AP Analyzes PAC Money, House Freshman

[dusty64]

Sep 19, 2:46 PM (ET)

By JONATHAN D. SALANT

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Associated Press analysis of 37 freshman House members on three key committees shows 35 of the lawmakers raised a greater percentage of political action committee money from the industries and unions that fall under their committees' jurisdiction than they had received before getting their assignments.

The AP analyzed data for the House members on three key committees - Armed Services, which decides which billion-dollar weapons systems the Pentagon will buy; Financial Services, which oversees congressional efforts to respond to the corporate accounting scandals, and Transportation and Infrastructure, which is writing legislation to allocate tens of billions of dollars in federal gasoline tax revenues. All but two of the lawmakers got a larger percentage of their PAC money after getting their committee assignments than they did during their 2002 campaigns.

"The committees are often where the action is," said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "You want to have access to the committee members and their staffs."

Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite received attention from the banking, insurance and real estate industries after she was elected to the House and named to the committee overseeing those industries.


Brown-Waite received $83,500 in PAC funds during the first six months of the year, five times as much as during her entire 2002 campaign, according to an AP computer-assisted analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission and from the Center for Responsive Politics, a private group that tracks campaign financing.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030919/D7TLKU681.html