Back in 2001, Republican activist Linda Chavez was Bush’s first choice to serve as Secretary of Labor, looking out for the interests of working people nationwide. She ran into a little trouble when the White House learned that Chavez failed tell the Bush gang about housing a Guatemalan woman whom she hired illegally to clean her house, and then encouraged a neighbor not to talk about the cleaning woman to the FBI when agents asked questions during her background check. Oops.
But never fear, this was a temporary setback for Chavez, who has built a successful network of political action committees. The problem, as the WaPo reported in a fascinating front-page expose today, is that Chavez’s PACs don’t appear to do anything — except raise money.
Linda Chavez rose to prominence in the 1980s as a tart-tongued Reagan administration official and candidate for the Senate, eventually becoming a well-known Latina voice on social issues and President Bush’s choice to lead the Labor Department. With her conservative celebrity came book deals, a syndicated column, regular appearances on the Fox News Channel — and a striking but little-known success at political fundraising.
In the years since she was forced to pull her nomination as Bush’s labor secretary after admitting payments to an illegal immigrant, Chavez and her immediate family members have used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. Their solicitations promise direct action in the “fight to save unborn lives,” a vigorous struggle against “big labor bosses” and a crippling of “liberal politics in the country.”
That’s not where the bulk of the money wound up being spent, however. Of the $24.5 million raised by the PACs from January 2003 to December 2006, $242,000 — or 1 percent — was passed on to politicians, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal election reports. The PACs spent even less — $151,236 — on independent political activity, such as mailing pamphlets.
As a rule, political action committees exist, as the name implies, to do political action. That generally means contributing to candidates, hosting forums, publishing materials, conducting studies and surveys, etc. In Chavez’s case, the Post found that her multiple PACs raised lots of money, but fell short on the whole “action” part of the equation.
OK, so where did the bulk of the millions of dollars Chavez raised go? Well, it’s a funny story.
[M]ost of the donations were channeled back into new fundraising efforts, and some were used to provide a modest but steady source of income for Chavez and four family members, who served as treasurers and consultants to the committees. Much of the remaining funds went to pay for expenses such as furniture, auto repairs and insurance, and rent for the Sterling office the groups share. Even Chavez’s health insurance was paid for a time from political donations.
“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.
I guess you could call it that, but a few other names come to mind.
Now, it’s worth noting that Chavez’s fundraising schemes, oddly enough, are not illegal. Washed-up has-beens who failed in politics can set up PACs, send out plenty of fundraising mail, and hope that supporters keep writing checks without seeing much in the way of results. (In my personal favorite, one of Chavez’s outfits sent out an anti-union letter, vowing to pass something called the “Workers’ Freedom of Choice Act.” The letter said, “If we stop now, the terrorists win.”)
The strangest thing about this whole mess is that Chavez and her family didn’t get wealthy from running political action committees that raised lots of money but hardly bothered with political action. As Josh Marshall explained, that’s not really where the money went.
With simple arithmetic even I can manage we can see that well under half a million dollars went to anything that can be considered “political action”, as in political action committee. And that leaves over $24 million raised over 4 years. So $6 million a year on operating expenses and salaries for Chavez, her husband and sundry offspring.
The answer? Oddly enough not all that much of that money seems to have gone to Chavez and her husband and sons. Evidence turned up by the FEC suggests that the telemarketing solicitation firm they contracted with kept as much as 95% of the money raised on the PACs’ behalf.
In other words, this was a fundraising scheme that took in money, in order to finance more fundraising schemes, which would raise money that could be used to raise more money. And so on.
Read the article. It’s a doozy.