Ickes To Testify Next Week
Republican senators want to re-focus hearings on '96 campaign
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Sep. 30) -- Former White House aide Harold Ickes, who missed out on a promotion and left the Clinton Administration with an estimated 2,400 pages of documents, is expected to testify next week at the Senate hearings into alleged campaign-finance abuses.
Sources tell The Associated Press that Senate Republicans have decided to summon Ickes and put a spotlight back on the 1996 campaign, after several days of earnest but lackluster testimony on election law and campaign-finance reform.
Today, the Senate panel heard from former Vice President Walter Mondale and retired Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, who were appointed by President Bill Clinton to review campaign-finance proposals. Afterward, the panel recessed until 10 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Oct. 7, when Ickes is expected to appear.
Mondale and Kassebaum Baker urged senators to ban so-called "soft money," the large and mostly unregulated donations to the parties, and to reorganize the Federal Election Commission. The political watchdog agency, with its members divided equally between Republicans and Democrats, has a reputation for moving slowly -- if at all -- against wrongdoers. (448K wav sound)
Kassebaum Baker warned that if soft money is prohibited, the gains "will be incomplete if funds now contributed to political parties are redirected, whether by corporations or unions, into election advertisements disguised as 'issue advocacy.'
"We believe the highest priority is to end, swiftly and decisively, the influence of soft money," she testified. (320K wav sound)
Mondale called soft money "an outrageous loophole never approved by Congress" and said it has swamped the political system and eroded public trust. (320K wav sound)
The two witnesses also predicted that a soft-money ban would withstand a constitutional challenge.
Filling in the details
Sources said senators hope that Ickes, as a top Clinton political advisor, will be able to fill in details about the use of the White House to entertain major donors and Clinton's personal fund-raising efforts. Ickes left the White House after Clinton passed over him and selected Erskine Bowles as his chief of staff after Leon Panetta's departure.
Ickes took extensive notes at White House meetings and has already provided much material to congressional investigators. He also has told investigators that Clinton made a few telephone calls to donors in 1994 from his White House residence.
The Senate committee's other priority is to probe the connection between interest groups' political spending and candidates. But that line of inquiry has been slowed by resistance from organized labor, the Christian Coalition and other groups in turning over documents on their political activities.
Congressional fund-raising
With the Justice Department looking at fund-raising solicitations from the White House, some former members of Congress concede the same sort of activity occurs at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Such solicitations have occurred in the past and probably still are common, according to ex-members and staffers.
"I don't think any [current members] will admit it, but it's so damn hard not to occur," said Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona who retired in 1994.
Members from Congress are forbidden from using official resources for political activity. But DeConcini said he remembers people in the Senate cloakroom, just off the Senate floor, making calls to prospective donors and comparing lists of would-be contributors.
Lawmakers can avoid problems by using telephones in rented Democratic and GOP offices near the Capitol.
In Other News:
Tuesday Sept. 30, 1997
• Ickes To Testify Next Week
• Critics On The Right Snipe At Sen. Thompson
• Negotiators Agree To Allow Pay Increase For Congress
• N.Y. Lieutenant Gov. Joins Democratic Party
• Clinton Meets With Race Advisory Board
• Clinton Bids Goodbye To Retiring Military Chief
• Congress Extends Immigration Filing Deadline
E-mail From Washington:
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