states — Montana, Utah and Idaho — aren’t required to file any disclosure reports at all.
• The Center identified 14 instances in the past three years in which justices or their spouses owned stock in companies involved in litigation before the judge.
• Twelve states rely on self-policing disciplinary bodies — made up of high-court justices themselves — to enforce their own courts’ ethical rules.

Other reports have noted the growing and potentially corrupting influence of campaign contributions on judicial elections. But little attention has been paid to the personal finances of the 335 judges in the state courts of last resort and how those holdings may influence decisions handed down from the bench.

The Center for Public Integrity’s findings have been re-published by more than six dozen other news organizations so far, from the Associated Press to the National Journal, and from the Washington Post to CBS.

Uncoverage

The Center for Public Integrity has signed up for a new crowd-funding effort for investigative journalism, called “Uncoverage.” Uncoverage will soon be operating under the banner, “Powering Investigative Journalism That Matters;” and “The News is Broken. Let’s Fix It.” Uncoverage is just getting going. As one of the nation’s leading investigative journalism centers, The Center for Public Integrity is pleased to help get Uncoverage off the ground, and grow our own crowd-funded support. You can read about the new operation here in the New York Times. As the paper reported, Uncoverage “will test whether the public cares enough about investigative journalism to pay for it.”  

Give with Confidence

In keeping with our commitment to transparency and accountability, the Center for Public Integrity is routinely evaluated by major “watchdog” groups that keep an eye on nonprofits. The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance ran a full page ad in USA Today’s sharing section for Giving Tuesday this week.  Under the headline, “Give with Confidence,” the BBB ad promotes the organization’s Charity Seal program. The ad lists all non-profit organizations that have met the BBB’s 20 rigorous standards for charity governance, including The Center for Public Integrity.

In addition, The Center for Public Integrity has earned a 4-star rating for the fourth consecutive year from Charity Navigator, the nation’s largest charity rating organization. Four stars means that the Center, according to Charity Navigator, “adheres to good governance and other best practices that minimize the chance of unethical activities and consistently executes its mission in a fiscally responsible way.”

Charity Navigator says that only about 6% of non-profits have received at least 4 consecutive 4-star evaluations. The organization reports that the “Center for Public Integrity outperforms most other charities in America. This ‘exceptional’ designation from Charity Navigator differentiates Center for Public Integrity from its peers and demonstrates to the public it is worthy of their trust.”

I am delighted both by our latest investigative work on state supreme court justices, and by these clear endorsements of our organization. As we say on our donation page, “Every dollar makes a difference.” Thanks for your support.

Until next week,
Bill

President Barack Obama has named Laura Ricketts, a major Democratic Party donor and one of the his top campaign fundraisers, to be a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the White House announced Thursday.

Records released by the Obama campaign last year indicate that Ricketts, a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, raised at least $500,000 for the president’s re-election efforts. Internal campaign documents published by the New York Times put that figure at more than $750,000.

Ahead of the 2012 election, Ricketts, who is openly gay, also helped launch a hybrid super PAC called LPAC dedicated to“making a true impact for lesbians in politics.”

As a hybrid super PAC, LPAC can collect unlimited donations to produce political advertisements. It can also accept limited donations to directly donate to federal candidates.

LPAC raised more than $1 million between its creation in April 2012 and June 2013, the period covered in its most recent campaign finance filing with the Federal Election Commission. Of this amount, about 30 percent has come from Ricketts herself, including $50,000 contributed in 2013.

This year, LPAC has supported the election of Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race, the election of Democrat Annise Parker, a lesbian, to be the mayor of Houston and the enactment of marriage equality legislation in Illinois, among other activities.

Ricketts herself has also donated an additional $75,000 this year to Democratic candidates and groups, including $32,400 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $30,000 to the Democratic National Committee, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of FEC records.

The Kennedy Center position would not be Ricketts’ first official perk for her talents and work in support of the president. Records show she has visited the White House about a dozen times since Obama took office in 2009, including multiple Christmas holiday receptions and an inaugural reception earlier this year.

She joins several other Obama bundlers on the Kennedy Center board, including UnitedHealth Group executive Anthony Welters, television journalist and entrepreneur Giselle Fernandez and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner. Kennedy Center trustees are not paid.

Notably, Ricketts’ political giving stands in stark contrast to that of her father, Joe Ricketts, the founder of the Omaha-based online brokerage firm TD Ameritrade.

The elder Ricketts ranked as one of the top GOP super donors during the 2012 election, giving more than $13 million to super PACs, including his Ending Spending Action Fund. Just three other Republican super donors gave more to super PACs: Bob Perry, Harold Simmons and Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

Ricketts’ Ending Spending Action Fund, and its related “social welfare”’ nonprofit, support candidates“who favor enhancing free enterprise, reducing the size of government and balancing our nation's budget.”

Most intelligence-related spending by the U.S. government is subject to independent scrutiny and monitoring by a small number of people — primarily, the 40 lawmakers assigned to the House and Senate intelligence committees, plus the roughly 100-member staffs of those two committees.

The lawmakers are meant to provide a key check on waste, fraud, abuse, and potential illegalities, since intelligence-related spending and activities are ordinarily well outside the public’s view.

According to a new report, however, every single one of those lawmakers has received campaign funds from twenty of the largest contractors providing intelligence services to the Defense Department, which accounted for a signficant portion of the nation’s overall $75.4 billion intelligence budget in 2012.

The total, election-related benefits for current intelligence committee members, including ex-officio members, provided by companies in the industry they directly oversee amount to at least $3.7 million from the companies' PACs and employees since 2005, according to the report released Dec. 9 by Maplight.org, a nonpartisan group that investigates campaign finance issues.

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the House committee’s highest-ranking Democrat, received the most from the contractors: $363,600, including $124,350 from Northrop Grumman, mostly from the company’s PAC, top executives and lobbyists. Ruppersberger is one of the “Gang of Eight” top legislators who routinely receive the most-detailed reports on intelligence among congressional members.

His Maryland district includes the National Security Agency, now routinely in the news due to Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the distant and controversial reach of its surveillance. Ruppersberger has called Snowden a traitor. In an interview with a Maryland paper last month, he said about the NSA’s PRISM data-mining effort that “we can’t afford to lose this program.” He did not respond to several requests for comment about the contributions.

Another Maryland legislator on the intelligence committee, Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski, received $210,150 from the companies, the second-highest total among intelligence committee members. Mikulski is also the chairwoman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, which funds most government programs, including those related to intelligence.

Other top intelligence committee recipients from the contractors included Reps. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J. ($205,345) and James Langevin, D-R.I. ($200,850), who also serve on the House Armed Services Committee. LoBiondo is the second-highest ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee and has been on Armed Services since 2003. Langevin is the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Intelligence Subcommittee.

Overall, Democrats and Republicans received nearly the same amount over the period studied, Maplight said

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a senior intelligence committee member who has been an outspoken critic of the NSA, in contrast received $24,500 from intelligence-related Pentagon contractors during the study period, placing him near the bottom among the current members. Sen. Jay Rockfeller, D.-W.V. a former chairman of the committee, also received relatively little from the companies, $36,100, mostly from the PACs of Lockheed and Honeywell during his last election in 2008. In October, Rockefeller opposed a Wyden amendment that would have disclosed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court findings of constitutional violations. Rockefeller has announced his retirement at the end of the session.

Defense industry giant Lockheed Martin, which provides many intelligence services for the military, including analysts, interrogators and translators, accounted for the largest flow of funds to the committees’ members, totaling $798,910. The company’s donations to the committees’ current members almost tripled during the seven years examined by Maplight, from $38,410 in 2005 to $105,500 so far this year.

It’s not clear from the report whether the contractors’ overall contributions to committee members have been rising. During the 2005-2006 election campaign, when only nine of the current members served on the committees, the contractors gave those members a total of $344,954, it said. During the 2011-2012 campaign, they gave a total of $1,046,382 to 36 of the 40 current members of the committees, including to the nine members who joined the committee this year. The other four received industry contributions before 2011.

In 2007, 70 percent of the overall intelligence budget went to contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but the number of contractors providing core services to the intelligence community has declined by about a third since then. A Senate intelligence committee report in March said that after some recent cutbacks, the intelligence contracting workforce “continues to grow.”

The issue of whether the contractor donations have any impact on the committees’ oversight functions is pertinent because so much of the committees’ authority is exercised behind closed doors. The Senate Intelligence Committee lists 56 hearings this year on its website, but only three were open to the public. Similarly, the House Intelligence Committee has had fewer than 10 open hearings this year.

The committees are “supposed to be exercising check and balances,” but they haven’t, said  Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. He noted that in the aftermath of Snowden’s disclosures, for example, the intelligence committees have been “generally supportive” of the intelligence community, while the House and Senate Judiciary committees “have been quite critical on a bipartisan basis.”

“It says something about the character of the intelligence committees,” Aftergood said.

Spokesmen for the two intelligence committees, asked by phone and e-mail whether the campaign donations to their members influenced their work, declined to comment. Mikulski, Langevin, and LoBiondo also did not respond to requests for comment.

It wasn’t quite cold enough to need a vest on a mid-November Texas morning, but Matt Dossey was wearing one anyway. Made of heavy-weight beige canvas, the vest just might have been concealing a pistol. There was no way to tell. Perhaps that was the point.

Dossey is the superintendent at Jonesboro Independent School District, a compound of three low, pale-brick buildings sandwiched between broad oak trees in the back and a horse pasture across the road up front. Jonesboro is a tiny community nestled in the rolling Texas scrubland 110 miles north of Austin, but aside from the schools, a post office and two churches, there’s little to suggest a town.

In January, the district adopted a policy of arming a select group of staff members with concealed weapons as a deterrent and defense against a potential school shooter. Jonesboro straddles the border between Coryell and Hamilton counties, and it’s more than 15 miles to the nearest sheriff’s department. The town is unincorporated, so it has no government and no police. If someone were to attack the school, Dossey said, no one’s coming to protect the kids — not quickly, anyway.

Dossey was standing inside the complex’s cafeteria, decorated with paper cutouts of a scarecrow and a map of Texas. The district was hosting an annual pre-holiday Thanksgiving dinner, when parents join their kids for a school lunch of turkey and stuffing served on sectioned plastic trays. Elementary school students were motoring around the room, which has two sets of doors leading outside. One of them sits loose on its hinges so it doesn’t close without a nudge. While there’s no law enforcement presence to speak of, Dossey, who hadn’t taken off his vest, said the new policy adds a layer of security that most everyone in town is happy with.

“If somebody walked in that door and opened fire,” he said, “we would have a chance.”

In the year since Adam Lanza shot 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last December, school districts and state governments have feverishly searched for ways to protect their students. State legislators introduced hundreds of pieces of legislation on school safety. Many called for arming more security guards or, like a law passed in Texas, for arming teachers. Others tightened laws meant to keep guns out of schools. Across the country, parents and government officials struggled with the same question — Are our schools safe enough? — but reacted with what at times seemed nearly opposite responses.

Monroe, Conn., for example, took a range of expensive measures in the months following the shooting at Sandy Hook, just nine miles down the road. The town, which spreads out from a village green set between two white-steepled churches, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading district buildings and hiring school resource officers, town police officers who are posted at the schools full-time. The move is largely in step with what’s happening across the state. The legislature passed a sweeping law in April that included gun controls, such as expanded background checks and a broader assault weapons ban, and mandates for school security. It also funded millions of dollars in infrastructure grants for schools. Any talk of arming teachers quickly fizzled, and the legislature actually tightened the state law on guns in school so that only active or retired law enforcement officers could serve as armed guards.

Texas, on the other hand, has not appropriated any money to school security and is not creating any mandates. Jonesboro is one of about 70 districts that have begun arming staff. This year, the state legislature paved the way for more to join them, passing a bill that created a state-run training program that will allow districts to designate staff members as “school marshals,” an entirely new class of law enforcement (districts must pay the costs).

At first glance, the disparate approaches appear simply to reflect a stereotypical divide between two regions of America with their own closely held views of guns and their place in daily life. But a closer look shows that what’s happened in Jonesboro and Monroe in the year since the tragedy of Sandy Hook also reflects broader set of beliefs about the role of government, about local control, and perhaps most importantly, about taxes.

A flurry of activity

Just after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2012, Lanza, a 20-year-old Newtown resident, arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School armed with a Bushmaster rifle and two pistols. School staff had just locked the front door, but Lanza quickly shot his way through the entranceway glass. In a classroom down the hall, the principal, school psychologist and another staff member, who were in a meeting with a parent and other staff, heard the shots and entered the hallway to investigate. Lanza shot all three, killing the principal and the psychologist, before making his way through the office, where staff were hiding, and on to two first-grade classrooms, where he killed the children and four adults.

A staff member had called 911 at 9:35, soon after hearing the first shots, and police arrived within four minutes. Within a minute of their arrival, Lanza shot himself. While it’s unclear exactly when Lanza entered the school, the entire episode lasted no more than 11 minutes, according to a recent report by the local state’s attorney.

The town had little time to mourn in quiet. Residents and victims’ families quickly formed groups advocating stricter gun controls or pushing a broader conversation about gun violence. Several parents created an organization called Safe and Sound, which has tried to offer tools for school districts to improve security through planning and training.

The daughters of Michele Gay and Alissa Parker were friends at Sandy Hook Elementary — Josephine Gay was 7, and Emilie Parker was 6 — but the two mothers had never met.   Parker was supposed to attend Josephine’s birthday party on Dec. 15. When she realized that Gay’s daughter, too, had been killed, she called the family immediately.

“In a tragedy, I think you form instant bonds with people, and she and I did that,” Parker said. “About a month after the shooting we had a conversation. She came over to my house and we had pizza with our kids and we said we wanted to focus on school safety.”

In Washington, much of the debate focused on the angry and incendiary issue of guns. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, held a press conference one week after the shooting, calling on Congress to fund an armed police officer in every school. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.

President Obama announced a broad plan in January encompassing both gun control and school security. But his signature legislative initiative, calling for background checks on most gun sales, died in the Senate in April. The school security measures fared better. The Justice Department gave $46.5 million in grants in the 2013 fiscal year to fund 370 school resource officers, who are being stationed in schools nationwide, in communities from Kotzebue, Alaska to New Orleans. Districts across the country have added thousands of such officers on their own, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers — augmenting the 10,000 or so that had already patrolled hallways nationwide.

State legislatures have taken a host of additional steps. Lawmakers sponsored bills on school safety in every state, introducing more than 500 this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Dozens became law. Rhode Island, for example, passed a bill requiring schools to conduct safety assessments with police and fire departments every three years, and another requiring that schools update emergency plans annually.

In March, South Dakota became the first state to pass a law explicitly allowing schools to authorize teachers to carry concealed weapons. Legislators eventually introduced similar bills in at least 34 states, with six other states actually passing laws — Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas — according to NCSL.

Some districts have used existing laws to do the same. In Arkansas, where the new law applies only to parochial schools, 13 public school districts won approval from a state board to arm their staff, even as Attorney General Dustin McDaniel issued a non-binding opinion saying the law the districts had used was intended for private security guards only. Districts in Colorado, Oregon and Ohio have taken similar steps, and schools in several other states are considering arming staff.

While few if any districts had armed teachers before Sandy Hook, other than one in rural Texas, the concept is not entirely new and has been pushed by gun groups for years, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy group that supports stronger gun control. After the shooting at Columbine High School outside Denver in 1999, the NRA’s LaPierre actually spoke against arming teachers, saying there should be no guns in school, “with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel.” But by 2005, one NRA staff member had indicated support for the idea.

Nearly every state bars guns from school grounds, but many of the laws include exceptions that allow districts some wiggle room. Texas law, for example, has for years explicitly allowed schools to authorize people to carry weapons. In 2003, Utah passed a law stating that anyone with a permit to carry a concealed weapon could bring a gun into  schools. Other laws, such as the one in Arkansas, are less clear and open to interpretation. The gun lobby has continued its push to expand those exceptions, with an NRA panel in April publishing a model bill for states that would allow districts to make their own decisions on arming staff. The organization did not respond to an interview request.

Across the country, schools have also been reviewing and updating their emergency plans, which can be the most important form of preparation, said Bill Bond, school safety specialist for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “The good news and the bad news is this: At first no one knew what to do,” he said. “There’s a darn good template out there now.” In June, the Education Department published a how-to guide for schools to create comprehensive emergency response plans.

Many schools had already laid the groundwork after the 1999 attack at Columbine. “What you really saw was schools playing catch-up on decades of neglect,” said Kenneth Trump, who runs a consulting firm in Cleveland specializing in school safety. Schools would leave doors unlocked and many had no plans for how to handle a shooter. The Clinton administration responded to the shooting by creating a number of new school safety programs, such as the COPS in Schools program, which funded school resource officers as part of a broader Community Oriented Policing Services program.

Federal funding for that and other safety programs has fluctuated wildly over the past decade. The COPS program, for example, has seen sharp decreases since 2009, with funding dropping from $1 billion to $178 million in fiscal year 2013.  The Secure our Schools Program, which the Justice Department uses to help schools buy safety equipment, received $16 million in fiscal year 2009 but has not been funded for the past two years. The Education Department’s Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities program, which includes various safety-related initiatives, has seen funding more than halved over the same period, to $64.9 million in the 2013 fiscal year.

Despite the flurry of activity, Trump said he’s seen little from the federal or state governments to suggest a lasting change since Sandy Hook. “The question is, six months or six years down the road, is there still the interest and conversation and is security part of the mindset and culture of the school?” he said. “Whether you’re taking about Congress or school boards, history tells us the answer is no.”

A different culture

Matt Dossey is as close as Jonesboro has to a town leader. In addition to serving as school superintendent, he’s also the minister at the Baptist church. Dossey grew up in Gatesville, about 15 miles southeast on State Highway 36, the two-lane road that bisects Jonesboro. Aside from attending college in Abilene, he hasn’t lived anywhere beyond the narrow corridor connecting Gatesville to Hamilton, about 15 miles in the opposite direction. His wife, Emily, and mother, Mildred, each graduated from Jonesboro High School. His older son, aged 6, is in kindergarten at the school. His younger, 4, will soon be a student as well.

At 40, Dossey would seem imposing if not for a genial demeanor. His vest stretched over a tall, barrel-chested frame. He wore a light-brown beard as a “no-shave November” gesture of support for patients with prostate cancer. He isn’t the only one to have spent practically his entire life in this rural sliver of central Texas. Standing in the cafeteria, he could point to the children of his childhood friend, or to a young teacher who years ago was his student, when he taught health education in Gatesville before coming to Jonesboro. While the small-town feel engenders trust, he said it makes securing the school a maddening task. Parents expect to be able to go where they please. Closing doors isn’t foremost on kids’ minds. Just inside the school’s main entrance, a set of double doors was propped open despite a taped-on sign: “KEEP DOORS CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.”

Dossey had first proposed the idea of arming teachers to the seven-member school board after he came to the district in 2011, citing Harrold, a rural district in northern Texas that adopted a similar plan in 2007. But some board members were hesitant.  “Anytime you put weapons in an atmosphere where you’ve got a bunch of kids, you’ve got to be careful,” said Keith Taylor, president of the school board of trustees. “It’s an added safety risk.”

Sandy Hook convinced Taylor and the other trustees that it was worth that risk. On Jan. 17, all seven voted to adopt the plan.

“You’ve got to understand, we live in a place where our kids are familiar with guns,” Dossey said, explaining why the program has generated little friction in town. In a smooth drawl, Dossey described how students camp out with their guns by the football field during the summer, when irrigated grass creates a green oasis amid the dry landscape for the Fighting Eagles of Jonesboro High. “Armadillos love to come to our football field and dig up holes rooting for worms and grubs. Well our kids go down there armadillo hunting,” he said. “It’s a different culture out here. Everyone has guns in their home, if not for skunks or whatever, then for intruders.”

While Jonesboro is one of nearly 70 districts across the state to adopt similar plans since Sandy Hook, according to the Texas Association of School Boards, some Texans have resisted the move. Most of the state’s larger districts have their own police departments. In Austin, for example, district police hired six school resource officers this year to patrol the city’s 79 elementary schools — they already had officers posted at each high and middle school.

District Police Chief Eric Mendez said teachers in Austin don’t have the time for training to carry weapons to school, and he questioned the wisdom of doing so. “It could be a student that you know that decides that he or she is going to start shooting at a school,” he said. “Are you prepared to shoot somebody that you taught last semester?”

Bond, who was the principal at a high school in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997 when a student killed three classmates, doubts that an armed teacher would actually stop a student bent on killing his or her peers. “I don’t believe a teacher would just kill a kid right there,” he said. “I’ve walked up in front of a kid who had a gun. I know how it feels. I think you’d hesitate.” More likely, he said, is that an armed teacher would lead to a deadly accident.

Many law enforcement groups, including the National Association of School Resource Officers, have spoken against arming school staff. Several have said that in a hectic response to an attack, police could accidentally shoot a teacher holding a gun. EMC Insurance Companies, which covers most Kansas districts, reacted to a new law passed in that state by saying it would decline coverage to any school that allowed employees to carry guns, and some other insurers have said the same.

Dossey has seen little of this sort of opposition. He speaks of his program in a reasoned, confident tone; he likes to say they’re not cowboys or G.I. Joes. He and the board selected a few staff members for the program before buying them standard guns and tapping the local sheriff to help with training. The district has kept their identities secret to protect them and to try to avoid having students view them differently. Members of the program get together once a month for target practice.

“The idea that it might be there on campus helps,” said Dallas Isom, who has taught nearly every subject over his 25 years as an instructor at Jonesboro. Isom has two children at the school, aged 13 and 16, and he said he trusts that whoever is part of the program is responsible enough to handle a gun around the kids.

The school district has also purchased security cameras and is in the process of replacing old doors and installing a buzzer system for the front entrance, which is now unlocked. The upgrades will cost about $50,000, Dossey said, and will come out of a $700,000 bond that voters approved in May to fund new buses and other projects. Dossey says arming a few staff will cost about $8,000 this year, compared to at least five times as much for a resource officer.

In 2011, the state legislature cut the education budget by more than $5 billion. While lawmakers restored about $3.3 billion this year, those cuts continue to loom large in any discussion of school spending.

Dossey said that if the state provided funding, he’d rather hire a school resource officer.

Still, he told his state representative that he opposed a bill that would have allowed districts to levy taxes to pay for security measures, including the hiring of school resource officers. “That’s the legislature kicking it to the locals and saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise taxes, go ahead,’ ” he said. “ ‘We’re not going to stick our neck out for you, but if you want to stick yours out and get it chopped off then go right ahead.’ ”

Taxes are not popular in Texas. The bill never saw a vote.

“The bottom line is there is not enough funding in most districts to finance something like this,” said Gary Scharrer, a spokesman for former Sen. Tommy Williams, who co-sponsored the bill before resigning in October. “This was an alternative. It was optional. It was local control. But the opposition to tax increases is pretty stiff and strong down here.”

Linda Bridges, president of the Texas affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, opposes arming teachers, and she’s skeptical of districts’ claims that they don’t have the money to hire a resource officer. “The issue really is, what are the priorities?” she said. “I have found they can always find the money for priorities.”

Bridges and other teachers’ advocates say that, at least on the state level, the push for arming teachers was as much about politics as it was about school safety. Within weeks of the shooting at Sandy Hook, Gov. Rick Perry indicated his support for allowing more guns in schools. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst went further, calling for state funding to train teachers to carry guns (Perry later vetoed a bill that would have provided up to $1 million for this, citing several shortcomings, including the cost).

“I didn’t hear him talking about how we make our schools better, how we return funding to our schools, how we see that our teachers are compensated,” said Ken Zarifis, president of Education Austin, the city’s main teachers union. “The first thing I heard out of Lt. Gov. Dewhurst’s mouth was about how we train teachers to carry guns. Well, welcome to Texas.”

Safety trumps all

Nearly two thousand miles to the northeast, Superintendent James Agostine is operating under sharply different circumstances. Sitting at his desk in Monroe Elementary School, Agostine can monitor dozens of security cameras across the district’s five schools, with sharp images neatly organized on one of the two monitors connected to his computer. The cameras are part of a technology upgrade the district purchased after the shooting in neighboring Newtown. The district has also installed new door locks in many of its classrooms, replaced outer doors and hired two police officers to patrol its schools, adding to the two it already had.

Inside the elementary school, the district moved the main office from the middle of the building to right next to the main entrance, where a receptionist can look out on a new glass-enclosed extension off the front door. Visitors must now get buzzed through consecutive sets of locked doors, a level of security more common at banks. The windows looking out on the entrance are now covered with a protective film that would prevent the glass from shattering if it were hit with a bullet. Once a visitor passes through the doors, Agostine said, they must come immediately to the office to sign in. The district cut a window into the wall between the office and the main corridor so the receptionist can watch visitors approach. If anything is amiss, the receptionist can hit a red panic button that dispatches police directly to the school.

Those actions contrast with what seems like a picturesque small-town scene. The elementary school is a wide, two-story building with a stone facade perched on a rise above the Monroe Turnpike. A star-spangled banner flutters above a landscaped entranceway, with potted pink chrysanthemums flanking the front door. The district stretches across all 26 square miles of a heavily wooded community in southwestern Connecticut, where wealthy New York suburbs start giving way to small-town New England. The median household income is about $108,000.

But there are ominous reminders of what happened nearby just a year ago. The Monroe district is currently housing Sandy Hook Elementary at one of its buildings while Newtown builds a new school. And Agostine, dressed in a checked shirt and tie with white, wavy hair combed back, seems to have embraced the role of protector.  

“In my career, the top priority is safety,” he said. Agostine, 56, was born in Waterbury and has spent his entire career in Connecticut, working as a teacher, principal and superintendent at two other districts before coming to Monroe two years ago. “Safety trumps all.”

Over the past year, Monroe has spent nearly $815,000 all told upgrading security at its schools, leaning heavily on those infrastructure changes. And what’s been done here has been repeated all across the Nutmeg State.

In April, the state legislature in Hartford passed some of the tightest gun controls in the country — requiring background checks on all gun sales, for example, and expanding the list of banned assault weapons — along with a handful of school security measures. Lawmakers and the governor created a host of panels and commissions on everything from mental health to security, including the School Safety Infrastructure Council, which is working on recommendations that will eventually be required as part of any state-funded school construction project. In the meantime, the state has spread $21 million in grants across about two-thirds of its districts, helping them upgrade facilities at 604 schools.

The legislation was the product of a bipartisan task force created after Sandy Hook. State Sen. Toni Boucher, a Republican who was co-chair of the task force’s school security working group, said there was near-unanimous agreement that arming teachers was too dangerous a step to pursue.

There’s a powerful sense of before and after in Connecticut (school administrators refer to the day, like 9/11, by it’s date, 12/14). “I think given the events here in Connecticut and others across the country, it’s becoming not only more acceptable but more of a public demand for security in schools,” said Donald DeFronzo, commissioner of the state Department of Administrative Services and chairman of the School Safety Infrastructure Council. “Parents want to believe that when they drop their kids off in the morning that they're leaving them, next to home, in the most secure place anywhere.” DeFronzo said that while it’s impossible to guard against everything, it’s become clear to his council that state government ought to take a more active role, rather than letting districts just do as they see fit. “We could do a much better job.”

The council is expected to release its recommendations in January. DeFronzo said the group is working with the federal Department of Homeland Security to adapt a security assessment tool now used for federal buildings to schools. Rather than prescribing blanket fixes for all schools, the tool will take into account the geography and demographics of a district and help identify security weaknesses while suggesting corrective measures. One school may want to build a fence around its property, while another may use landscaping to delineate the grounds.

All this will come with a cost. DeFronzo said the new security requirements could add between 5 percent and 15 percent to any given construction project. The state’s schools have spent about $530 million a year on school construction over the past five years, with the state covering more than two-thirds of that. New security measures could tack on tens of millions of dollars a year. While the state budget office expects a surplus for the next two years, it recently projected a budget deficit of $1.1 billion for the year beginning  July 1, 2015. DeFronzo thinks the public is prepared to pay more for security. “That was the underlying public policy decision that was made,” he said. “It’s got to be evident that if you create new standards, there’s a cost.”

Monroe was lucky. The district had already been looking at security upgrades before the shooting, and was prepared to spend part of its regular maintenance budget. At the same time, savings on medical expenses in last year’s budget freed up about $240,000. Within days of the shooting, Agostine asked the school board to devote the savings to additional security spending. They hired consultants, attended conferences organized by the state, updated their emergency plans (the new law includes requirements for these plans). The preparation meant the district was ready to move immediately, which turned out to be a huge advantage.

“Within months of Sandy Hook happening, everybody is getting busy,” Agostine said. “You can’t find a contractor now to come in and design a new system. They don’t have the horses in the stall.”

Still, the town of nearly 20,000 didn’t avoid debate over the costs. In April, voters rejected an annual budget that included funding for three new school resource officers. After some residents questioned the need for additional officers in the schools, the town cut one of the positions from the budget, which was then approved in a subsequent referendum.

Agostine seems comfortable speaking about the security measures, some of which began before the shooting, like a general discussing battlefield tactics. But he acknowledges they come with a social price, too. “For 30 years we’ve been inviting parents to come into our buildings, and now we’re saying, ‘Better not. Don’t do it.’ Years ago it would not be uncommon for a parent to come in with their child, walk down to the classroom, help the child at their locker, give them a kiss and send them into the classroom. Now we say, ‘Leave them at the door.’ ”

Agostine said the security that the district has put in place represents the new normal, like taking off your shoes at the airport or any number of intrusive measures Americans have grown accustomed to since Sept. 11, 2001. “The realization I think we all have to be under is that we’re all on film, twenty-four-seven just about. If you pull up to a department store or a big box store, park your car, you’re on camera. You’re being observed,” he said. “Just about any public building, that’s happening. The cost of our society in terms of security is that we give up a little bit of that autonomy.”

It’s amazing how a little sunlight will change the behavior of some of the biggest names in corporate America — sunlight here meaning greater transparency and accountability.

It’s also amazing how the U.K.’s The Guardian is covering this changed behavior — and its potential consequences for every American — without much competition from U.S.-based media. It seems that reporters in Washington in particular can’t be bothered.

Over the past several decades, one of the country’s most influential political organizations — the 40-year-old American Legislative Exchange Council — was able to operate largely under the radar. Never heard of it? That’s by design. Founded in 1973 by conservative political operatives, ALEC has been successful in shaping  public policy to benefit its corporate patrons in part because few people — including reporters — knew anything about the organization, much less how it went about getting virtually identical laws passed in a multitude of states.

That began to change two years ago when an insider leaked thousands of pages of documents — including more than 800 “model” bills and resolutions, showing just how close ALEC is with big corporate interests and revealing how it goes about getting laws passed to enhance the profits of its sponsors, usually at the expense of consumers.

The Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit corporate watchdog organization, sifted through the documents and posted them on a dedicated website, ALECexposed.org. Those bills and resolutions, drafted by or in collaboration with industry lobbyists and lawyers, “reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state,” CMD says on the website.

I reviewed all of the health care legislation in the leaked documents and wrote about what I found for The Nation magazine in July 2011. It became clear from my review that health insurers felt one of the best ways to block the profit-threatening provisions of ObamaCare would be to use ALEC to disseminate bills it had helped write to friendly state legislators.  It was also clear that ALEC’s staff and membership had been at work for more than a decade on a broad range of issues important to my former industry, from turning over state Medicaid programs to private insurers to letting them market highly profitable junk insurance.

While ALEC-member legislators hail from every state, the organization has been especially successful in getting bills introduced in legislatures controlled by Republicans. As The New York Timesnoted in an editorial in February, more than 50 of ALEC’s model bills were introduced in Virginia alone last year.

In addition to insurance companies like State Farm and UnitedHealthcare, ALEC’s corporate membership has included big names ranging from ExxonMobil and Wells Fargo to Johnson & Johnson and Kraft. And it has worked closely with groups like the National Rifle Association as well.

It is the organization’s association with the NRA, in fact, that has led to dozens of corporations severing their ties with ALEC, as The Guardian reported.

Soon after the NRA succeeded in pushing a stand-your-ground bill through the Florida legislature — which George Zimmerman used in his defense in the Trayvon Martin case — ALEC adopted it as a model for other states. The group took that action after a 2005 NRA presentation to ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. As The Center for Media and Democracy reported, the corporate co-chair of that task force at the time was Walmart, the country’s largest seller of rifles. Since then, more than two dozen states have passed laws identical or similar to the ALEC/NRA stand-your-ground model legislation.

News coverage of ALEC’s role in getting the controversial law enacted from coast to coast — coupled with CMD-led disclosures about the organization over the past two years — has caused many of ALEC’s longtime corporate members to abandon it, according to The Guardian.

Documents obtained by the British newspaper indicate that since 2011, ALEC has lost more than 60 corporate members, a hit so severe that during the first six months of this year it has “suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income.” It has also lost nearly 400 state legislative members during the same time frame.  

The organization has launched what it refers to as the “Prodigal Son Project” to woo back companies like Amazon, Coca-Cola, GE, Kraft and McDonald’s that have dropped their membership. Another “prodigal son” ALEC hopes to welcome back: that big retailer and rifle seller, Walmart. The loss of Walmart alone undoubtedly was a major contributor to the budget shortfall, considering the size of the company.

Meanwhile, just blocks from Capitol Hill where many Washington reporters spend their days, ALEC last week held its annual “policy summit,” but very few of those reporters felt the summit was worth their time, despite the fact that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., were on the agenda. And despite the fact that even with fewer resources, ALEC is still hugely influential in shaping public policy. As Nancy MacLean, professor of history and public policy at Duke University, noted in a May column for North Carolina Policy Watch, “What ALEC and the companies that provide it with millions in operating funds seek is, in effect, a slow-motion corporate takeover of our democracy.”

That might be a story worth covering.

ALCOLU, S.C. — A few miles off I-95, past acres of brown-and-white fields where blackbirds circle overhead, this small town in the heart of Deep South cotton country isn't known for much. It has a post office and a few churches, some abandoned houses and some nicer ones, ramshackle trailers and cotton fields. 

After church on a recent Sunday there, George Frierson was scuffing a shiny black dress shoe across some gravel at a railroad crossing. Back when he was a kid the rail line split this tiny, rural town along racial lines. But for blacks like him growing up in Alcolu, the train tracks signified something even more sinister than segregation.

“Where they actually found the girls' bodies, they say it was just along the tracks,” he said.

Frierson is a local historian and community activist who works at the nearby Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church and serves on the county school board. The general area he was marking with his shoe was the scene of a double murder in 1944. Two young white girls out picking flowers had their skulls bashed in and were found in a nearby water-filled ditch. 

Police said their killer used a railroad spike, and for the culprit they fingered a 14-year-old black boy named George Stinney Jr., whom a witness said had been seen talking to the girls earlier that day. The sheriff's deputies who snatched Stinney up said he confessed to the crime when they took him in for questioning. The boy's parents, who lived in a company house, were run out of town the day he was arrested and didn't see their son until his trial. 

An all-white jury sentenced the teenager to death after 10 minutes of deliberation. The trial lasted two and a half hours in the Clarendon County courthouse where a local tax commissioner preparing for a State House run in an election year was appointed to represent him. No witnesses spoke in his defense. That summer, fewer than 90 days after the girls were killed, the State of South Carolina shocked George Stinney Jr. to death in an electric chair that could barely fit his small frame. He was the youngest person executed in 20th century America.

These days, not everyone who lives in the area has heard the story of George Stinney Jr. About four years ago, a white local attorney named Steve McKenzie read a newspaper account about the execution.

“I practiced law in Clarendon County for 20 years and did not even realize this case even existed,” he says. “This is a well-known case in the black community, but in the white community I'd ever even heard of it. I grew up in this area … and was just, as a lawyer, was just appalled at the lack of process that was given to George Stinney.”

In October 2013, McKenzie asked the county solicitor ― the state's equivalent of a district attorney ― to give Stinney a new trial 70 years after the boy's death. A county judge could grant or dismiss the motion, but it's likely to wind up a merely symbolic move.

“It's not the strongest case in the world,” McKenzie admits.

The Palmetto State has strict rules about introducing new evidence after a trial, and obviously the death sentence has already been carried out. In 2009, Aime L. Stinney told The Sumter Item, a local newspaper, that she and her brother did interact with the girls the day they disappeared, according to reporter Robert Baker. But the new legal motion comes with sworn statements from Aime and her other brother Charles that say they were with Stinney the entire day of the murders and it would have been impossible for him to have done it.

"George's conviction and execution was something my family believed could happen to any of us in the family,” Charles Stinney wrote in his statement. “Therefore, we made a decision for the safety of the family to leave it be.”

No written record of a confession has even been produced, according to McKenzie and others who have researched the case, and nearly all the transcripts, files and records related to the prosecution have vanished except for some handwritten notes.

Part of the new petition to re-open the case also hinges on that alleged confession between a black teenager, alone in a room with multiple white sheriff's deputies in the Deep South, pre-Miranda rights era of 1944.

“The only thing that we are aware of is an oral confession,” McKenzie says. “To me, any time you put a 14-year-old in that situation and you put it in that era, then the chances of this confession either being coerced or the person being manipulated by the people who were actually doing the interrogation would be very, very high. … You're talking about white men in the Jim Crow South with a 14-year-old boy. It wasn't even close to being an even playing field.”

Modern science

Obviously no can say for sure what happened in the room where the deputies questioned George Stinney Jr. 70 years ago. The officers are dead, and Stinney is dead. But one thing can be said about the circumstances in which the teenager's alleged confession was used in the swift trial that led to his execution.

In 1944, there was no body of scientific evidence, research or psychology to suggest that people would ever confess to a crime they didn't commit. Now, there's plenty.

“Our courts are only just now catching on to the fact that there's a science to interrogation that unfortunately can lead to false confessions,” says Joe McCulloch, a lawyer in South Carolina's capital city of Columbia who directs the state chapter of the anti-death penalty Innocence Project.

It wasn't until around the late 1980s when American courts began using expert witnesses to testify about false confessions at trials, says Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City who is regarded as one of the nation's leading experts on the topic. Around that same time, England was seeing a rash of false confession cases and completely revamped the way its law enforcement officers handle interrogations because of it, he says. That country moved to a less confrontational style of police interrogations, and by 1985 made sure all interrogations were recorded.

By the next decade, here in the United States, two professors at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University formed the Innocence Project to help exonerate prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing.

According to Kassin, among those early prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence, 25 percent of the cases involved false confessions.

“Nobody ― nobody ― imagined that the rate of false confessions in those cases would be so high,” he says.

These days, no murder trial in the United States could ever take just two and a half hours, as Stinney's trial did in 1944. And when it comes to the confession part of it, modern defense attorneys have a bench of experts at their disposal, some of whom have devoted their life's work researching it.

One of those is Kassin. In 1985, he wrote a landmark article that laid out three categories of false confessions and why someone would ever admit to a crime they didn't commit. One category is a voluntary confession, typically given by someone looking for attention. Another is an internalized confession, when interrogation tactics lead someone to believe they might have actually committed an act they haven't.

The third is called a coerced compliant false confession.

“These are cases where innocent people who know they're innocent are in a situation of interrogation that is so stressful, they've been there so long and they're sleep deprived and they're so tired and they are being yelled at and being called a liar and there may have been threats or promises that have been made or implied, and basically, in a nutshell, the situation has become so bad … that they use confession as the only way to get out,” he says.

Oftentimes, Kassin says, a part of it is something known as myopic decision making: when someone is under duress, he or she will do what's expedient to get out of a bad situation with little or no regard for future consequences.

The cannon of false confessions analysis these days isn't relegated to ivory towers of academia, criminal justice research papers or the dense pages of footnoted law journals. In recent years it's penetrated pop culture. The image of a 14-year-old black teenager facing two small town white cops who think he might have killed a pair of young white girls could easily be imagined in the script of a modern-day TV crime drama. 

This April, PBS aired a Ken Burns documentary called “Central Park Five,” which tells a notorious story from the perspective of five black and latino teenagers who were convicted of raping a white female jogger and beating her close to death in the New York City park in 1989. They'd pleaded not guilty, and said police had manipulated confessions out of them, four of which were videotaped. They were told if they confessed they'd be able to go home. In 2002, all five of them were let out of prison when DNA evidence proved a serial rapist, who later also confessed to that particular crime, had been the real confessor responsible for the attack.

Meanwhile, the 2012 documentary “West of Memphis” traces the story of three young Arkansas men who were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys who were found naked and hogtied in a ditch. One of them, Jessie Misskelley Jr., implicated the others in the crime after a long police interrogation, which became the basis for the arrests. DNA evidence later exonerated them.

Why did Misskelley confess? He was “borderline mentally retarded, with an IQ of 72, yet police persisted with his lengthy interrogation,” wrote Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, in a post on the Harvard Press Blog. “The few recorded pieces of the interrogations showed police using leading questions to try to tell him what had happened, something that interrogators are trained not to do because it contaminates a confession. We do not know what threats or other techniques were used to secure that confession.”

In 2005, after studying cases and talking to people who had falsely confessed to crimes they didn't commit, Kassin says he discovered something he calls the phenomenology of innocence.

“Innocent people trust that their innocence will ultimately work them out,” he says, adding that someone who knows they've done nothing wrong can sometimes believe that once the interrogation is over, the crime is fully examined and investigated, the police will see the evidence clearly points in another direction, and everything will be OK once they get a lawyer.

That, and myopic decision making, is much worse with young people than adults, Kassin says. They'll ask if they can call their mom and are told they can when the interrogation is over. Getting out becomes the urgent problem they need to solve and so they say whatever it might take to get them out of the situation.

It certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibilities that Stinney was up against the same or similar circumstances and psychology in 1944.

“Research couldn't be clearer: kids are much more shortsighted in their decision making than they are focused on longterm consequences,” Kassin says. “A 14-year-old fits perfectly into that model.”

A better way forward

Just as no one can know how Stinney's alleged 1944 confession to the sheriff's deputies came about ― or if it even did ― the same could be said for what the jurors in the case were thinking when they reached their verdict, sentencing a black teenager to death for the killing of two white girls in a segregated Deep South town that wanted revenge.

Steve McKenzie, the lead lawyer working to have the Stinney case re-heard, in order to right what he sees as a moral wrong, had a rather shocking confession himself when asked about that specific aspect of the trial.

“If I would have been sitting on that jury I probably would have convicted him too,” he told me. “I'll tell you why: It's simply because the white community was expecting justice and they had what they thought was a confession. So why doubt what the police officers were saying? You had two sheriff's deputies that said he confessed. For the white community, as far as they were concerned it was done, the girls were dead and let's execute the murderer and move on. And that's what they did.”

A Jim Crow era fraught with racial tension, however, can't take all the blame. The jury that heard the case of the West Memphis Three made their verdict in the 1990s, and the Central Park Five case took place in New York City.

In 2009, the American Psychology-Law Society published a white paper on false confessions authored by six researchers who studied the issue. In it they documented research that's shown how over the years judicial concern about an over-reliance on confessions by jurors has given rise to “a series of rules designed to curb possible abuses in the interrogation room, exclude unreliable confessions from trial, and prevent wrongful convictions.”

The paper concluded with the strong recommendation that electronic recording of interrogations be mandatory in the United States. Currently, the FBI doesn't have to tape confessions. At the state level, 17 states require it. At the local level, Kassin says hundreds of jurisdictions are doing it voluntarily.

In South Carolina, police can use oral confessions in court just as they did in 1944, says McCulloch of the state Innocence Project.

“As an old prosecutor, there is nothing more effective in a courtroom than a confession,” he says. “The problem with a confession if it's not recorded is that it's always subject to inaccuracy on the part of the police officer, which could be unintentional or a misinterpretation. But certainly it is subject to the accused at trial denying they ever confessed.”

McCulloch plans to help get a bill introduced in the state legislature in January that would mandate all interrogations and confessions be recorded. He adds that the purpose isn't just to give juries the best possible evidence of a confession, but also to prevent the kinds of law enforcement techniques that result in false confessions.

“If you've got the whole thing on video and the cops are feeding that information that only the murderer would know, that's what leads to the credibility of a false confession [and] the techniques of hot boxing a subject, especially if they're young,” he says.

Beyond a more uniform practice of videotaping confessions, there's another reform that renewed attention to the Stinney case might be able to spotlight. 

According to Dan Macallair, who directs the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, one important lesson that could be drawn from modern reflection on that 1944 prosecution is the need to smooth out regional disparities that still exist in the juvenile justice system nationwide. 

“People tend to think of the juvenile justice system in the United States as a monolith, and that's just not the case,” he says. “There are huge regional disparities in this country that we haven't addressed.” 

Another is on the laws in those states as it pertains to minors. What happened to George Stinney Jr., he says, shows how “quick and easy it is to descend into barbarity” if laws are in place to allow it. Stinney's execution at his young age, he notes, was an official sanction through statute. 

“As a result it became perfectly OK for prosecutors to pursue this penalty on a 14-year-old,” he says, “on a child whose feet wouldn't touch the ground when they put him in the chair.”

'As long as this is out there'

Around noon on Dec. 1, George Frierson, 56, had just finished counting the money collected in the small one-story Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Alcolu after a service. The church is just a few miles from where a local lumber baron shut down his mill for the day and assembled a search party of workers in 1944 that found the bodies of Betty June Binnicker, age 11, and Mary Emma Thames, who was 8, when they failed to come home.

“I was born in Alcolu, and all young black males knew about this story from our youth,” Frierson said outside the church as he looked out over a cotton field across the highway. “I wasn't born at the time of this incident, I'm not that old. But I'm considered a historian, so I started out on this juncture to see the facts of this case, not as an advocacy or activism point of view. And then it evolved into the activism. When I started out I just wanted to be sure that the facts that I heard all my life are correct.”

It turned out that facts were funny things. People believed the ones they wanted to believe.

“I won't say that the white community doesn't know, but they won't admit to what they do know,” he says about those in the town who do talk about the case.

Frierson carries around a book of old newspaper clippings and correspondence he's been given over the years by people interested in or close to the Stinney story. For the past several years he's been trying to have Stinney exonerated. In recent weeks, as news of the motion to have the case re-tried has spread, more information has come Frierson's way. He says someone in a nearby town who recognized his face on TV recently found him and gave him a copy of the autopsy reports of the two girls. Someone else sent him a letter allegedly from the governor at the time that uses harsh and graphic language in support of Stinney's execution. A man now living in Arkansas, who was a teenager at the time of the murders and says he was the member of a search party who first found the bodies, has reached out. (McKenzie says he has an affidavit from him on file, but hasn't yet filed it with the court.)

Recently, Frierson has been in talks with the state parole board, he says, and they've been working on language for a pardon, though he turned down a first draft of one. In the legal and religious sense, he says, a pardon is to be forgiven for something that you've done. He doesn't think Stinney killed anybody. At around 95 pounds, there was just no way the skinny 14-year-old could have beaten those girls to death, he believes, and then hauled them several hundred feet from the murder site and dumped them in a ditch.

“There has never been any statements about any blood attributed to Mr. Stinney in this case,” Frierson says. “It never, ever was alleged that there was any bloody clothes, blood on him or whatever.”

But Frierson is also keeping his own secrets about the case.

“There are some things that are not reported anywhere that I know to be facts that I am not at liberty to speak of, like who the real perpetrator was,” he said at one point. “I was told who it was, and I never call his name. But everybody in the community knows who it allegedly was.”

He says the Stinney family heard a deathbed confession from this unnamed man who Frierson would only describe as someone who drove a truck. As for why he won't say his name, he says the man was never arrested, tried or convicted.

“I think they call that defamation of character or slander,” he said.

Back at the railroad crossing near where the girls were killed, Frierson gestured to the scrub brush and empty fields on either side of the road. Where rows of houses and a big lumber mill used to stand is now scraggly trees and vines. Some litter blew down the road. Lately, the Stinney case has brought international attention to the small town as news of the legal motion and the details of the gripping case have made a splash in the big newspapers and cable broadcasts. A movie about it is in the works.

“I'm speaking from a biblical point of view,” Frierson said. “When God pulls his hand away from something, or puts his hand and his judgment on something, it can never prosper. There are people who have taken that view: that Alcolu can never prosper as long as this is out there. This used to be a thriving area here. See what it is now.”

Corey Hutchins is a reporter for the City Paper in Charleston, S.C., and a correspondent for Columbia Journalism Review's United States Project. His work has appeared in Slate, The Nation, and The Center for Public Integrity, among others. 

Minutes after Rick Metsger took the oath of office to become the newest overseer of the nation’s credit union industry, he walked a few blocks up the street to break bread with executives and lobbyists for the firms he now regulates.

The luncheon in his honor was held at an elegant, $4 million Capitol Hill party and meeting space called Credit Union House. It drew a tightknit group of business leaders, advocates, and regulators — the most powerful people in a financial industry that holds more than $1 trillion but that most Americans know little about.

Metsger, whose ascent they had gathered to toast, was one of their own, a fellow-true believer in credit unions who would now police the industry full-time as one of three board members of the National Credit Union Administration.

Metsger, in his coziness with his fellow-revelers, is typical of the regulators, lawyers and lobbyists who make comfortable livings shuttling between overseeing and promoting the credit union industry. Together, they guard its wholesome reputation, forged during the Great Depression, when credit unions were set up to help poor people whom banks refused to serve.

Metsger had served on the board of his own credit union. He won a seat in the Oregon state Senate with the help of thousands of credit union volunteers and tens of thousands of dollars from the industry. A decade later, as chairman of a key committee, he helped pass legislation allowing credit unions to enter new lines of business. He worked as a paid consultant for a regional industry lobbying group even after President Barack Obama nominated him to the board in May. He ended the contract just weeks before he arrived in Washington to be sworn in on Aug. 23.

Ethics watchdogs question whether someone with such deep roots in an industry can cut through the wholesome, folksy rhetoric that its lobbyists use to push for weaker rules and less enforcement. As the NCUA board tries to fix the failures that led to a little-publicized, industry-wide bailout in 2009, the concern is especially pressing.

If the industry can persuade regulators to allow more risk in the system, the board’s decisions could plant the seeds of the next big taxpayer bailout.

“This is a person who is an advocate for the credit union industry, and he is now in charge of monitoring the credit union industry,” says Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, which advocates for transparency in elections and government. “It will be difficult for Metsger to question the industry’s perspective because he appears to share it in most respects.”

Metsger says he obtained approval from the agency’s ethics lawyers before attending the luncheon and paid out-of-pocket the $40-per-plate cost of food for him and his family.

After inquiries from the Center for Public Integrity, the NCUA’s inspector general is reviewing the lawyers’ advice to Metsger and revisiting the agency’s earlier analysis of any potential financial conflicts, according to Sharon Separ, who oversees investigations for the independent, internal watchdog office. A formal investigation would follow if the facts warrant it, she said.

Big business

Credit union advocates work hard to cultivate the industry’s image as quaint and community oriented. In reality it’s a massive and growing business. In 2012, the nation’s 6,800-odd credit unions — with 94 million depositors — earned $8.5 billion in net income and held more than $1 trillion in assets. The biggest credit union, Navy Federal, holds $55.4 billion in assets and earned $792.3 million last year. It recently became the nation’s 20th-biggest mortgage originator.

Like banks, credit unions provide financial services such as deposit accounts and loans to consumers. Unlike banks, they are barred from risky activities that would not serve customers, like investing in most derivatives, and are exempt from paying most taxes. They are required to return excess earnings to their member-customers, for example by offering lower rates on loans or higher interest on deposits. The tax exemption is expected to cost the government $1.66 billion next year, according to the White House’s budget office.

Much of that extra income is diverted to finance the industry’s advocacy efforts, reducing the benefits available for customers. Credit unions spent more than $600 million of their members’ money since 2008 on trade groups, lobbyists, political donations, naming rights to sports arenas and other efforts to promote what they call “the credit union movement,” according to a new analysis of public documents by the Center.

“This isn’t a charity, it’s big business,” says Marvin Umholtz, a former credit union executive who now consults for both credit unions and banks.

The National Credit Union Administration board is charged with supervising the industry and overseeing the $11.7 billion fund that insures credit union deposits, so that customers are protected if their lender fails. To prevent costly failures, the board monitors the industry and imposes sanctions on weak credit unions. In effect, the board controls how much risk the institutions can take on, and how quickly they can expand.

The board’s expansionist policies have helped credit unions add more than 11 million members in the past 10 years and boost lending more quickly than banks. Their assets have doubled since 2001.

”You can think of them as providing regulatory oversight, but you can also think of them as cheerleaders and enablers,” says Kathleen Clark, an expert in government ethics and professor at Washington University School of Law.  It’s a common problem when regulators are “ideologically in line” with the companies they oversee, she says.

Interests overlap

Metsger, like the other two members of the NCUA board, bounced straight from promoting credit unions to writing rules and policing them. It is a typical trajectory inside the clubby world of the “credit union movement,” where regulators often embrace the view that credit unions are inherently good, and more credit unions are good for America.

Among the guests at Metsger’s luncheon was his new boss, NCUA Chairman Debbie Matz, a credit union executive between her two stints as a regulator. Troy Stang, CEO and lobbyist in Oregon for the Northwest Credit Union Association, organized the event — and had Metsger on his payroll until earlier that month. Bill Cheney, the industry’s top lobbyist in Washington, was a director of the two credit unions whose losses after the financial crisis led to a $19 billion taxpayer bailout.

A picture from the event shows the four locked in amiable conversation at Credit Union House, the swank party space built by lobbyists, for lobbying. How they handle issues facing the industry may set the stage for the next credit union crisis — or guarantee a safe and sound system for decades to come.

Metsger says his new job requires a different mode of advocacy, one focused on ensuring the industry’s financial strength. He says friendly gestures by industry advocates, like the luncheon celebrating him, won’t cloud his judgment as a regulator.

“You want to make sure you keep this arms-length, but you also need to have a dialogue with folks and you don’t want to make them feel like you’re in isolation — ‘Oh, no, I can’t be seen with you,’” he said in an interview.

Cheney said the event made sense because the northwest trade association is a part-owner of Credit Union House and Metsger had consulted for the group. “I don’t think that creates any undue influence with the regulator whatsoever,” Cheney said.

Mission creep

Federal credit unions were set up during the Great Depression to serve working-class people who were being turned away by banks. The 1934 law that created them says they would provide credit for “people of small means … to stabilize the credit structure of the United States.”

The industry has strayed from that mission. Fewer than one-third of federal credit union members earn less than 70 percent of the median income in their areas. Bank customers are more likely to be low-income than credit union customers, according to Federal Reserve data. At the same time, regulators are deeming a record number of credit unions “low-income” or “small,” designations that carry generous benefits, such as the ability to accept deposits from non-members and make more commercial loans. Changes in federal law also broadened the mission of the credit union system.

Credit unions have erected a sprawling advocacy machine to protect their tax break from attacks by bankers who believe it confers an unfair advantage.

There are 43 leagues like the Northwest regional group; two major national lobbies — the Credit Union National Association and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions; charitable foundations; groups representing low-income, corporate and other credit union subgroups; for-profit subsidiaries; quasi-independent companies like CUNA Mutual, which charges credit unions for services then pumps tens of millions back into their advocacy network; and even a think tank, the Filene Research Institute.

The groups collected more than $160 million in membership dues and other payments from credit unions from 2008 through 2011, the most recent year for which thorough data are available. That income helps pay for causes like Credit Union House, where dozens of political fundraisers are held each year. Four of the state credit union leagues that own the house put up more than $300,000 apiece to help build it. Hundreds of credit unions and trade groups make annual donations.

If you trace it back, all of that money comes from the pockets of credit union members who pay the fees and interest that make up a credit union's earnings.

Trade groups portray credit unions as humble Davids fighting dreaded banking Goliaths, sponsoring national ad campaigns with populist slogans like “Don’t tax my credit union.” One such ad, sponsored by the Credit Union National Association, tells viewers, “You didn’t save your money to make someone else rich” — a reference to banks, whose profits go to their shareholders.

Top executives at big credit unions, however, can pull down eight-figure pay packages and golden parachutes to rival all but the biggest banks. David Maus, CEO of the Public Service Employees Credit Union in Denver, was paid $11 million in 2010. Cheney, top lobbyist for the Credit Union National Association, received $1.3 million in compensation in 2012, tax filings show.

Promoting growth, adding risk

When they’re not defending their special tax status, credit unions lobby for rule changes that would allow them to act more like banks, take more risks and grow.

They often find sympathetic ears at the NCUA.

Chairman Matz, for example, has repeatedly urged Congress to allow credit unions to boost commercial lending. And she exempted many from the legal cap on business lending by helping them qualify as “low-income credit unions.” Between August 2012 and August 2013 alone, the number of credit unions in that group leapt 72 percent, to 1,961 from 1,140.

Most credit union managers lack the expertise to run prudent small business-lending programs, says Jim Blaine, CEO of the nation’s second-biggest credit union by assets, State Employees’ Credit Union in Raleigh, N.C.

“If you’re going to go into it, you’d better be good, and there are very few credit unions that can do it at this point,” says Blaine, whose credit union has rejected members’ pleas to do commercial lending.

His view is borne out in government audits that have found that credit unions with business lending programs are more likely to fail.

’57 Chevy

Metsger’s devotion to credit unions bloomed early. When he was 19, he needed a car to get to his job scrubbing toilets at a local school in Oregon. Portland Teachers Credit Union lent him $350 to buy a used ’57 Chevy, and he was hooked. To this day, Metsger, 62, remains a member of the credit union and an aficionado of old cars.

He worked as a teacher, then an investigative reporter, before a visit to Salem on behalf of his credit union board inspired him to run for the state Senate.

“My issue was concern about citizens, ordinary citizens, having access to credit union services — low-cost financial services — so they can find a better life,” Metsger said in a 2010 political speech about his first campaign. “With the help of thousands and thousands of credit union volunteers and consumer advocates, I was successful.”

Metsger received roughly $120,000 in campaign money from the credit union industry during his 12-year political career, more than he got from any other industry. He defended the industry’s political spending after leaving office, as a paid consultant for the Northwest Credit Union Association, previously known as the Credit Union Association of Oregon. That group alone accounted for almost half of his donations from credit unions.

Serving in Oregon’s legislature is a part-time job. Between sessions, Metsger worked as a PR consultant for clients including several credit unions and the Credit Union Association of Oregon.

In the statehouse, he pushed several pieces of legislation aimed at strengthening and expanding the industry. He supported bills that would allow credit unions to take deposits from government agencies to bolster their capital cushions. He supported boosting their commercial lending, which can increase risk. And he advocated expanding the pools of people from which credit unions can draw their members.

His work pleased the Credit Union Association of Oregon, which in 2009 named him “Legislator of the Decade.”

Backwater bailouts

Metsger begins his job as regulator at a moment of upheaval for the National Credit Union Administration.

The 1,262-employee agency is headquartered in a new brick building across from a train station in Alexandria, Va., about seven miles south of the better-known bank regulators clustered around the White House and Treasury buildings.

Its location, and the credit union industry’s relatively modest size, long rendered the NCUA a sleepy backwater of financial regulation.

Attention shifted south after the financial crisis, when massive losses on risky mortgage bonds forced NCUA to shutter five teetering “wholesale” credit unions whose failures would have upended the entire system. The regulator took them over, borrowing $19.2 billion from the government to bail out the system. It still owed about $3.9 billion as of last month.

A policy change by the NCUA helped lay the groundwork for the crisis.

Wholesale credit unions, also called corporates, provide short-term loans and investment services to retail credit unions. They traditionally served these customers in defined regions, but the board decided in the late 1990s to let them serve credit unions across the nation, forcing them to compete with one another. Seeking to offer the highest returns, some corporates invested in complex, risky mortgage bonds that were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis — threats that government auditors had warned about in 1995 and 2004.

Bill Cheney, the million-dollar CUNA lobbyist who attended Metsger’s luncheon, was sued in 2010 by NCUA because he sat on the board of WesCorp, one of the biggest failures. The judge in the case later dismissed the charges against Cheney and the other directors. Cheney settled a separate lawsuit related his service as a director of U.S. Central, the biggest failed corporate credit union.

Credit unions have spent $4.8 billion of their members’ money paying down the bailouts, on top of the $5.6 billion they lost in the failures. They could pay up to $3.9 billion more to close out the Treasury debt, according to NCUA estimates.

Cleaning up and scaling up

Now the agency is under pressure to ensure there is no repeat of 2009. It has retooled the rules and oversight practices for corporates, imposing new risk management requirements and limits on how much of any single investment type they can buy. If one appears shaky, it will automatically trigger requirements to raise capital and cease paying dividends.

This get-tough campaign contrasts with the agency’s efforts to help credit unions grow and thrive.

The regulator spent $5.5 million last year on an office that offers free, private consulting services to small credit unions and those designated as serving low-income members. A brochure of marketing tips from the office advises, “Encourage tellers and loan officers to cross-sell products at every touch point with the member.”

They also softened rules that defined distinct groups eligible for membership. Today, for example, anyone can join the NASA Federal Credit Union simply by agreeing to become a member, cost-free, of the American Consumer Council.

“There really are no longer any restrictions on membership,” says Blaine, the credit union CEO.

Among the agency’s key goals for 2012, according to its annual report: boost awareness of credit unions among young people; classify more credit unions as low-income, so they are subject to looser rules and extra subsidies; and increase the number of potential credit union members so the industry can keep growing.

There are no meaningful safeguards to prevent the NCUA from being completely filled with the industry veterans and allies. By law, only one of the three board members can be a recent credit union employee or affiliate. None of the current board members counts, agency spokesman John Fairbanks said.

Not Metsger, who was paid by a major trade group until the month he was sworn in. Not Michael Fryzel, who was a lawyer for credit unions until he was sworn in in July 2008. And not Matz, who was a senior executive at Andrews Federal Credit Union until roughly a year before she was nominated to her second stint on the board. Credit union industry groups don’t count for purposes of the rule and Matz took off just enough time to avoid being considered a recent employee.

Metsger said in an email that he avoids conflicts of interest by “never letting my associations … direct my decision-making,” and by seeking guidance from ethics lawyers.

Tension in the family

Credit union lobbyists bristle at the idea that they wield too much influence over the regulator. As evidence, they cite issues on which they disagree with the NCUA.

Trade groups, for example, have argued that closer inspection of credit unions’ lightly-regulated subsidiaries would be unnecessary and invasive. In November, the board proposed new reporting requirements for the entities, some of which made shoddy loans that contributed to recent credit union failures.

CUNA and the regulator have locked horns more often since the crisis, Cheney says, because of all the new rules the board has imposed over industry objections.

“If there’s some sort of a family crisis, it can create tension in the family, and certainly we had a crisis in the financial services industry,” he says. “But any time the pendulum starts to swing, the question is, ‘When has it swung too far?’”

If the credit union industry has agreed with his decisions, Metsger said, that does not mean he made the decisions merely to please industry. He broke with the industry at least once, he notes, by supporting a 2007 proposal in the state legislature to curb risky and abusive mortgage lending that credit unions hated.

Metsger says he will continue to strike a “fine balance” in his new role, engaging industry stakeholders and hearing them out, but remaining focused on the agency’s mission — protecting the health of the credit union industry.

“I’m very cognizant of it,” he says. “That doesn’t mean you always guess exactly right, but you do the best you can.”

One of America's most liberal bastions — San Francisco — has cut student suspensions by nearly a third in three years but continues to struggle with grossly disproportionate suspensions of black students.

District data obtained by Public Counsel, the country's largest pro bono legal group, and community organizers in San Francisco show that African-American students represented only 8 percent of the city's public high school kids last school year. Yet 50 percent of high school students suspended for misbehavior labeled "willful defiance” were black.

Willful defiance is a vague, catchall category for disruptive student behavior that can range from arriving late to using foul language to refusing to obey instructions.

The district’s black and Latino students are 10 percent and 23 percent, respectively, of the student population.Together, however, students of these ethnic backgrounds comprised 77 percent of all student suspensions and 81 percent of all suspensions for willful defiance.

Just as The City by the Bay is challenged by sharp income divides, its schools, too, suffer from a wide gap in academic achievement between white student and those who are black or Latino.

High rates of suspension result in poor academic performance as out-of-school kids fall behind and disengage from school, said Laura Faer, Public Counsel’s California statewide education rights director.

“These go hand in hand,” she said. “They are not separate.”

Suspensions, Public Counsel has said, are like an “unsupervised vacation” from school, with damaging consequences for students.

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education began considering a resolution introduced by a member to eliminate, by next fall, the option to suspend students for willful defiance.

“We’ve made some progress in reducing suspensions overall,” said Matt Haney, who introduced the “Safe and Supportive Schools” resolution.

Despite that, Haney said, “the numbers for African American students remain not just troubling, but shocking.”

The resolution calls for out-of-school suspensions to be “an absolute last resort.”

In San Francisco schools, more than two-thirds of all suspensions were for willful defiance.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest district, was already ordered by its board of trustees earlier this year to end suspensions for willful defiance.

The push in L.A. and in San Francisco now is to strengthen disciplinary alternatives already being used in an effort to improve student behavior: counseling, positive behavior intervention and support techniques and restorative justice practices — in which students must sit down and meet with victims of their abusive behavior and make amends.

A Center for Public Integrity and San Francisco Public Press story on San Francisco’s efforts showcased the district’s mixed attempts to spread this model school by school.

District officials in San Francisco could not be reached for comment.

Haney’s resolution would require district administrators to create a plan within four months of the resolution’s passage to ensure that training resources are directed to schools where data shows high rates of suspensions. Training should emphasize "trauma-informed counseling" — how to work with kids traumatized by life events--and how to recognize racial and ethnic bias in responses to children.

The resolution would also require schools to “get extra help” from the central office and exhaust other methods before suspending black students.

Haney compared to the effort to training police officers with a history of pulling over drivers of a certain race excessively. He said some staff are concerned about having an option taken form them if resources and training are not provided, but that he hasn’t heard pushback defending the status quo.

“Removing a student doesn’t work,” he said. “With removal, the student just comes back more angry and more disruptive.”

Kevine Boggess of San Francisco’s Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, a community group, has been working to gather support for eliminating willful defiance suspensions and to boost alternative-discipline training for school staff.

Coleman Advocates is also working on ways to further integrate parents into school life, and bridge tension between parents and educators over discipline problems.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, Coleman said in informational material, found that out-of-school suspensions “are counterproductive to the intended goals” of improving student behavior and “should not be considered an appropriate discipline in many but the most extreme and dangerous circumstances.”

These days, Nick Allard conjures visions of Shakespeare's Juliet when he talks of lobbyists.

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet — or foul," says Allard, the dean of the Brooklyn Law School and a partner at Patton Boggs, a Washington, D.C.-based law and lobbying firm.

It should come as little surprise, then, that Allard is no fan of the American League of Lobbyists' decision last month to change its name to the Association of Government Relations Professionals.

He's not alone. 

"If K Street wants lobbyists to be called government relations professionals, then that's exactly the kind of newspeak that made people distrust lobbyists in the first place," Oliver Ruff, a New York-based lobbyist, wrote this week in a LinkedIn forum for lobbying firms.

And count Howard Marlowe, former president of the American League of Lobbyists, among the dissenters.

"There are already associations for public relations consultants, grassroots consultants, political intelligence consultants and much more," said Marlowe, the longtime leader of the Marlowe & Company boutique lobbying firm. "We no longer have a professional association ... for championing changes to lobbying disclosure and campaign finance laws, nor do we have one for defending lobbyists."

Not so, says Monte Ward, current president of the newly renamed Association of Government Relations Professionals.

Ward insists the organization will still offer lobbying education programs and advocate for the profession that, at the national level, has of late witnessed its registered ranks and income dwindle. 

He notes the association's new name comes with a new tagline, too: "Voice of the lobbying, public policy and advocacy professions."

The Association of Government Relations Professionals is the largest of its kind in the nation, although only a small fraction of the nation's roughly 12,000 registered federal lobbyists are members. 

"Our profession is changing, and we're wearing different and multiple hats," Ward says. "Our members — they want an association who reflects who they are. This is something we should have done a long time ago."

What few lobbyists will deny is the "lobbyist" has an image problem. Thank high-profile scandals and ethical rows for painting lobbyists as unscrupulous hacks or conniving arm-twisters — not as principled advocates for worthy clients, exercising their constitutional right to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

As one recent poll commissioned by a campaign finance reform advocacy group found, about 83 percent of Americans believe lobbyists wield too much influence over the country’s government.

At the Center for Public Integrity's behest, Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster, scoured his language database to determine how "lobbyist" is most often used in present-day English.

While most references are neutral, he said, "it's clear that there are some negative associations with 'lobbyist.'" 

Among the passages about lobbyists Sokolowski cites from the Corpus of Contemporary American English:

• "He had the look of a lobbyist, smelled strongly of cologne."
• " ... you were nothing but an errand boy for your fat cat lobbyist friends ... "
• " ... has ceased to be a scientist and really is no better than a shill or lobbyist for a special interest."
• "Every lying executive, every filthy lobbyist, every sold politician."

Sokolowski also mentioned a BBC news report he recently heard where an Israeli government official, who's pressing U.S. lawmakers on issues related to Iran, bristled at the notion that he was engaging in "lobbying." (Start the audio clip at the 6:45 mark.)

Bupkis, says Allard.

"Lobbyists can be a pain in the ass, but they're needed because they're effective," he said. "I'm a lobbyist, and I'm proud of it. I'd embrace and celebrate being a lobbyist."

Myrna Perez and Thomas Hicks again sat before a pair of U.S. senators Wednesday for a hearing on their presidential nominations to the Election Assistance Commission.

Their session, however, morphed into a debate on whether this little-known and decidedly bedraggled commission — created by Congress in 2002 to help prevent voting meltdowns like those experienced during the 2000 presidential election — should exist at all.

“The Election Assistance Commission has fulfilled its purpose and should be eliminated,” declared Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, the ranking member of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which conducted the hearing.

He quickly added: “None of my comments are a reflection of the nominees.”

Reflection or not, the nominees find themselves in a political purgatory and legislative limbo soupy as any Congress is stirring.

Consider that Hicks, Democratic senior elections counsel for Congress’ Committee on House Administration, and Perez, deputy director of the Brennen Center for Justice’s Democracy Program at the New York University School of Law, have been waiting for senators to confirm them since their initialnominations in early 2010 and early 2011, respectively.

Both are Democrats. Both have previously testified at a Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing. And both say they’ve slogged along because they firmly believe the EAC should exist as an independent, bipartisan body that in large part tests and certifies voting equipment and serves as “national clearinghouse and resource” for election administration.  

“Elections don’t allow for do-overs. Above all else, we must always uphold the public’s trust and ensure confidence in the process,” Hicks told Roberts and Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, during his testimony before them. 

“The EAC, if operating well, is a valuable resource to election administrators because of its nationwide scope, targeted focus and expressly delineated responsibilities,” Perez said during her testimony.

The EAC’s reality, however, is marked by leadership vacuums and little sense of purpose.

It’s endowed with almost no regulatory powers. All four commissioner positions and have been vacant since 2011, and it hasn’t conducted a public meeting since then. It hasn’t had a quorum of three commissioners — what’s needed for the EAC to conduct votes, write policy and issue advisory opinions — since 2010. The commission has no permanent executive director or general counsel. It used to distribute grants to states so they may better administer elections. But today, lacking leaders, the EAC no longer make grants.

The “highlights” section of its 2012 annual report includes accomplishments such as “clarified various data reported in the biennial EAC Election Administration and Voting Survey.”

Commission resources, meanwhile, have plummeted. President Barack Obama’s 2014 budget proposal calls for taxpayers to fund the EAC with $11,062,500. The agency is slated to carry 29 full-time positions.

That’s notably down from its funding and staffing levels in 2009, Obama’s first year in office, when it received $17,959,000 and carried 43 full-time positions, budget records show.

And when Obama declared this year he wanted to “identify non-partisan ways to shorten lines at polling places, promote the efficient conduct of elections and provide better access to the polls for all voters,” he didn’t tap the EAC.

Instead, he created the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, to which he named 10 people. His executive order notes that his commission will terminate after it produces a final report to him and “strive to avoid duplicating the efforts of other governmental entities.”

Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., thinks the EAC is such a waste that he's sponsored the Election Assistance Commission Termination Act, which has not yet advanced out of committee. "It’s a commission that has far outlived its purpose and yet still wastes millions of tax dollars each year," he told the Center for Public Integrity. 

King, the other senator attending Wednesday's hearing, acknowledged the “unusual situation” the EAC finds itself in. But he vowed to push the nominations of Hicks and Perez to a committee vote, and then, a vote by the full Senate. Neither are likely to occur before next year.

“It’s our job to find a way to move forward,” King told the nominees.

Roberts remained adamant that the committee conduct a full oversight hearing on the EAC’s efficacy. He noted, however, that Democrats run the Senate and may simply want to keep the commission operating, in which case “it must be balanced” with two Republican nominees.

After the hearing, both Perez and Hicks said they’d welcome GOP colleagues on the EAC, themselves noting that a commission of two is still one commissioner short of a quorum to conduct official business.

State officials blasted The Center for Public Integrity’s report on how difficult it is to learn about the financial holdings of state supreme court judges, while the reaction from some newspapers was a call for reform.

The nine-month investigation reported that 42 states and the District of Columbia received a failing grade in a Center evaluation of disclosure requirements for high court judges. Not a single state did better than the federal government when it comes to revealing the financial holdings of top judges.

Stories appeared in more than 50 news outlets in more than 40 states and in several national publications. It also was featured on C-SPAN and numerous radio stations.

No trouble here

Montana has zero disclosure for judges, one of three states (the other two being Idaho and Utah) with that dubious distinction. Despite that, Chief Justice Mike McGrath didn’t see a problem.

He told the Associated Press that by following a strictly enforced code of judicial conduct, the court has “moved sort of beyond mere disclosure.”

“We have a code that is quite strict and it specifically requires judges to disqualify themselves if they have any kind of an economic interest, or any member of their family has an economic interest,” McGrath said.

It’s basically the “trust me” argument, which was fairly common among critics.

The Great Falls Tribune, in an editorial, wasn’t so trusting, arguing that “transparency would be enhanced by requiring Montana’s Supreme Court judges, the most powerful state judges, to disclose their financial interests and those of members of their immediate family.”

The Billings Gazette agreed. Its editorial urged the state legislature to enact laws so judges face the same disclosure requirements as other statewide officials.

Iowa officials were similarly unperturbed. The state earned 17.5 points out of 100.

“The Center’s report and rating as applied to Iowa judges appears to be a solution in search of a problem,” said Guy Cook, president of the Iowa State Bar Association and a Des Moines lawyer. Sen. Rob Hogg, chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, said the state’s court system is of the “highest integrity.”

Iowa had one of the oddest rules — judges “are allowed to receive gifts worth any amount on their wedding or 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries.” Cook told an Iowa newspaper that the rule applies to employees of the judicial branch, not judges.

We double-checked. He’s wrong.

John Goerdt, Iowa’s deputy state court administrator, confirmed to the Center that the section of the code of conduct clearly refers to judges. Cook did not respond to a phone call, and The Gazette deleted his comment.

South Dakota Chief Justice David Gilbertson also said the Center’s report was “a solution looking for a problem,” according to The Argus Leader.

South Carolina Chief Justice Jean Toal called the Center’s study “very flawed,” according to The State. “That is a viewpoint shared by every chief justice in the country,” she told the Columbia newspaper.

The state scored 40 points in the survey.

Chip Campsen, a Republican state senator from Charleston who sits on the state’s Judicial Merit Selection Commission, told The Post and Courier that an internal vetting system and the judicial code of conduct are adequate checks on potential judicial corruption.

“It’s not just the wild, wild West with judges sitting there unimpeded, making rulings on cases that they may have an interest with,” Campsen said. “There are protections in place.”

The Center gave South Carolina a failing grade largely because the materials available to the commission — documents that shed light on Supreme Court justices’ personal finances — are sealed. The information that is made public does not shed much light on judges’ personal finances.

Attacking the messenger

Bill Gang, spokesman for the Nevada Supreme Court (42.5 points), called the report "somewhat misleading” in the Las Vegas Sun.

“The fact that 84 percent of the state court systems received a failing grade while none received a grade higher than C suggests that the test is not neutral,” he said.

He did not elaborate on what he meant by “neutral.”

He also critiqued the Center’s point system that sought information about the finances of judges’ spouses and dependent children, saying Nevada could not pass because it does not seek such information.

Judicial experts told the Center that family members’ financial interests are crucial to understanding the full picture of judges’ finances.

In the Concord Monitor, New Hampshire (48 points) state courts spokeswoman Carole Alfano made a similar point about the alarming failure rate.

"New Hampshire has strong disclosure, and no one currently is asking for the judicial forms to be changed,” she said. “If CPI had taken a different tack on it — maybe, ‘Here’s some suggestions we have’— the court may have listened. But the flat-out F isn’t helpful, and it isn’t terribly legitimate.”

The Center doesn’t advocate for reforms; we report what we find. And we did share our results with the court prior to publication.

New Jersey’s court spokeswoman Winnie Comfort told the New Jersey Law Journal there were two "red flags" that cast doubt on the report’s findings.

Points were subtracted for not asking about judges' outside income even though the New Jersey Constitution prohibits outside employment for judges, she said. The Center did give the state credit for reporting judges’ income because they disclose their court jobs, but we docked points because judges were not required to disclose the amounts of their judicial salaries.

In addition, Comfort said the state was wrongly criticized for asking only about real estate in Atlantic City, a question intended to screen out conflicts relating to the heavily regulated casino industry.

Comfort noted the form does seek information on rental income, regardless of the location of the property. The Center updated the New Jersey survey to note the inclusion, though the change did not result in a higher score (34 points).

The information sought is limited, though, and does not cover property that is not rented but lies outside of Atlantic City. Land that is being developed or farmed, for example, would not need to be reported if no rent was being collected.

Room for improvement?

There were also a few calls for reform.

“South Carolina's judicial ethics standards are clearly lacking,” noted The Post and Courier in an editorial. “They should address conflicts that might arise from judges' investments and financial liabilities, just as those for elected officials should. Adjustments to state requirements should be made as soon as possible.”

Another appeal for more transparent state judiciaries came from Mississippi, a state that has seen the confidence in its system “rocked by judicial bribery scandals.”

A columnist from The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson wrote, “We hope judges will always do the honorable thing and step aside when there is a hint of a possible conflict, but we need to have strong requirements in place to ensure those in the judiciary aren’t unduly influenced by outside interests.”

The online New Mexico Watchdog suggested that the legislature consider addressing a gap in state law that an official said limited New Mexico from posting the state’s disclosures online, as the Center noted in the report.

The gaps in state disclosure requirements are easily correctable, noted an editorial from The Times-Tribune in Scranton, Pa. The piece urged Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille to “embrace the opportunity, given a long series of scandals that have diminished public confidence in the courts.”

TheHouston Press asked why states don’t simply adopt the federal rule.

“Besides the necessity of the public trust in the state judicial system — which far more people participate in than the federal court system — there simply cannot be differing sets of rules for players in the judicial system depending on if one is chummy with a judge (most people aren't),” the paper wrote. “The Texas Legislature and the Texas Ethics Commission are on notice.”

Other comments

The District of Columbia (15 points) has great disclosure rules. Unfortunately, the public can only see two of the 10 sections on the forms. In a story on NPR affiliate WAMU-FM, a court representative said it’s not the fault of the judges. Congressional statute governs what information the district makes public.

That was a common refrain in a number of states, which note that changes to financial disclosure requirements are left to state legislatures.

An Alabama ethics official made a good point, using an old Center study to refute the new Center study. When grading state legislatures, researchers in 2009 ranked the requirements tops in the nation, said Jim Sumner, director of the Ethics Commission, in the Birmingham News. Justices are required to fill out the same report.

Alabama got 45.5 points.

The standards were a bit tougher this time because the Center opted to use federal disclosure forms as the basis for comparison. The federal forms, however, still aren’t that great — scoring 84 points. Judges report investments in a wide range and the forms are not available online.

California, which was featured prominently in the Center’s story, took issue with the state summary, noting that one conflict really shouldn’t have been considered a conflict.

California judges are not required to disqualify themselves from cases when they have a financial interest in a company that files a “friend-of-the-court” brief. Cathal Conneely told the Center in an email that such briefs might be abused by attorneys seeking to remove judges from particular cases.

In Connecticut’s state summary, the Center wrote that the state “does not require judges to report any income information for spouses or dependent children.”

Melissa Farley, executive director of the external affairs division of the Connecticut Judicial Branch, pointed out that the state does require judges to report financial information, including income, about their spouses and dependent children, but the information is not made public.

Family members’ financial information “is confidential unless there is an investigation started by the Supreme Court or the Judicial Review Council,” Farley said.

The Center only gave credit for publicly available information.

After publication, we learned that Alaska (58.3 points) requires judges to fill out a second form that contains much of the same information as the one we based our grade on. We’ve included those 2012 reports here.

Rhode Island’s court spokesman Craig Berke told the Providence Journal he was unsurprised by the Center’s findings, but questioned the project’s utility. The state scored 56.5.

“Rhode Island ranked 13th from the top and still it got an ‘F’,” Berke said. “We don’t understand the methodology, and we are not sure of its usefulness.”

John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, said there is “definitely room for improvement” in the Supreme Court’s current system but it "still has greater breadth and consistency than most.”

“But that may come at the cost of its depth, ” he added.

In Vermont (32 points), the findings didn’t surprise advocates who pointed out to WCAX 13 that the state is one of four that does not require financial reporting for statewide political candidates.

"It's far more important, frankly, to concentrate on candidates running for state office here," said Paul Burns of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.

The Center found that Wisconsin Justice Ann Walsh Bradley had participated in a 2011 case involving Nestle USA. In response, Bradley told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she owned stock in the multinational Nestle based in Switzerland, not the Nestle USA named in the lawsuit.

“I am in full compliance with our code of judicial conduct," she said. "This investment is a tiny, tiny piece of a multinational company and its stock is in my IRA. And I do not participate in the management of the stock."

Nestle USA is a subsidiary of the Nestle company in which Bradley owns stock, meaning it is one and the same company, according to Nestle spokesman Ian Metcalfe.

Picture a paradise where you can be lawsuit-proof. A place to hide your hard-earned assets far from the grasp of former or soon-to-be-former spouses, angry business partners or, if you happen to be a doctor, patients who might sue you.

Lawyers drumming up business say they have found just the place: the Cook Islands. And, thanks to a recently released trove of documents, it’s become clear that hundreds of wealthy people have stashed their money there, including a felon who ran a $7 billion Ponzi scheme and the doctor who lost his license in the Octomom case.

These flyspeck islands in the middle of the Pacific would be nothing more than lovely coral atolls, nice for fish and pearls, except for one thing: The Cooks are a global pioneer in offshore asset-protection trusts, with laws devised to protect foreigners’ assets from legal claims in their home countries.

The Cayman Islands, Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands capture headlines for laws and tax rates that allow multinational corporations and the rich to shelter income from the American government. The Cook Islands offer a different form of secrecy. The long arm of United States law does not reach there. The Cooks generally disregard foreign court orders, making it easier to keep assets from creditors, or anyone else.

Win a malpractice suit against your doctor? To collect, you will have to go to the other side of the globe to plead your case again before a Cooks court and under Cooks law. That is a big selling point for those who market Cook trusts to a broad swath of wealthy Americans fearful of getting sued, and some who have been.

“You can have your cake and eat it too,” says Howard D. Rosen, a lawyer in Coral Gables, Fla., who has set up Cook trusts for more than 20 years, in a video on his website. Anyone with more than $1 million in assets, his firm’s site suggests, should consider Cook trusts for self-preservation, but especially real estate developers, health care providers, accountants, architects, corporate directors and parents of teenage drivers.

Read the rest at icij.org.

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — Ray Kline, it’s said, bled Goodyear blue.

Compact and laconic, Kline signed on as an operator at the Goodyear chemical plant here in 1960 and logged just short of 40 years. He routinely worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, retiring in 1999 as head of maintenance.

“I made a good living,” Kline said in the dining room of his comfortable home in Lewiston, N.Y., two blocks from the Niagara River — betraying little bitterness over the price his family paid for economic stability.

Kline, 75, has endured two bouts of bladder cancer. Strong evidence suggests the disease was work-related.

In a yet-to-be published study, federal health investigators have confirmed 50 cases of bladder cancer among plant employees through 2007, nearly three times the number that would have been expected in the general population of New York State. The unofficial tally to date, compiled by a lawyer for some of the cancer victims, is 58 cases.

The likely trigger in most instances, investigators concluded, was a chemical, still used by Goodyear and others, called ortho-toluidine.

The disease made its appearance in 1972 and continues to plague this decaying pocket of western New York. Workers at the 67-year-old plant, a collegial place that sustained generations, called it “the ginch.” Those who survived it fear its return. Those who avoided it wonder when their luck will run out. Many question why the chemical’s most prominent manufacturer, DuPont, took so long to issue warnings.

The long-running episode underscores the limits of regulation and points up the insidious nature of occupational illnesses, which by one estimate take more than 50,000 lives in America each year.

It’s a cautionary tale at a time when more than 80,000 chemicals, many carrying unknown or little-understood health effects, are on the market in the United States. Workers can become unwitting test subjects, made vulnerable by employers that fail to act on scientific knowledge or, in extreme cases, suppress the truth.

Three years before Kline landed at Goodyear, the plant began making Nailax, an antioxidant that keeps tires from cracking. Three U.S. companies supplied a key ingredient, ortho-toluidine, at various times from the 1950s into the 1990s; DuPont supplied Goodyear for the longest period, almost four decades.

By 1955, records show, DuPont knew the chemical caused bladder cancer in laboratory animals and protected its own workers from it. But it didn’t issue warnings to Goodyear and other customers until 1977, the year Kline’s son-in-law, Harry Weist, started at the Niagara Falls plant.

It would be another 13 years before Goodyear would take significant steps to reduce exposures to ortho-toluidine in the plant. By then, the outbreak of bladder cancer was under way.

Kline was case No. 21, diagnosed in 1997. Weist was No. 37, diagnosed in 2004.

“None of us are simple-minded,” said Weist, 57, who worked at the plant for 34 years. “If we knew this stuff was bad and we were getting exposed to it back in the day, we would have protected ourselves.”

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, Goodyear said it “takes the issue of ortho-toluidine exposure at the Niagara Falls plant very seriously. We are deeply concerned and continue to be committed to actions to address the issue.”

DuPont said it “conducts its business in accordance with the highest ethical standards and in compliance with all applicable laws to ensure the safety and health of our employees, our customers, and the people of the communities in which we operate. Our experience with ortho-toluidine was no exception.”

Its communications about the chemical were, DuPont said, “commensurate with the state of scientific knowledge” at the time.

Steve Wodka, a lawyer in Little Silver, N.J., maintains DuPont could have told Goodyear how to use ortho-toluidine safely by 1957, when Goodyear’s rubber chemicals division opened in Niagara Falls.

“There were so many warning signals,” said Wodka, who has sued DuPont and other ortho-toluidine suppliers on behalf of 24 bladder cancer victims from Goodyear and three from the now-shuttered Morton International chemical plant in Paterson, N.J. “If people had simply heeded them, there would have been a lot of lives saved.”

The disease cluster “wouldn’t have been detected by the medical community” had the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union not pushed for a federal investigation at Goodyear, Wodka said. “It would have just blended into the background.”

Goodyear ‘social club’

The Goodyear plant in Niagara Falls opened in 1946 as the city, blessed with cheap hydroelectric power from the Niagara River, was becoming a manufacturing behemoth. Factories lined Buffalo Avenue — B.F. Goodrich, Olin Mathieson, International Paper. By the 1950s, word was, you could quit a job in the morning and be working in a new place that afternoon.

Ray Kline came to Goodyear in January 1960, having migrated north from Pennsylvania a year or so earlier and knocked around places like Nabisco and Autolite Battery. Kline was hired as an operator in Department 145, where polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resin was made in reactors. He helped clean the reactors, chipping away at the hard, white plastic with a hammer and chisel. He also helped bag the PVC powder.

Nine years later Kline transferred to maintenance, which frequently took him into Department 245, the rubber chemicals division. Here ortho-toluidine, a yellowish liquid, was pumped into reactors from tanks outside and used to make Nailax, which came out looking like dark chocolate chips and was bagged for shipment to Goodyear tire plants.

“The 245 reactors — after all the mixture had taken place, you always had sludge and crap in the bottom,” Kline said. “You had to go in and clean it out.” The company’s method of determining overexposure was crude, he said: Workers were told to go outside when their fingernails and lips turned blue.

Harry Weist, Kline’s gregarious son-in-law, said Goodyear was like a “social club,” where fathers got jobs for sons, workers tormented one another with practical jokes, football pools were managed and hockey outings organized. At its peak the plant employed about 300 union workers, who earned solidly middle-class wages, sometimes better. People stayed.

The plant was also a breeding ground for disease.

By the early 1970s, three workers from Department 145 — the PVC unit, which closed in 1996 — had died of a rare form of liver cancer called angiosarcoma, which researchers blamed on a sweet-smelling chemical called vinyl chloride.

When Kline worked in Department 145 in the 1960s, his wife, Dottie, bore two children, John and Donna, with severe birth defects in consecutive years. John, who was missing much of his brain and skull, a condition called anencephaly, lived for one day. Donna, born with a brain fluid buildup known as hydrocephalus and spina bifida, a spinal cord defect, survived six weeks.

Dottie Kline believes her husband’s work around vinyl chloride caused both children’s defects, a theory with some scientific support.

In 1975, Peter Infante, then an epidemiologist with the Ohio Department of Health, reported significant excesses of birth defects in three Ohio cities with PVC production sites. His study, he wrote, “demonstrated that malformations involving the central nervous system in those three communities were particularly high,” though they couldn’t be pinned to a particular chemical.

Infante, who went on to work for two federal agencies, later emphasized that it was important to assess “not only the effects of [vinyl chloride] as transmitted through the female, but also the potential for any adverse effect that may be transmitted through the male.”

The research didn’t come in time for the Klines. “It still hurts to talk about it,” Dottie said.

In 1986, Ray Kline nearly died of a heart attack at 48 after being struck in the chest by a piece of equipment at work. Bladder cancer came on in 1997 and reappeared a year later. “He is still getting suspicious cells to this day,” Dottie said.

Ray said he considers it all “water under the bridge. I don’t get too excited about it.” He had to be coaxed by his family into bringing a lawsuit against DuPont, thinking it might reflect badly on Goodyear.

“Honestly, there’s drawbacks to any place you work,” he said. “You just need to be aware of them, and we weren’t aware of them at the time.”

His wife is not as forgiving.

“He’s been through a lot because of Goodyear,” Dottie said. “Sure gave us a good living, but I don’t know that it was worth what we went through with our kids and what he’s been through.”

Asked about the Klines’ ordeal, Goodyear said, “The health and safety of our associates has always been at the top of our agenda. That includes all operations at the Niagara Falls facility.”

Recipe for cancer

After nearly three years in the Air Force, Harry Weist started in Department 145 — vinyl — at Goodyear in December 1977. “My mom was a switchboard operator there and I said, ‘Give me a job.’ ”

Weist, who married Ray Kline’s daughter, Diane, in 1980, spent a decade in Department 145. He ventured at times into Building C-2, the recycling area of the rubber chemicals division. Here liquid waste drained from the Nailax reactors, including ortho-toluidine, was collected. Weist’s path to becoming bladder cancer case No. 37 may have begun in C-2.

In those days, and for years after, some workers handled the vilest of compounds wearing only T-shirts, jeans, ball caps and cotton gloves. The most-despised task was cleaning the Sparkler filters, which removed iron filings from the batches of Nailax. “You’d open it and you’d have orange fumes coming off it,” Weist said. “It was really nasty.” The fumes were rich with ortho-toluidine.

There were other, bigger sources of exposure. For 31 years, Goodyear weighed ortho-toluidine — pumped into Building 32, the Nailax production area — in open tanks, posing an inhalation risk. There were frequent spills, allowing for direct contact with the chemical and absorption through the skin.

In the late 1970s, amid mounting worries about chemicals in the workplace, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers — since absorbed by the United Steelworkers — hired physicians to investigate conditions in union plants. Dr. Christine Oliver of Boston arrived at Goodyear in Niagara Falls in March 1979; once inside the plant, she learned of an apparent cluster of premature deaths from heart disease in Department 245. There also seemed to be a bladder cancer problem, Oliver was told.

Two years after Oliver’s visit, Rod Halford, then president of OCAW Local 8-277, wrote a letter to plant manager James Pearson. “It has come to our attention that four current Goodyear employees have developed cancer of the urinary bladder,” Halford’s letter began. He identified two chemicals of concern: ortho-toluidine and aniline, a raw material in Kagarax, which helped speed the rubber curing process and is no longer made by Goodyear.

Both were suspected animal carcinogens, Halford wrote, though only ortho-toluidine appeared to target the bladder. He asked Pearson for air monitoring and worker mortality data, among other things.

Pearson replied that worker exposures to the chemicals were “well below” allowable limits, and that neither of the two mortality studies conducted in the plant to date had addressed “cancer of the urinary tract specifically.”

More than three years before Pearson wrote this letter, DuPont had informed Goodyear managers that while there was no evidence ortho-toluidine had caused cancer in any DuPont employees, it had induced tumors in rats and mice during a study by the National Cancer Institute.

Attached to DuPont’s letter was a material safety data sheet it planned to begin using. It included the following warnings: “O-toluidine is cyanogenic [turns the lips and nails blue] and can be absorbed through the skin & respiratory tract, exposure symptoms may include bluish lips or fingernails, headache, nausea, or fatigue. Product may cause cancer in animals. Direct body exposure to fumes or liquid must be prevented.”

Current and former Goodyear workers say this information wasn’t shared with them at the time. Halford would become bladder cancer case No. 18 in 1992.

There was limited activity in the seven years following Halford’s 1981 letter. Wodka, who’d been a legislative assistant and staff representative in the OCAW’s Washington office for 12 years, left the union to get his law degree.

By 1988, after Harry Weist had transferred to maintenance, local OCAW officials knew of eight workers in Niagara Falls with bladder cancer. Wodka alerted the OCAW international, which requested an investigation by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health — NIOSH, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Things were worse than expected. NIOSH epidemiologists found 13 cases of bladder cancer in the plant, nearly four times the incidence rate in the general population. They documented a 27-fold increase in the disease among workers who had spent at least 10 years in Department 245. Suspicion fell on ortho-toluidine and, to a lesser extent, aniline.

Elizabeth Ward was the lead NIOSH investigator for five years. Now national vice president for intramural research at the American Cancer Society, Ward believes the cancer surge at Goodyear was largely preventable.

“There was evidence of the carcinogenicity of ortho-toluidine in animals, but the plant had not really taken sufficient precautions to reduce exposures to the workforce,” Ward said. “It really was a case of not heeding the evidence.”

Goodyear said, “We have followed effective industrial hygiene practices for decades in regard to this chemical.” Only one case of bladder cancer, it said, involved a worker who started at the plant after 1990.

Casualties

This is small comfort to people like Dick Prato. Prato started at Goodyear in 1963 and worked in Department 245 for 39 years. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer after urinating blood on a camping trip in 1995, making him case No. 19. The ginch came back in 1997 and 2007.

Prato rode out six weeks of chemotherapy in 1995 and another round two years later. “Every Monday I’d get the [drugs] shot up in my bladder,” he said. “You’d get that stuff at 8 in the morning and urinate it out by 1. You were wrapped up in a blanket, freezing to death, and yet sweat was just pouring off you. It was like the flu.”

The cancer lay dormant for a decade. “Then I went in to have my regular check-up,” Prato said, “and there it was.”

He underwent more chemo. At 72, he harbors a persistent, low-grade anxiety. “Sometimes,” he said, “I don’t even wait a year” to get a cystoscopy, an exploratory procedure, usually done annually, in which a tube fitted with a lens is inserted into the urethra. “I get scared and get scoped after nine months.” The aim, for anyone in his position, is to keep the cancer from breaching the bladder wall and metastasizing.

Bladder cancer is often survivable if caught early. Once unleashed, it’s horrific.

During the last year of his life, Joseph Nicastro, a retired Morton International worker who died in 2010, was punctured with tubes and perpetually sickened by chemo and radiation treatments.

“It was pure hell,” said his wife, Pam, who lives in Ocean Township, N.J.

Pam and Joe had met in 1993 and were married a year later. Joe was an operator at the Morton plant in Paterson, where ortho-toluidine was used to make dyes for gasoline. “He used to speak every once in a while about [co-workers] who had cancer,” Pam recalled. “I’d say, ‘I hope you’re wearing your protective gear.’ And he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m wearing it.’ He showered every day before he left that plant. I think you had to.”

Joe was a “big, strong guy,” his wife said. “He had a presence about him.” In late 2007, when he was 64, Joe began complaining of leg and shoulder pain. “We just thought it was the aches and pains of aging,” Pam said. By early 2008, he was having trouble urinating. One day a “big blood clot” came out, Pam said. A cystoscopy detected “a mass so large it was outside the bladder wall. It was in his muscle.”

The cancer had spread to Joe’s bones. He lived another 22 months and weathered treatments that sometimes seemed worse than the disease itself. Steroids made him anxious and aggressive; chemo made him violently ill. At one point “the skin was literally peeling off his butt” from radiation therapy, a condition exacerbated by chronic diarrhea, Pam said. “The man was trying to sit on a toilet with open wounds.” Joe fell one time when Pam was out; she returned to the couple’s townhouse to find him on the floor, covered in feces.

Pam became Joe’s full-time caretaker, flushing the nephrostomy tubes that drained his kidneys and emptying the bags that collected his urine. She helped him go to the bathroom, gave him sponge baths, took him to countless doctor visits and tried to boost his flagging spirits. “He was so scared. His mind was racing,” she said. “He would always say he was sorry to me. I would say, ‘Why are you sorry? You had to make a living.’ ”

Joe spent the last week and a half of his life in hospice care. He died at 3 a.m. on March 4, 2010. He was 66.

Pam sued DuPont, claiming it failed to warn Morton — which closed the Paterson plant in 2002 — about the cancer-causing properties of ortho-toluidine. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum just before a scheduled trial in October 2012.

Pam said she used to be “furious” at DuPont, though her anger has abated somewhat. “I just felt like every time I would see [DuPont’s] lawyers, it was no big deal to them,” she said. “It made me sick.”

DuPont said it “settled lawsuits related to ortho-toluidine in order to avoid a long and drawn-out litigation process. DuPont's decision was not, nor should it be construed as, an admission of liability.”

Decades of alerts, DuPont’s knowledge

DuPont began making ortho-toluidine — part of a family of compounds known as aromatic amines, used in the rubber and dye industries — at its sprawling Chambers Works in southern New Jersey in 1919. More than two decades earlier, in 1895, a German physician named Ludwig Rehn had reported finding bladder cancer in three workers at a dye factory. Rehn had documented 38 cases in seven factories by 1906; German law eventually would force such operations to improve ventilation, provide workers with protective clothing and mandate post-shift hot baths.

In a 1921 paper, the International Labour Office in Geneva summarized the findings of Rehn and others in Europe, deeming it “absolutely necessary that in factories in which workers are exposed to the dangerous action of aromatic bases, the most rigorous application of hygienic precautions should be required.” Such precautions, it predicted, “will assure at the end of a few years the diminution and even the disappearance of the disease.”

Yet hundreds of bladder cancer cases emerged from DuPont and another early manufacturer of aromatic amines, Allied Chemical in Buffalo, in the coming years. Chambers Works, which opened in 1917, had recorded 489 cases by 1991, 453 of which DuPont viewed as “occupational” in nature, according to a company memo.

The alerts kept coming.

In 1934, G.H. Gehrmann, then DuPont’s medical director, noted the importance of giving highly exposed employees at Chambers Works annual cystoscopies. Medical examinations, he wrote, should “continue all through the entire period of employment, and in the case of men exposed to bladder tumor-forming chemicals, continue until death removes the final possibility of tumor development.”

In 1940, two researchers at Osaka Imperial University in Japan reported that ortho-toluidine caused benign tumors in the bladders of rabbits that had been injected with the chemical and rats whose skin had been painted with small amounts of it. They took this as evidence that the development of cancer in humans “can be prevented by keeping the skin as clean as possible.”

In 1948, Wilhelm Hueper of the National Cancer Institute warned in a review of occupational carcinogens that ortho-toluidine was “capable of producing bladder tumors” in animals. Hueper had published on the subject as early as the 1930s, when he was a toxicologist at DuPont’s Haskell Laboratory for Toxicology and Industrial Medicine.

In a deposition a half-century later, the lab’s retired director, John Zapp, dismissed Hueper, a German immigrant, as a “difficult, troublesome employee wherever he worked.”

Zapp admitted knowing by 1955 that ortho-toluidine had caused tumors in rodents. “Look, I don’t care if a chemical gives cancer to rats if it doesn’t bother the humans,” he testified in his deposition. “And I think that the rat is a poor indicator for bladder tumors.”

Zapp acknowledged that DuPont had the capacity to perform its own study of ortho-toluidine at the time but elected not to. It already had flagged another aromatic amine made at Chambers Works, beta-naphthylamine, as the biggest cancer threat to workers; that chemical, Zapp said, was gone from the plant by 1957.

It was also in 1955 that Monsanto, which had been buying ortho-toluidine from DuPont for at least 15 years, reported that some exposed workers had seen blood in their urine. Neither this development nor the animal studies created a stir at DuPont. Ortho-toluidine already was classified as a “no-contact chemical” at Chambers Works based on its acute effects, Zapp explained.

“Even if we had proved that ortho-toluidine was a carcinogen, I think our workers would have been protected,” he said. Indeed, a photograph in Modern Occupational Medicine, a 1954 textbook edited by Zapp and two other DuPont employees, shows a worker in a “Chem-Proof Air Suit” developed at Chambers Works.

Goodyear began buying ortho-toluidine from DuPont and Allied (later acquired by Honeywell) in 1957. A third supplier, Mississippi-based First Chemical, entered the picture in 1967. Three years later a Russian study found an excess of bladder cancer among workers exposed to the chemical; the study was translated into English for both Allied and DuPont.

In the United States, the National Cancer Institute found that ortho-toluidine triggered bladder tumors in rats and mice. DuPont followed the work closely. In a confidential 1975 memo, Haskell Lab’s assistant director, Blaine McKusick, wrote that faults could be found with the NCI experiment but suggested DuPont “regard ortho-toluidine as a suspected carcinogen” nonetheless.

DuPont waited another two years to send a letter to Goodyear and other customers, alerting them to a “possible carcinogen problem” with the chemical. The letter had little impact at Goodyear, said the president of the company's bargaining unit at Steelworkers Local 4-277, Ed Polka, who started at the Niagara Falls plant in 1979, the year the NCI study was published.

Workers had “no inkling” of ortho-toluidine’s potency, said Polka, who bagged Nailax his first five years. “DuPont knew beaucoup years earlier. None of this information ever came to us. It was a dirty little secret.” Goodyear’s position, he said, was, “You don’t need to worry about it.”

In its statement, DuPont said it was on the “cutting edge of the available toxicology and epidemiology studies conducted with ortho-toluidine” during the 90 years it and its wholly owned subsidiary, First Chemical, made the compound. “DuPont’s communications for ortho-toluidine were commensurate with the state of scientific knowledge, the applicable laws and regulatory standards and consistently reflected the scientific community’s consensus on the potential health effects associated with the product.”

‘Still a question’ for Goodyear

When did Goodyear know? In a 1991 deposition, the company’s former medical director, Dr. Clifford Johnson, testified that when the union alerted the company to the four bladder cancers in Niagara Falls in 1981, there was “still a question” in his mind about whether ortho-toluidine caused bladder cancer in humans.

“Did you notify any of the suppliers of ortho-toluidine to the Niagara Falls plant of this incidence of bladder cancer?” union lawyer Wodka asked.

“No, I did not,” Johnson replied. He hadn’t been convinced there was a looming crisis in Department 245. “I had no way of knowing whether four cases was a high number,” Johnson testified; he said he’d made no attempt to find out.

Dr. Steven Markowitz, a Steelworkers and former OCAW consultant, said Goodyear should have acted after the 1979 NCI study was published.

“Bells should have gone off about restricting exposure and about looking at human epidemiology — is there a problem?” said Markowitz, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at New York’s Queens College, a medical expert in Wodka’s litigation and a co-author of the first NIOSH paper on the outbreak. “That was very strong evidence because it wasn’t just any old animal carcinogen. The NCI study showed tumors in the same organ as in humans — the bladder — in female rats.”

Goodyear said it “adjusted its systems and processes” when it learned ortho-toluidine might be problematic.

In fact, it made improvements at the Niagara Falls plant in the 1980s, upgrading exhaust systems and encouraging workers to wear protective gear instead of T-shirts and jeans. The policy was loosely enforced, Polka said. “The older guys were like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be bothered with it. I’ve worked with it all this time and I got no problems. Leave me alone.’ Goodyear’s attitude was, ‘We’re making it available to you. Put it on if you want.’ ”

When NIOSH came into the plant in 1988 and confirmed the bladder cancer excess, people took notice. Goodyear clamped down in the early 1990s, making mandatory the wearing of chemical-barrier suits and respirators for workers performing certain jobs and fortifying pipes and pumps to keep ortho-toluidine from leaking. Workers who had to clean the rancid Sparkler filters were required to put on air-fed “astronaut” suits, not unlike the ones DuPont began supplying to its own people decades earlier.

Despite these measures, enormous harm already had been done. Dozens of workers developed bladder cancer from the 1970s on. Among them was a maintenance worker known for his obsession with cleanliness.

“That guy was so meticulous he’d wipe his chair in the lunchroom before he sat down,” Goodyear retiree Bob Dutton said. “Later on we find out he’s got the ginch. He’s gone. He died of a brain tumor.”

‘Antiquated’ standards, few inspections

Ortho-toluidine is no longer made in the United States. The four domestic users — Goodyear, Monsanto, Lanxess Corp. of Pittsburgh and AC&S Inc. of Nitro, W.Va., according to the Environmental Protection Agency — import it from countries such as Germany, China and India. The compound is on the European Chemicals Agency’s version of a blacklist, along with 143 other “substances of very high concern.” The International Agency for Research on Cancer considers it a Group 1 — known — human carcinogen.

Monsanto brought in more than 23 million pounds of ortho-toluidine last year to make herbicides in Muscatine, Iowa. In a statement, spokesman Thomas Helscher wrote that the company is “aware that ortho-toluidine is classified as a probable human carcinogen by OSHA” — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The raw chemical, he wrote, “is not handled at any of Monsanto’s facilities.” It’s shipped first to an intermediate manufacturer in Texas, which converts it to a more benign material that then goes to Iowa.

Both Monsanto and the intermediate manufacturer — which Helscher declined to name, citing a confidentiality agreement — take care to protect workers from ortho-toluidine exposure, he wrote. Levels of the chemical in the Texas plant were “undetectable” during air monitoring earlier this year.

Still, air concentrations of ortho-toluidine in Goodyear’s Department 245, even at the height of the cancer scourge, were mere fractions of the federal limit of 5 parts per million, according to NIOSH. That limit, like hundreds of others, hasn’t been updated by OSHA since 1971.

In 1974, OSHA issued a broad standard covering 14 carcinogens, including aromatic amines such as beta-naphthylamine. The standard required a long list of protective measures; impervious gloves, boots and air-supplied hoods had to be worn by workers in case of spills or during maintenance, for example, to keep the chemicals from soaking through the skin.

Ortho-toluidine wasn’t included. Workers kept dying.

In an unusually candid news release in October, OSHA, boxed in by industry legal challenges, restrictive court decisions and hostile politicians, acknowledged that its “exposure standards are out of date and inadequately protective for the small number of chemicals that are regulated in the workplace.” It urged employers to switch to safer alternatives or voluntarily adopt more stringent limits “since simply complying with OSHA’s antiquated [ones] will not guarantee that workers will be safe.”

Rigid policing seems out of the question. OSHA and its state partners must monitor nearly 8 million workplaces; together they have about 2,400 inspectors. “It would take us close to 100 years to inspect every workplace once,” OSHA chief David Michaels said in November.

Goodyear, for its part, said it has “systems and procedures in place for the safe handling of ortho-toluidine, which include double seal pumps, dedicated shower rooms, ventilation, and the required use of personal protective equipment.”

The company said it does biannual bladder screening for all active and retired employees. It also does pre- and post-shift urine testing for workers to gauge how much ortho-toluidine is being absorbed through the skin during the workday.

Wodka, however, had to bring a class-action lawsuit to force Goodyear to extend the screening program to retirees and other former employees. And urine testing for workers is infrequent, with no guarantee it will continue.

Older members of Steelworkers Local 4-277 speak of Wodka — 64, with a salt-and-pepper beard — with reverence. “Ask Steve,” they say when their memories fail them.

Wodka remains a union stalwart, representing the local. He joined the staff of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers as an intern in 1969. He and a New York Times reporter were to meet nuclear whistleblower and union organizer Karen Silkwood in Oklahoma the night she died in a car accident in 1974. Many believe Silkwood, an employee of Kerr McGee Corp. who’d been contaminated with plutonium, was deliberately run off the road.

In 1983, as a legal assistant in the Washington office of the plaintiffs’ firm Baron & Budd, Wodka worked on the first bladder cancer case out of Goodyear — Henry “Hank” Schiro, who was diagnosed in 1972 and died at 57 in 1986. He filed his first lawsuit against DuPont, Allied and First Chemical in 1987 on behalf of Goodyear worker Richard Sullivan, victim No. 3. (Workers’ compensation laws generally bar employees from suing their employers).

“My goal,” Wodka said, “is to see things through to the end … to make sure that workplace is made safe before my career is up.”

Today the Goodyear plant has only 43 union workers. Part of Department 145 — the old PVC section — has been torn down; the rest is used as a warehouse.

The plant still moves a lot of product with its stripped-down crew, Harry Weist said. A sign outside reads: “TAKE SAFETY TO THE EXTREME. WE MUST. WE WILL.”

A town in decline, fear of ‘the ginch’

Niagara Falls itself is in decline, a seedy cousin to its tourist-mecca namesake across the river in Ontario. Gone are Great Lakes Carbon, Electro Metallurgical and other plants that provided middle-class jobs for decades.

Downtown is mostly bereft of life, save for the Seneca Niagara Casino and Hotel on 4th Street. A half-mile west of the tower, mist rises from the 180-foot-high American Falls and, beyond that, the slightly lower but much wider Horseshoe Falls in Canada. “You’ve got this beautiful attraction,” Weist said during a drive through the city. “I can’t believe you can’t do something with this.”

Weist and his father-in-law, Ray Kline, deliver auto parts to keep busy in retirement and make extra money — especially important for Kline, whose health benefits, like those of other former managers, were eliminated by Goodyear.

Both have settled claims against DuPont. Both have their bladders scoped annually for cells that could signal the ginch’s return.

“You always worry,” Weist said. “Is it going to come back?”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Ed Polka is president of the Goodyear bargaining unit at United Steelworkers Local 4-277.

Two days before Aetna told Wall Street it would not allow policyholders who received cancellation notices to renew their cancelled policies next year, as President Obama had requested, the company was accused in a lawsuit of sending out false and misleading statements to shareholders about what it was spending to influence public policy.

Mark Bertolini, CEO of the nation’s third largest health insurer, reportedly told shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts at a meeting in New York last Thursday that the company was too busy to provide the information state insurance departments would need before giving Aetna the approval to reinstate the cancelled policies.

“If we were to go to all those states, refile all those plans, refile all those rates and do it in time for December 23, we would have paid attention to nothing else," Bertolini was quoted as saying. He apparently wasn’t asked how other, smaller insurers were able to pull it off and do other things.

The reality is that it might have cost the company some money that otherwise would be available for profits — and shareholders would no doubt take a dim view of that.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) thinks shareholders might also take a dim view of receiving inaccurate information on an issue they would be asked to vote on at the company’s annual shareholders’ meetings. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in New York on behalf of an Aetna shareholder, CREW accuses the company of violating the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by sending out false and misleading proxy statements to shareholders.

CREW alleges that Aetna tried to hide nearly $8 million in contributions to the American Action Network (AAN) and the Chamber of Commerce to influence recent elections.

 “Aetna pretends to be a model of corporate transparency, but in truth, shareholders have almost no idea which dark money groups the company is funding or how much it is contributing,” CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement. “Who knows where else Aetna has been funneling money?”

In its last two proxy statements, which contain information about executive compensation and company governance, Aetna management recommended that shareholders reject two proposals that would have required the company to disclose more information about how it spends policyholders’ money to influence elections and legislation.

Aetna says it provides enough information about political spending to comply with the law, but the company did not disclose to shareholders the specific contributions it made to either American Action Network or the Chamber of Commerce, according to CREW.

CREW says that in recommending a vote against one of those shareholder reform proposals, Aetna maintained that its “Political Contributions and Related Activity Report” was adequate, accurate and could be found easily on its website.

Not so, says CREW. “In reality, Aetna has disclosed inaccurate information in those reports, which are hard to locate on the company’s website.”

CREW found out about the donations to AAN and the Chamber not from the company’s website but from reviewing the tax forms of the Republican and Democratic Governors Associations. CREW says those forms indicate that Aetna contributed far more to AAN and the Chamber than it actually reported elsewhere between 2006 and 2012.

CREW also questions Aetna’s contention that its 2011 contribution to the Chamber was for “voter education.” CREW says the money was actually spent “to run negative ads in hotly contested congressional elections.” Further, CREW says the contribution to AAN was not reported by Aetna at all— at least not on its website.

CREW first learned of Aetna’s contributions to AAN last year when it came across a document Aetna filed with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an organization comprising the country’s state insurance regulators that establishes industry operating standards.

Aetna apparently disclosed the contributions by accident because such contributions are not required to be reported to the NAIC. When the company amended the filing later, it didn’t list the donations.

Both the AAN and Chamber have spent millions on ads calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. While Aetna stands to gain financially from the law, it and other insurers have been critical of the potentially profit-threatening consumer protections and regulations in it. About the only way insurers can get rid of the parts of the law they don’t like, however, is to help elect enough Republicans to ensure that the GOP can control both the House and Senate and take back the White House in 2016.

As the Center for Public Integrity reported, AAN conducted a campaign last year that targeted “select liberal members” of Congress and urged 35 Republican members of the House facing tough reelection fights to continue pushing for the repeal of Obamacare. The Chamber has also spent millions of dollars on anti-Obamacare ads. More than $100 million spent by the Chamber in 2009 and 2010 on such ads came from the insurance industry.

“We intend to vigorously defend against this lawsuit,” Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener was quoted as telling the CT Mirror. “Aetna meets or exceeds disclosure requirements of current laws and regulations.”

Bertolini has said previously that Aetna’s donations to the groups were for “educational” — not political — purposes.

It will be interesting to see if Aetna can convince the court of that. 

A mysterious super PAC that's routinely ignored federal election laws has a date with the executioner.

In a letter dated Dec. 4, the Federal Election Commission tells Secretive Politics that it faces "administrative termination" for what amounts to its refusal to file mandatory financial disclosures.

Since registering with the FEC in August 2012, Secretive Politics has lived up to its name.

It's been incommunicado with federal regulators. Repeated calls and emails by the Center for Public Integrity to its only known official, treasurer June Walton, have likewise gone unreturned. 

The super PAC also uses a "virtual office" in Sugar Land, Texas, a Houston suburb. There, operators charge clients $350 a month for a mailing address, live receptionist and access to a conference room — but no physical office space. Its listed website and email address don't work.

Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates, but federal law requires them to regularly submit paperwork to the FEC accounting for their income, spending and debt.

It's unclear whether Secretive Politics has engaged in political activity. It may have been raising and spending money, flouting federal regulators all the while. Or, just as likely, it existed in name only — like several hundred effectively dormant super PACs that have materialized since 2010, when the Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow.org v. FEC federal court decisions gave rise to such political committees.

The FEC notes that Secretive Politics is still obliged to file reports with the FEC if it raises or spends money with the intent of influencing a federal election.

Its termination also "does not relieve the committee of any legal responsibility for the payment of any outstanding debt or obligation," the FEC writes.

The Secretive Politics committee has 30 days from the receipt of the FEC's letter to appeal the agency's decision.

Just after the federal government shut down Oct. 1, and one of the government’s more dysfunctional agencies stopped functioning altogether, Chinese hackers picked their moment to attack.

They waylaid the Federal Election Commission’s networks. They crashed computer systems that publicly disclose how billions of dollars are raised and spent each election cycle by candidates, parties and political action committees.

As minutes turned to hours, the FEC found itself largely defenseless against what may be the worst act of sabotage in its 38-year history. The government had furloughed all 339 agency employees, save for the presidentially appointed commissioners, and not even one staffer had been deemed“necessary to the prevention of imminent threats” to federal property, the minimum measure for keeping someone on the job.

And it happened just months after an independent auditor commissioned by the government warned that the FEC’s information systems were at “high risk” to infiltration — a charge the FEC roundly disputed, saying its “systems are secure.”

This hacking ordeal, confirmed by three government officials involved in an ongoing investigation that included the Department of Homeland Security, marks the nadir of a year that ranks among the commission’s darkest, according to a six-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity.

An analysis of thousands of records and interviews with more than 50 current and former commissioners, staff members and associates reveals:

• The commission over the past year has reached a paralyzing all-time low in its ability to reach consensus, stalling action on dozens of rulemaking, audit and enforcement matters, some of which are years old.
• Despite an explosion in political spending hastened by key Supreme Court decisions, the agency’s funding has remained flat for five years and staffing levels have fallen to a 15-year low.
• Analysts charged with scouring disclosure reports to ensure candidates and political committees are complying with laws have a nearly quarter-million-page backlog. Commissioners themselves are grappling with nearly 270 unresolved enforcement cases.
• Staff morale has plummeted as key employees have fled and others question whether their work remains relevant. Among top FEC jobs currently unfilled or filled on an “acting” basis: general counsel, associate general counsel for policy, associate general counsel for litigation, chief financial officer and accounting director. The staff director doubles as IT director.

As the nation heads into what will undoubtedly be the most expensive midterm election in history and a 2016 presidential election that, in no small way, has already begun, the FEC is rotting from the inside out.

Bitter ideological warfare among commissioners and congressional and White House indifference have yielded an agency less able to fulfill its stated mission: to “prevent corruption in the federal campaign process by administering, enforcing and formulating policy.”

Two newly minted commissioners, Republican Lee Goodman and Democrat Ann Ravel, have pledged to find common ground and work to strengthen the FEC’s standing. Odds are that they’ll lead the agency next year as chairman and vice chairman. The other commissioners talk of the agency reasserting itself after months when the six-member commission operated with only four or five slots filled.

But plenty of folks don’t believe them. The roots of the agency’s dysfunction remain in in place, reformers and some former commissioners argue. Only wholesale reforms, they say, could pull the FEC from plunging into irrelevancy.

“The commission just seems to look inward and almost wonder aloud if a decision has an ideological impact, and if so, they shy away from it,” said Frank P. Reiche, a Republican who served as an FEC commissioner from 1979 to 1985. “It’s sad — very sad — and the agency is almost doomed to failure for carrying out its statutory mission unless reform measures are implemented and adopted by Congress.”

Some history

The FEC began operations in 1975, created and structured by Congress to be independent — largely in reaction to the Watergate scandal. The fledgling agency’s mandate: enforce federal election laws, especially those that govern how political candidates, parties and committees raise, spend and disclose their money.

The agency is also tasked with administering the public funding of presidential races and standing as a bulwark against those intent on undermining fair elections. It lacks criminal enforcement authority, but uses its civil power to audit and levy fines for people and organizations that violate what’s now 229 pages worth of election laws and 550 pages of related regulations. Its jurisdiction ranges from punishing slam-dunk lawlessness — committees not filing mandatory disclosures or submitting incomplete information — to arbitrating the most esoteric, legalistic questions about cell phone use or advertisement print size or electronic money.

The FEC’s early years were hardly placid. The commission had few resources. Election law changed regularly during the late 1970s. An untested staff didn’t always perform efficiently. And unlike most federal agencies, the FEC featured three commissioners from each political party — a lineup that frequently made quick action on politically sensitive issues difficult.

“Congress created the agency to be structurally deadlocked,” said Ralph Nader, the consumer rights advocate who ran for president multiple times. “Congress is content to defer to the FEC’s paralysis. It never wanted an agency that would pinch both parties.”

But during the 1990s, as political parties injected unlimited “soft money” into campaigns and elections grew more and more expensive, the FEC’s stature soared and so did its budgets, about doubling between 1992 and 1999. The agency started posting campaign finance disclosures online, and legions of Americans outside the Beltway began using its resources for the first time. Commissioners steadily assessed more fines against non-compliant candidates and committees as commissioners, despite their philosophical differences, did often find agreement on whether someone broke a law.

In 2002, Congress passed — and President George W. Bush signed — the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which among other reforms banned those unlimited “soft money” donations to political parties. The Supreme Court largely upheld the law the following year despite a challenge by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a fervent opponent of campaign contribution limits, and like-minded allies.

But election reformers’ celebrations would prove fleeting, thanks in large part to McConnell.

By the presidential election year 2008, the FEC literally couldn’t function — only two commissioners remained on the job as McConnell demanded that the Senate vote on pending nominees as a package, not individually as Democrats wanted. Democrats sought to block the confirmation of Republican Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky, whose temporary appointment had expired and whom they criticized for backing voter identification laws and taking a largely deregulatory approach toward interpreting campaign laws.

After a half-year idled by too few commissioners to conduct business in the midst of a presidential election, the parties reached an uneasy pact. The U.S. Senate in mid-2008 then confirmed as commissioners Republican Don McGahn— a kinetic lawyer and quick-witted rock-band guitar player who abhorred campaign regulations — along with current Republican commissioners Caroline Hunter and Matthew Petersen and Democrat-backed Steven Walther, who identifies as an independent.

Gridlock ensues

The youthful, lawyerly Republican bloc of McGahn, Hunter and Petersen arrived at the FEC just as federal courts began handing conservatives a string of campaign finance victories that made it easier for corporations, labor unions and nonprofit groups to directly inject money into political elections. The trio struck up friendships and forged a unified front against campaign finance reform overtures they believed would be overly burdensome, such as forcing politically active nonprofit groups to unveil their backers.

The gridlock that ensued can be traced to radically different views among the FEC’s Democrats and Republicans on how elections should be waged. The Democrats, led by FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, believed the FEC should be a strong regulatory force that checks the political influence of corporations and wealthy donors. The Republicans, led by McGahn, insisted the agency should above all ensure the free speech rights of political actors — rights they believe should include the raising and spending of big money to either promote or lambaste political candidates.

For months this year, Democrat Weintraub and Republican McGahn rarely spoke in private and frequently clashed in public, the bizarre final act of their personal drama unfolding at McGahn’s last meeting, on Sept. 12.

There, McGahn railed for an hour against Weintraub’s decision as chairman to block commissioners from debating, amending or voting on a public version of the agency’s enforcement manual that a congressional committee had demanded two years prior. The issue wasn’t even on the agenda.

Weintraub held firm. She pushed it off for another day, insisting that the matter wait until Goodman and Ravel had been sworn in.

McGahn, who resigned in September, says today’s campaign rules — especially those sparked by the Citizens United v. FEC decision — have vindicated his deregulatory philosophy, which equates political spending with free speech. The agency is on track to put more power in the hands of politically appointed commissioners and less in the hands of hired staffers — the way it should be, he argues. And what reformists decry as gridlock McGahn sees as a process through which the FEC is aligning itself with federal court decisions such as Citizens United that make it easier to pour big money into elections.

“I didn’t need this job. I came here to work, to change the way the place thinks,” McGahn said. “I was proven right time and time again by court cases.”

The cold war Weintraub and McGahn fought this year is emblematic of a radically changed dynamic on the commission in which disagreement is the norm — meaning not much gets done.

Both Republican and Democratic commissioners who served on the FEC before 2008 say that while they certainly disagreed from time to time, their relationships weren’t disagreeable. On most matters before the commission, they could find enough commonality to cobble four votes together and take action.

Come 2008, once the slots were filled, finding four votes for anything possessing a whiff of controversy became increasingly rare. During the rest of 2008, nearly 32 percent of executive session and open meeting tallies failed to reach the four vote mark, either because of absences, or deadlocks. By 2012, about 36 percent of executive session and open meeting votes lacked the support of four commissioners, and during the first half of 2013, the figure rose to 41 percent. As recently as 2007, only 7 percent of such votes had failed to reach the four vote threshold.

On requests for advisory opinions, in which people or groups ask the commission to provide guidance on the law, a deadlock is the equivalent of the commissioners saying, “go interpret the law yourself.”

Reviews of the commission’s performance — not surprisingly — varied by ideology. Republicans, said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan activist group, are “actively pushing the agency not to do its job.”

Not so, says the GOP’s Petersen, who served as FEC chairman in 2010.

“I hear people say … we aren’t even following the law, basically making us sound like we are scofflaws. Those sources of criticism are completely unfair and inaccurate,” he said.

What can’t be disputed, though, are the issues that were left in limbo by the deadlocked votes, regardless of where blame is best directed.

Among the litany: whether Karl Rove-backed American Crossroads could produce “fully coordinated” advertisements with candidates without violating anti-coordination laws and if a 2012 television advertisement featuring audio of President Barack Obama speaking depicts a “clearly identified candidate” and therefore should be subject to disclosure rules. The commission has deadlocked three times since 2010 on whether to broach the issue of forcing politically active nonprofit organizations to disclose their donors. It’s an issue that the Internal Revenue Service, not the FEC, is now poised to tackle next year, having just announced proposed rules on how such groups may operate.

Fines drop

Disagreements on how to enforce election laws have contributed to a drop in agency fines for political committees that haven’t followed the letter of the law.

In 2006, the FEC assessed more than $6.7 million in fines — an all-time high — for violations ranging from not disclosing campaign donors to filing mandatory campaign finance reports late. By 2012, it collected less than $1 million in fines, one of its most meager years since 1995, according to agency records.

Commissioners are voting on far fewer enforcement matters, from more than 1,000 annually during the middle of last decade, to fewer than 200 annually early this decade — the result of an overtaxed staff and commissioner disagreement. In several dozen instances, commissioners either refused to approve enforcement settlements FEC attorneys had reached with an offending party or couldn’t get four votes in place to approve the general counsel’s recommendation to punish a candidate or committee. As of early December, the commission has yet to resolve 268 pending enforcement cases, agency officials confirm. Commissioners acknowledge the backlog is unacceptable.

In September, for instance, Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, avoided penalty when the FEC couldn’t find four commissioners to concur with staff attorneys that the congressman’s campaign had run political advertisements without including mandatory disclaimers. Democrats favored action; Republicans didn’t.

In 2008, commissioners deadlocked on whether to accept FEC staff’s fine settlement with the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, stemming from the embezzlement of campaign money.

The same year, the FEC deadlocked on accepting the payment of an FEC fine a congressional candidate had already made.

Benchmarks missed

In 2012, the agency aspired to process enforcement cases within 15 months of receiving them. In reality, it did so 70 percent of the time, internal records show. It also sought to process 75 percent of cases assigned to its “alternative dispute resolution” program — a way for the FEC to exact “more expeditious resolution of enforcement matters with fewer resources” — within 155 days. It did so about half the time.

And while the FEC aimed to conclude all non-presidential committee audits in an average of 10 months after the election — excluding delays caused by developments beyond the commission’s control, such as subpoenas and extension requests — it hit that benchmark just 27 percent of the time.

The FEC in part blamed the underwhelming performance on its own procedures, instituted in 2009 and 2010, that allow committees to more readily respond to findings and the commissioners themselves to more closely review audits.

The commissioners’ case docket, meanwhile, sometimes reads like an American history book, with certain disputes or allegations of election law violations dragging on for years.

The FEC seals the details of pending cases, making it impossible to know how old the oldest active case is.

But among the more extreme examples of recently closed cases that lingered for years is a 2003 complaint by the American Conservative Union against a supporter of former Sen. John Edwards’ 2004 presidential committee. The FEC, in 2012, ultimately decided not to fine the man because he had no money. Another involves the presidential committee of former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008. Dodd’s campaign got its day before the FEC this year, on Feb. 7.

John McCain’s 2008 presidential committee won dismissal of a case against it on May 7. In a separate matter, resolved in July, McCain’s committee paid an $80,000 fine stemming from a complaint lodged in October 2008 by the Democratic National Committee, which accused McCain of accepting excessive contributions and improperly disclosing others.

The FEC did score a $375,000 judgment against Obama’s campaign early this year for failing to report the identities of some high-dollar donors. But the incident stemmed from Obama’s 2008 campaign, not his 2012 re-election.

Sometimes, the FEC threatens action only to take none.

Take the case of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign. The former House speaker’s committee has more debt on its books — about $4.5 million — than any other White House also-ran. The FEC has for months harangued him for not properly disclosing the nature of his debts and reimbursements to campaign staffers, including Gingrich himself.

Gingrich treasurer Lisa Lisker has each time told the FEC, in effect, to buzz off. The FEC has yet to fine or otherwise sanction Gingrich, who hasn’t been a candidate in 20 months and now co-hosts CNN’s Crossfire program.

Anarchy at the FEC?

As a regulatory body, the FEC is also supposed to write rules that help interpret federal election laws and provide the public clarity on what’s acceptable during political campaigns.

In years gone by, this responsibility kept both staff and commissioners busy.

Early last decade, it routinely produced upward of half-a-dozen new rules annually.

This year, in contrast, the FEC has approved just one rule — a wholly uncontroversial measure to adjust civil monetary penalties upward so they keep pace with inflation.

And it’s not like there’s been nothing to issue rules about. It’s been nearly four years since the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United v. FEC decision, which allows corporations, unions and special interest groups to spend unlimited amounts of money to directly advocate for or against candidates. Yet the commission has yet to write rules interpreting any aspect of it, even the decision’s most fundamental elements —such as the right of corporations and unions to dip into their treasuries to overtly advocate for and against political candidates.

Nor has the commission made rules to implement the federal court’s SpeechNow.org v. FEC decision, which gave rise in 2010 to super PACs, or the Carey v. FEC ruling, which legalized hybrid PACs — political committees that may at once operate as super PACs and traditional PACs so long as they keep separate accounts for both. The minutiae of proposed rules in these areas aren’t commissioners’ stumbling blocks; they simply haven’t tried.

“Today, there’s a lack of consensus on the FEC as to what the FEC’s job even is,” said Republican Trevor Potter, who was FEC chairman in 1994 and now, after serving as Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign general counsel in 2008, leads the reformist Campaign Legal Center. “There’s a belief present that failing to act is a form of action. But this deadlocking and inaction is not healthy for our system.”

Funding fails to keep pace

The gridlock has coincided with another, decidedly less visible problem the FEC faces: enough resources to execute its most basic tasks, such as reviewing political committees’ financial reports, which are central to the agency’s campaign-cop-on-the-beat function and vital to the public’s understanding of how elections are waged.

It wasn’t always that way. In eight years, from 1992 to 2000, the FEC’s funding more than doubled, from $18.8 million to $38.4 million, federal records show. Funding growth continued throughout the 2000s as the tiny agency sought to keep pace with ballooning workloads.

But that growth has slowed, thanks to tight budgets, sequestration and a recalcitrant Congress.

Over the past eight years, funding is projected to have increased from $54.2 million in 2006 to $65.8 million for 2014. When accounting for inflation, the FEC’s estimated funding in 2013 is about the same as it was in 2003.

Meanwhile, the politics business that the FEC oversees is exploding. The 2005-2006 federal election cycle cost $2.85 billion for politicians and political committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The 2011-2012 election cycle? Nearly $6.3 billion — a 120 percent increase. Pro-Mitt Romney super PAC Restore Our Future alone spent double the FEC’s budget.

“Everything goes up but the budget stays flat,” Weintraub lamented. “We need more than we have.”

Employment at the FEC peaked in 2005, at 385 staffers — 372 permanent, 13 temporary — agency personnel data indicates.

Since then, the numbers have steadily snaked downward.

By the end of fiscal 2009-2010, as the effects of the Citizens United v. FEC decision took hold, the agency fielded 349 workers. And three years later, at September’s end, the agency had bled 11 more positions. Not since the turn of the millennium has its ranks thinned to such a level, internal staffing rosters show.

Hardest hit is the Reports and Analysis Division, which makes sure political candidates and committees comply with campaign laws.

Eleven of its positions are unfilled despite the agency processing record numbers of political transactions — 23 million in 2012 alone. Instead of an individual analyst monitoring 200 to 300 political committees, as is normal, they’re today sometimes shouldering more than 500. Entry-level analysts earn about $52,000 annually.

As of mid-November, 2.2 million pages worth of FEC disclosure reports had not been reviewed by staff for errors, anomalies and completeness — an estimated 22-week backlog, confirmed Goodman, the new Republican commissioner. On average, FEC staffers review about 100,000 such documents a week, although that figure in November has slid to 84,000 each week because of short staffing, he said.

More funds recommended

To remedy staffing woes, FEC commissioners argue in one voice that the agency needs cash. And in a 45-page document the FEC sent in September to Congress at the Office of Management and Budget, it asks for a modest raise — to $68 million annually — for fiscal year 2015.

Most of the extra cash, the FEC proposes, would go toward better compensating staff and shoring up its IT capabilities. Commissioners acknowledge that the agency’s website, where its millions of campaign records are published, is woefully clunky. Searching for items as simple as a complaint against a candidate often proves difficult. Generating a list of something as fundamental to campaigns as payments to vendors is impossible.

Funding reductions have had “a significant negative impact on the human capital management and daily operations of the agency,” the FEC writes in its latest funding request. “Further reductions… will be detrimental to the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission and provide adequate services to the American public.”

Numerous staffers say the agency’s creaky IT systems are at greatest risk if more funding — and a major attitude adjustment on the part of top managers — isn’t forthcoming.

An independent audit of FEC operations last year by Leon Snead & Company P.C. all but predicted October’s Chinese hacking incident.

“FEC’s … decision to not fully adopt information technology best practices increases risk to the agency’s information and information systems,” the audit reads. “Without adopting and implementing National Institute of Science and Technology minimum security controls, the FEC’s computer network, data and information is at an increased risk of loss, theft, manipulation, [and] interruption of operations.”

The FEC responded, saying its systems are basically secure. But the auditors persisted, saying the agency’s outdated software and inadequate system patches portended “vulnerabilities.”

In a statement, the FEC acknowledged that hackers have targeted FEC systems but offered no details. Weintraub, the commission chairman, refused to comment or to acknowledge that the hack during October’s government shutdown originated overseas.

Commissioner Walther, however, said in an interview that FEC Staff Director Alec Palmer, who also leads the agency’s IT division, should be removed from one of his two postings. “We have simply not addressed our security needs, and there is no excuse for not giving this attention,” Walther said. Palmer, who at $165,300 annually earns more than the $155,500 salary commissioners do, declined to comment.

Before the shutdown, Weintraub had warned that a work stoppage would throttle the agency.

It did. People who could address the hacking problem found themselves barred from work. Ultimately, the government recalled FEC staffers on an emergency basis to address the system meltdown that was crippling FEC.gov during a time when federal law required candidates and committees involved in two special elections — New Jersey’s U.S. Senate race and Massachusetts’ 5th District congressional contest — to file disclosure reports. In desperation, Weintraub took to Twitter and asked political committees to post disclosures to their own candidate websites in the name of transparency.

If the government shuts down again, Weintraub said, she’d demand at least some FEC staffers remain at work. Commissioner Hunter, though, disagrees. A government shutdown is a government shutdown. “The FEC is not essential to the operation of the republic in the same way, say, the Department of Defense is,” she said.

Morale plummets

As the FEC’s internal schisms have widened and resources have dwindled, a wave of high-ranking staff members have grown increasingly disenchanted with the agency some had called their professional home for years, even decades. Several said they retired earlier than planned. Others simply quit.

Democratic Commissioner Cynthia Bauerlyresigned in February and returned home to Minnesota, where she now works for the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development.

General Counsel Tony Herman resigned in July after just two years on the job. In part stymied by commission inaction on a variety of recommendations his office made, Herman decided to take a job at his former law firm, Covington & Burling LLP.

His departure triggered widespread rumblings about the commission’s ability to work with its staff and whether Republican commissioners in particular were on a quest to purge high-level employees they considered obstacles to consolidating power at the commission level.

For months this year, commissioner McGahn spearheaded a Republican effort to approve a public FEC enforcement manual that, among a host of actions, would require commission approval for various decisions now primarily in the hands of staffers. Herman and many top staffers and Democratic commissioners were opposed.

“Someone from [the Office of the General Counsel] asked me if Tony Herman is leaving before the Commissioners toss him out,” McGahn’s executive assistant, Jill Moschak, wrote in a June email to J. Duane Pugh, the FEC’s top liaison to Congress. “OGC peeps sometimes have a very active imagination.” Herman says he never believed the commission would have “the requisite four votes to fire me.”

Since his departure, though, the commission has yet to even name an acting general counsel.

“You have to trust your senior staff. Otherwise you’re just going to needlessly slow things down,” said one former top-level FEC staffer who recently departed. “It’s very difficult to come to work every day … do a professional job and then send it up to the commission so the commission can deep-six it because of ideology and spite.”

Another mid-level staffer who also left this year said most staffers were doing the best they could, “but everyone has six bosses who don’t get along and don’t seem to want to get along.”

Herman agreed.

“Morale was very low, and understandably, when morale is low, people don’t do their best work,” he said.

Existential dilemma

There have been numerous calls for reform at the agency over the years, but the process has been stymied in part because some influential politicians — especially Republicans — philosophically disagree that the FEC should wield significant power.

“We’re talking about regulating political speech, a constitutionally protected freedom that must be approached with extreme caution,” said Rep. Gregg Harper, R-Miss., a member of the Committee on House Administration, which has FEC oversight responsibilities.

Destroying the current 3-3 partisan balance “would just create a temptation for that majority to extend campaign finance laws beyond their legitimate scope,” he added.

For Rep. Robert Brady, D-Pa., the House Administration Committee’s ranking member, the recent wave of changes to the election landscape — starting with the Citizens United v. FEC decision and continuing now with the Supreme Court’s pending McCutcheon v. FEC case — make the FEC’s regulatory duties more important than ever.

“It will fall entirely upon the FEC to guide members and candidates through this uncertain territory, and right now I’m not convinced the agency is capable of doing so,” Brady said.

Jan Baran, chairman of Wiley Rein LLP’s election law practice and former general counsel for the Republican National Committee and President George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, suggests Capitol Hill is the FEC’s most notable obstacle.

“If there’s one problem the FEC has always had, it’s Congress. It can’t even agree on what the law should be,” he said.

Beyond freezing its funding for years, Congress hasn’t passed a single one the FEC’s most recent volley of legislative recommendations, on which all commissioners — Democratic and Republican — actually agreed this year.

The asks include passing a law that makes Senate candidates file campaign reports electronically, not on paper — at an estimated $430,000 savings to the federal government — and making it illegal for anyone to misrepresent themselves as working on behalf of political candidates or committees when they don’t.

Moreover, Capitol Hill has brushed off an overture to create senior executive service positions at the FEC — much like those that exist at myriad other agencies — and won’t heed commissioners’ plea to ban people involved with any political committee, not just candidate committees, from using money raised for personal use. A repeatedly introduced House bill prohibiting the practice among leadership PACs has sat in committee for months, and a separate bill, the Clean Campaign Contribution Act of 2013, is also stuck in committee.

The lone exceptions? The House approved a bill that extends the FEC’s administrative fine program — used to punish minor violations without full-blown investigations — through 2018. It awaits a Senate vote.

In 2003, and again in 2006, 2007 and 2009, Sens. McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., attempted to reclaim some of their campaign reformist magic following the 2002 passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which banned unlimited “soft money” contributions to political parties.

To do so, the cross-aisle senators introduced bills that would dissolve the FEC and, from its ashes, create the “Federal Election Administration.” A key feature of the most recent proposal: installing a three-member administration panel to prevent deadlocked votes.

But the Senate referred the bills to its Committee on Rules and Administration, where they sat, then died, without a hearing. Feingold is no longer in the Senate; McCain, whose office declined to comment, stopped trying. Little in the way of Congress-initiated FEC reform has surfaced since.

“We’re not anyone’s No. 1 priority,” Weintraub concedes.

Don’t look to Obama for major FEC reforms, either.

The president once regularly railed against the Citizens United v. FEC decision and decried the influence of big money in the political process, but his recent track record is hardly reformist.

Indeed, Obama became the first president since the FEC’s creation to not successfully appoint someone to the FEC during an entire term. His lone nominee, labor lawyer John Sullivan, withdrew from consideration after the Senate blocked his consideration.

McGahn’s term expired April 30, 2009. The White House could have nominated his replacement at any point during the next four-plus years. It chose not to, and McGahn kept working against campaign reformers’ most every demand.

By 2012, Obama had given his blessing to supportive super PACs. In 2013, he supported the formation of Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political lobbying group that reveals limited information about its donors. These actions, campaign reformers say, eviscerated any hope they had that the president would push back against election deregulation in a meaningful way.

White House spokesman Eric Schulz declined comment.

New members hopeful

But hope persists, even at the FEC.

Upon their nominations for the FEC on June 21, Weintraub sent Goodman and Ravel effusive email messages — the McGahn era appeared to be nearing an end.

“Allow me to be among the first to welcome you to the FEC!” she wrote Goodman, who with Ravel, would ultimately take his oath in October after a relatively uneventful confirmation process.” She told Ravel that “I'm so looking forward to working with you.”

For Goodman and Ravel, their time is now. Come this winter, the FEC will likely elect Republican Goodman as its chairman and Democrat Ravel its vice chairman, since all other current commissioners have had their turn in the rotating leadership positions. It’ll be their agency to direct.

“I am an eternal optimist, and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here,” said Ravel, who in October as chairman of California’s Fair Political Practices Commission oversaw the outing of numerous donors to nonprofit organizations that sought to influence a ballot initiative vote.

Ravel will continue fighting for expanded political disclosure at the federal level, saying, “It is the essential purpose of the FEC.”

Goodman describes himself as libertarian in his campaign finance philosophy, “and you’ll find me erring on the side of freedom,” he said. But, he says, “To be effective in my philosophical viewpoints, my door needs to be open, and I need to be open to [Democrats’] viewpoints, as well …. There doesn’t need to be a lot of animosity or angst for us to do our work. We all agree it’s important work — and that the FEC is still relevant.”

Whether newfound collegiality translates into functionality, however, remains an open question.

In a headline-generating case in November, the Conservative Action Fund, a PAC, asked the newly constituted commission to provide guidance on whether it could raise and spend bitcoins — an all-digital currency. FEC staffers drafted four plans of action, spanning 83 pages, for commissioners to consider.

The Republicans supported the most permissible option. Democrats blocked them. Another 3-3 deadlock. The PAC — and by virtue of the decision, all political committees — left the FEC’s 9th floor chamber at 999 E St. in Washington, D.C., back at square one, no answer in hand.

“We will continue to work on these very interesting issues,” said Weintraub, the chairman, who promised the commission would revisit the bitcoin matter sometime in the future.

No date for doing so has yet been set.

The newly elected chairman and vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission pledged to work together to tackle a host of agency problems detailed today by the Center for Public Integrity in an investigative report.

Both Lee Goodman, a Republican who becomes chairman in 2014, and Ann Ravel, a Democrat and incoming vice chairman, say fixing the bipartisan agency’s information technology systems is a top priority.

They vowed to hire new IT security specialists during the next two months. Agency funds will also be diverted to bolster internal system security. A long-term plan to enhance public portions of its digital offerings will also be completed in 2014, they said.

In addition, at a meeting Tuesday morning, commissioners voted unanimously to formally ask Congress for permission to accept “gifts that will assist the commission in carrying out its functions,” particularly those that would help update the agency’s technology.

“Gifts” would likely come in the form of donated help from “individuals or organizations that support the agencies’ mission of enhancing transparency,” the commissioners wrote in a memorandum they plan to send to President Barack Obama and Congress.

“This is something we’re in total agreement on,” Ravel said.

“We can do better,” Goodman said.

Current Chairman Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat, added that she expected “some” of the FEC’s IT problems to be solved by February following what she described as “a challenging year to lead the agency.”

Chinese hackers waylaid the FEC’s servers in October just as the federal government shut down over a budget impasse. Its website, which makes public the agency’s millions of political candidate and committee campaign finance records, went dark for several days and operated at partial capacity for the government shutdown’s duration.

Even during the more placid times, the agency’s website is widely regarded by the public and commissioners alike as obsolete, where simple searches for enforcement cases or campaign vendors are difficult, if not impossible. IT matters are just one aspect of multiple agency problems, which include understaffing, poor morale and partisan gridlock.

But FEC commissioners ended 2013 on a conciliatory note.

At the agency's final meeting of the year, Ravel nominated Goodman for the chairmanship, which traditionally rotates between Democratic and Republican appointees every year. Republican commissioner Caroline Hunter nominated Ravel for the vice chairmanship.

Both votes were unanimous and the nominators spoke glowingly of their colleagues — a departure from the sometimes bitter and decidedly public sniping between Weintraub and former Vice Chairman Don McGahn, who resigned in September.

The commission also unanimously approved several other legislative recommendations it will send to a president and Congress that have largely ignored the FEC’s previous requests.

On this year’s FEC wish list:

• Require senators to file campaign finance reports electronically.
• Require committees that make electioneering communications to file electronic reports.
• Ban all political committees — including congressional leadership PACs — from using funds for personal needs.
• Make permanent an “administrative fine” program to more efficiently punish low-level campaign finance reporting violations.
• Increase and index for inflation the minimum amount committees must spend to report activity to the FEC. Currently, committees that spend $1,000 or more during a calendar year must register with federal regulators. The FEC did not recommend a specific dollar amount.
• Create senior executive service positions within the agency, which commissioners say would help in “recruiting and retaining key management personnel.”
• Strengthen laws to punish people who falsely represent themselves as working on behalf of a campaign or political party.

The commission failed to approve a recommendation to make all political action committees and super PACs report their financial activity quarterly — not semi-annually, as many do — during non-election years.