SANTORUM...A
LITTLE MORE THAN TAINTED..
PACS
America's Foundation
Affiliate: ex-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa)| Total Receipts | $511,099 |
| Total Spent | $585,194 |
| Begin Cash on Hand | $102,858 |
| End Cash on Hand | $28,763 |
| Debts | $0 |
| Date of last report | June 30, 2011 |
| Contributions from this PAC to federal candidates (list recipients) (0% to Democrats, 100% to Republicans) | $2,500 |
| Contributions to this PAC from individual donors of $200 or more ( list donors) | $175,411 |
Official PAC Name:
AMERICA'S FOUNDATION
Location: Downingtown, PA 19335
Industry: Leadership PACs; Republican officials, candidates & former members
Treasurer: BARNA, ALEX
FEC Committee ID: C00305797
(Look up actual documents filed at the FEC)
*Based on data released by the FEC on September 24, 2011 except for independent expenditure and communication cost, contributions to federal candidates, and contributions from individual donor data, which were released by the FEC on August 28, 2011.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center
America's Foundation Contributions to Federal Candidates
Recipient  | Total |
|---|---|
| English, Phil (R-PA) | ($2,500) |
| Recipient | Total |
|---|---|
| Lamontagne, Ovide (R-NH) | $5,000 |
Based on data released by the FEC on August 28, 2011.
Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center
.
Exclusive:
An investigation into the private and public finances of Rick Santorum suggests
that the Senate GOP might want to reconsider making him its ethics czar.
“In far too many families with young children,
both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the
budget, they might find they don’t both need to.”
-- U.S. Senator Rick
Santorum, in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common
Good
The estates at
Shenstone Farm sprawl over 500 acres of steeply rolling, barren hillside, at
the point where northern Virginia’s traffic-clogged suburbs finally surrender
to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On an unseasonably warm January
day, this former horse farm is shrouded in fog so dense that a visitor could
imagine a band of gray-clad rebel soldiers emerging from these hilltops in the
heart of Civil War country.
Instead, what slowly
takes shape from the gloaming are well over 100 McMansions, with more on the
way—massive brick structures jutting out like solitary fortresses, each
surrounded by roughly four acres of treeless, lunar-like landscape, with
three-car garages and sconce-topped brick monument pillars at the foot of each
long driveway. Most sport pricey wood playsets in the backyard. It is here,
some 43 miles by car and a world away from Capitol Hill, that Pennsylvania’s
junior U.S. senator, Rick Santorum, and his wife, Karen, bought a home on
November 14, 2001, for $643,361 (now assessed by Loudoun County at $757,000).
It is here that the most outspoken social conservative in the Senate is raising
his six children in the manner he described in his book last year, which caused
so much controversy back in the state where he is seeking a third term this
fall. And it is here that Santorum departs most mornings for his newest
mission: crafting a package of Senate ethics reforms aimed at removing the
stain of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
When Santorum first
ran against incumbent House Democrat Doug Walgren in 1990, he released an
attack ad that drew the attention of Roll Call, the Capitol Hill weekly:
“Strange music plays while a picture of an attractive white house is shown. The
announcer says, ‘There’s something strange about this house.’ The reason is
because Walgren lives in McLean, which is ‘the wealthiest area of Virginia’
rather than his suburban district. ‘Maybe that’s why he voted for a pay raise
seven times,’ the announcer argues.”
But in 1995, just after winning election to the Senate (and thus
five years before he would have to face Pennsylvania voters again), the couple
purchased a $292,000 house in Herndon, Virginia. “I made the pledge that I
would live in my district as a congressman, and I did,” Santorum said at the
time. “The Senate is a very different place from the House.” For two years he
didn’t even own a home in Pennsylvania, but in 1997 bought a small house in
Penn Hills—in the Pittsburgh area, next door to his wife’s parents—for $87,800. Around the same time that the couple
became Virginia homeowners, Karen Santorum entered into an unusual working
arrangement with the Pittsburgh political consulting firm that has provided all
of her husband’s media work. From 1995 through 1998, Brabender Cox—the company
that handled nearly $10 million in media buys for his two Senate campaigns—paid
a retainer to the senator’s wife. John Brabender, a firm principal who is
godfather to one of the couple’s children, told reporters that he paid her
roughly $4,000 a month for “client development,” although the exact amount was
never disclosed. As Pennsylvania voters know, the senator has endured enormous
controversy over his residence in Penn Hills. The Santorums’ niece lives in the
tiny two-bedroom home—valued at $106,000—that the senator claims as his legal
and voting residence. As previously reported, the Penn Hills school district
said that it paid more than $67,000 for the cyber-schooling of Santorum’s
children down in Virginia, until the arrangement was revealed in late 2004. He
said he was entitled to the schooling because he pays property taxes there. But
education funded by taxpayers two states away apparently isn’t the only perk of
membership in the U.S. Senate. According to one expert, Santorum appears to
reap personal benefits from America’s Foundation, the so-called leadership PAC
controlled by Santorum, which has raised some $5 million from wealthy donors
and business PACs over the last five years. The stated purpose of America’s
Foundation is to support other GOP candidates, but the Prospect found
that the committee spends considerably less on direct candidate aid than
comparable PACs, and considerably more on operating expenses—declaring hundreds
of small- to medium-sized meals and purchases by Santorum or his political
staff to be “campaign-related.”
Since the beginning of
Santorum’s term in 2001, America’s Foundation has paid for some 66 trips to
Starbucks—almost all in Santorum’s hometown of Leesburg—and close to 100 small
purchases from another Washington area coffee vendor, along with purchases at
Arby’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Ben and Jerry’s, and a vast array of retail and
food outlets. Santorum spokeswoman Davis said that every listed expense was
related to the PAC’s mission, including “routine expenses such as office supplies
including furniture, travel for staff, meals, and grocery items for various
functions such as fund-raisers and planning meetings.”However, a comparison to
five other senators’ leadership PAC expenses shows that those PACs do not list
expenditures on items such as convenience stores or coffee shops, with a couple
of exceptions for out-of-state travel. Different leadership PACs maintain
records differently, but America’s Foundation appeared to spend more heavily on
credit-card payments, for example, than similar PACs. The $463,378 spent by
Santorum’s PAC on credit-card payments from 2001 through 2005 constituted 8.6
percent of all cash taken in, while comparable numbers for Kentucky’s Mitch
McConnell, his partner in the GOP Senate leadership, were $29,524 and 1.6
percent. All this leads experts to say that those expenditures appear highly
unusual.“These are very questionable transactions, given that the donors to
this leadership PAC were trying to work on ‘party building,’” says Alex Knott,
political director for the Center for Public Integrity, a leading
Washington-based good-government group. “They were probably not aware that the
funds were being spent at convenience stores and coffee houses.” CREW’s Sloan
said some charges appear to be for personal use, which would violate Senate
ethics rules. “Let them explain why an ice-cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s is a
campaign expense,” she says. So-called leadership PACs were originally
developed as a way for the ranking members in the House and Senate to build
support from new and junior members by giving extra money to their campaigns.
Over time, however, even members of Congress who aren’t in leadership founded
these PACs, and it isn’t hard to understand why. On the giving side, leadership
PACs are a way for big-money givers inside the Beltway to offer support beyond
the current limits, which in the current 2006 cycle are $4,200 for an
individual ($2,100 each for the primary and general election) and $10,000 for a
PAC. On the spending side, there would seem to be few restrictions except that
a leadership PAC can’t directly aid the campaign of the politician with which
it is connected. In fact, while America’s Foundation has raked in millions from
Washington lobbyists and big-business PACs, it has doled out just a fraction of
that money on the stated purpose of Santorum’s committee, which is supporting
other candidates. From the start of 2001 until late 2005, according to its
disclosure forms, America’s Foundation raised a whopping $5,363,735, but spent
just $967,632 on other candidates or political committees—just 18.1 percent.
Santorum spokeswoman Davis maintained that America’s Foundation “assisted other
candidates running for office to the tune of $3,025,331 since 2001,” although
she did not explain how that calculation was reached, and the forms clearly
show the smaller number. Again, Santorum’s number compares unfavorably to those
of most other senators in leadership positions. For example, Democratic
Minority Whip Dick Durbin’s figure for the same period was 65 percent.
McConnell’s was 47.5 percent. House Minority Leader Roy Blunt’s was 54 percent.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s was 23.1 percent. Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist was in Santorum’s ballpark, at 20.5 percent, but
Santorum was the lowest of all those reviewed. The bulk of the PAC money was
spent on a broad category called “other federal expenditures.” Those costs
include direct mailings and fund-raising commissions. A company called Capitol
Resources Group—located in the Philadelphia suburb of West Conshohocken and run
by Santorum’s finance chief, Rob Bickhart—has received monthly rent, expenses,
and management fees that generally came to $10,000 every month. It also pays
regularly for Internet and mobile-phone service. But other expenditures by
America’s Foundation are less conventional. The PAC has paid for hundreds of
meals over a five-year period. Some of those were at expensive, upscale
restaurants like the Capital Grille restaurants in Philadelphia and in
Washington, D.C. But what jumps out from the PAC’s thousands of pages of
reports are all the small meals. Arby’s, the fast-food chain specializing in
roast-beef sandwiches, has been a particular favorite. Eleven Arby’s meals,
totaling $118.25, were charged to the PAC—eight of them in Dillsburg,
Pennsylvania, a small town on U.S. 15 south of Harrisburg. The PAC also charged
four meals at Burger King, totaling $50.36—three of these in Virginia or
Maryland. Other meals were charged at fast-food eateries such as Wendy’s,
Boston Market, Sbarro, and Papa John’s pizza.But the pages of federal
records show that no charge was too small for America’s Foundation: not the
$4.44 it paid to a Sheetz Service Station in Mt. Jackson, Virginia, in July
2002; not the $3.71 it paid at Goodnoe Farms, a popular Bucks County ice cream
stop, in May 2004; not the $4.48 at a Ben & Jerry’s in August 2002; not the
$5.26 at a Wawa convenience store in June 2003; and not the $2.49 at an Auntie
Anne’s pretzel store in June 2004. On five occasions, charges—totaling
$338.87—were made at Giant Foods supermarkets in Leesburg and Burke, Virginia.The records also display
an unusual penchant for coffee. America’s Foundation paid 66 times for visits
to Starbucks, all but a couple of them at the Leesburg location, which is a
popular local hangout on the town’s main shopping drag, with a large
wood-burning stove in its main lounge area. A Starbucks barista said he has
seen Santorum there on a couple of occasions, adding: “We got a lot of
celebrities … Oliver North comes here all the time.” The total Starbucks charges since 2001 come
to $558.65. But that is not America’s Foundation’s favorite coffee stop. Since
the current term began, the fund has also paid for 94 visits to coffee shops
owned by HMS Host of Bethesda, Maryland—for a total spending of $380. Other
visits to both the Leesburg Starbucks and HMS Host were also paid for by
Santorum’s 2006 campaign, but in much smaller amounts.America’s Foundation
doesn’t spend money on just food. Its records show expenditures at an all-star
lineup of American retailers. Some of the purchases are at traditional office
stores that have become a mainstay of modern political campaigns, like Staples
and OfficeMax. A $273.48 charge at the Restoration Hardware store in Ardmore,
Pennsylvania, is listed under the previously unknown campaign category of
“repairs.Other entries for “office supplies” or “PAC fund-raising expenses”
include $325.99 at the Target store in Leesburg in September 2005 and $102.28
at a Virginia Wal-Mart in June 2002. These are in addition to charges at
Overstock.com; K-Mart; CVS and Duane Reade drug stores; Barnes & Noble and
B. Dalton bookstores; and a RadioShack and Circuit City in northern Virginia.
The PAC office expenses were incurred even though America’s Foundation lists
its official address at someone else’s office: the Washington headquarters of a
major lobbying firm, Williams and Jensen, which employs America’s Foundation’s
treasurer, Barbara Bonfiglio. Although America’s Foundation paid out tens of
thousands of dollars in itemized travel expenses, including chartered jets and
commercial air tickets, Amtrak tickets, luxury hotel stays, parking and, of
course, meals, it also made unitemized travel expense payments directly to
Santorum on a frequent basis. The total of these payments over the five years
of the senator’s current term is $48,188. These payments were questioned at one
point by the Federal Election Commission and defended in a campaign filing as
“travel expenses that the senator incurred on behalf of America’s Foundation
and were reimbursed at the exact amounts he was charged at the time the travel
was incurred.” Again, other leadership PACs showed far fewer direct
reimbursements to the office holder. Larry Noble, executive director of the
Center for Responsive Politics and former top lawyer for the Federal Election
Commission, said that a leadership PAC like America’s Foundation “isn’t
supposed to be used as a slush fund or a coffee fund.” But he noted that even
if one could prove that the spending was for “personal use,” which would be
difficult to do, he believes that probably would not violate the FEC’s lax
rules on the spending practices by PACs.A recent study by the Center for
Responsive Politics found that Santorum was No. 1 among all 535 members of
Congress in raising money from lobbyists for his regular campaign fund, taking
in $145,946 in the first 10 months of the 2006 election cycle. Not
surprisingly, Washington lobbyists were also among the major sources of the
millions raised by America’s Foundation. Although Jack Abramoff is one of the
few big names not on the donor list, the PAC of Greenberg Traurig, the law firm
where Abramoff worked until 2004, donated $4,000 to America’s Foundation in
2003. (Santorum recently said he would turn over the $11,000 in
Abramoff-related donations to charity.)
Lobbyists from another
scandal-scarred lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group—which is under federal
scrutiny in the D.C. lobbying scandal and recently shut its doors—had donated
$14,000 to America’s Foundation and $4,600 to the Santorum 2006 committee. A
big chunk of that came from a one-time Santorum aide, Michael Mihalke, who
later went to work for the Alexander firm, which The New York Times
called “one of the crown jewels” of the K Street Project.
The biggest source of
income for America’s Foundation is industry PACs—particularly in the areas of
banking, insurance, health care, and pharmaceuticals—which have given hundreds
of thousands of dollars. Oddly enough, given Santorum’s position as the
Senate’s leading social conservative, America’s Foundation has raked in big
dollars from gaming, tobacco, and liquor interests. Among the Santorum fund’s
leading donors are political action committees for R.J. Reynolds, Altria, and
U.S. Tobacco Corporation. On November 2, 2004, the date that the GOP maintained
control of the Congress and the White House, four U.S. tobacco executives gave
$10,000 to America’s Foundation—in addition to $6,000 in donations from the
firm’s PAC that same year. Earlier in October 2004, Santorum had been a key
vote in a House-Senate conference committee that killed a provision allowing
the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry. Also in the
fall of 2004, America’s Foundation received $5,000 from the Anheuser-Busch PAC.
That summer they received $1,000 from the Miller Brewing PAC. In April 2005,
Santorum introduced legislation that aimed to halve federal excise taxes on
beer, from $18 to $9 a barrel for large brewers.
Santorum has not
received as much gaming money as certain other members of Congress. Over the
past five years, the Mashantucket Pequot Indians, who operate a casino in
Connecticut, have given $17,500 to America’s Foundation ($5,000 of that to a
now defunct “non-federal” account). In 2001, according to published reports,
Santorum joined with his Pennsylvania Senate colleague, Arlen Specter, to kill
a measure that would have blocked the opening of a California Indian-gaming
casino that was backed by a prominent Philadelphia Republican, former mayoral
candidate Sam Katz. On August 16, 2001, Katz donated $5,000 to America’s
Foundation.
Other America’s
Foundation donors who are not so well known have been closely linked to
legislation sponsored or backed by Santorum. For example, there was America
Foundation’s huge windfall of $45,865 from donors in Puerto Rico on December
31, 2003. Santorum had introduced the Medicare Puerto Rico Hospital Payment
Parity Act of 2003 and pushed to get extra reimbursement moneys for Puerto Rico
in the reform package enacted by Congress that same year. He also sponsored the
Puerto Rico Medicare Reimbursement Equity Act of 2005.
Then there is the case
of the $612 million coal-to-diesel fuel plant in Schuylkill County,
Pennsylvania. No one has been a bigger governmental supporter of this
controversial project than Santorum, who inserted a provision in the National
Energy Security Act of 2000 to allow federal funding for part of its
construction costs, clearing the way in 2003 for a $100 million Department of
Energy grant to the plant’s builder, Waste Management and Processors, Inc. Last
year, he added a provision in the energy bill to federally guarantee loans for
the plant. Waste Management and Processors CEO John Rich and his relatives have
donated $8,000 to America’s Foundation and $18,500 to Santorum’s campaign fund
since 2001, according to federal records. Davis, in response to an inquiry,
said that none of Santorum’s official actions were linked to the donations.
It would be hard to
imagine an American landscape more removed from the lush Virginia hills of
Leesburg than gritty North Philadelphia, one of the poorest zip codes in
Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania. Here, the Greater Exodus Baptist Church
sits amid a gloomy stretch of pawnshops and fast-food restaurants, across from
a Salvation Army center and atop Philly’s rusty Broad Street subway line.
Inside the powder-blue
walls of the century-old sanctuary, the joint is rocking. “Justice Sunday III,”
an event pushing Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on the eve of his January
confirmation hearing, is about to be televised to Christian fundamentalists in
churches around the country. The pulsing backbeat of a large gospel choir has
the audience—evenly divided between African Americans and whites—swaying and
stomping its feet. But up on stage, Rick Santorum gazes out with a wide but
bemused smile; as the beat accelerates, he bobs his neck back-and-forth in slight
motion. He takes a seat, literally at the right hand of the Reverend Jerry
Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority.
While Santorum, still
boyish-looking at age 47, may appear slightly out of place, he seems very much
at home when he steps up to the pulpit. He preaches that the founding of
America, right there in Philadelphia in 1776, created a kind of freedom that
“is what makes America one of the most religious countries in the world, a fact
at the core of the success of America in this experiment. But that freedom is
at risk today because of the actions of liberal activists judges on the Supreme
Court!” From one of the back pews, a listener lets out with an “Amen!”
This is the public face
of Rick Santorum, the “family values” conservative prone to rash and
provocative statements on hot-button social issues such as abortion and gay
marriage, the face that graced a May 2005 cover of The New York Times
Magazine under the words, “The Believer.” Most pundits expected that
Santorum—facing a tough re-election battle in a state that has gone Democratic
“blue” in the last four presidential elections—would drift back toward the
political middle.
Instead, he has cemented
his reputation as a voice of the social conservative movement with the
publication of It Takes a Family. Published last July, Santorum’s book
set off sparks by linking working moms to “the influence of radical feminism,”
comparing abortion to slavery, and lashing out at “the weird socialization” of
public schools. It echoed earlier controversies like the 2003 interview in
which he essentially compared gay sex to bestiality—famously riffing on
“man-on-dog sex”—and bigamy, or his comment in 2002 that it was not surprising
that the Catholic priest sex-abuse scandal burst forth from the liberal bastion
of Boston.
But Santorum the
conservative social critic is merely the latest incarnation of a political
survivor. His views on abortion were once somewhere between pro-choice and
ambivalent, and in 1990 campaign literature he noted that he had “returned to
my Church after a period of absence.” Santorum has also written that his view
on abortion was influenced by his 1988 marriage to then-law student Karen
Garver. Last year, the Philadelphia City Paper revealed that when Garver
met Santorum, she had been living with the founder of Pittsburgh’s first
abortion clinic.
The details of
Santorum’s private life have clashed with his public record on several
occasions. The senator has voted for a medical malpractice bill that capped
non-economic damages at $250,000, even though in 1999 Karen Santorum had sought
$500,000 from a Virginia chiropractor for back pain and was awarded $350,000 by
a jury. (A judge reportedly later halved the award to $175,000.)
While experts and
politicians may debate the propriety of Santorum’s real-estate dealings and PAC
spending, one thing became clear during a recent visit to the Estates at
Shenstone Farms. Very few of the development’s residents can afford the bulky
$750,000-plus homes without two sources of income. Residents said that in a number
of families, wives work either full time or at home; one is a part-time
hairdresser. A Santorum neighbor told the Prospect that she occasionally
sees the senator’s children outside mowing the lawn but doesn’t really know the
family—which is not surprising since she cares for two young kids while working
full-time from her house. In the community where the Santorums chose to live,
she said, “Not too many women stay at home.”
And so the political
chameleon has changed colors yet again, casting himself as the Senate’s leading
reformer. But with the November election fast approaching, Santorum is trailing
Casey, his most likely Democratic opponent, by double digits in the polls.
Florida pollster David Beattie has written that the 2006 election may turn on fiscally
conservative, socially moderate voters with weaker partisan ties. Beattie calls
them “Starbucks Republicans.” At least Santorum will know where to find them. WillBunch is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and author of itsblog, Attytood.com.
