Virtual Tour of Letitia White’s Lil’ House of Scandal up on Capitol Hill.
In case you haven’t heard, John Murtha says that if the Dems take the majority in the House, he wants to be Majority Leader. That means a leadership fight with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD). The backdrop issue here is Iraq. But Murtha will also get some opposition simply for launching a leadership fight during the build up to the November election.
True whackjob: Rep. Curt Weldon says “the jury is still out on” whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Jeffrey Shockey is the deputy staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. That’s 
the committee that decides how the money gets spent. Literally. It’s hugely powerful. And the Committee Chairman is Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) who’s at the center of the ever-expanding Cunningham investigation.
Now, Shockey went to work for Lewis in 1994. Then in 1999 he left to work for the lobbying firm of Copeland Lowery. TPM and TPMmuckraker.com regulars will remember that Lowery’s an ex-congressman-turned-lobbyist who’s the link between Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Jerry Lewis, et al. And at Copeland Lowery, Shockey, as you’d probably expect, was mainly in charge of lobbying clients who needed access to Lewis.
That was between 1999 and 2004 while Lewis was a member of the Appropriations committee and then Chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
But in January 2005, Lewis ascended to the Chairmanship of the full Committee. And it was then that Shockey was overcome with a yearning to return to public service and signed on as deputy staff director for Lewis at the Appropriations Committee.
Now, already it was known that when Shockey left Copeland Lowery he got a lump-sum payment of $600,000.
But it came out yesterday that that was just the first payment out of a total of $1.96 million Copeland Lowery paid Shockey over the course of 2005 when he was helping to run the committee that is earmark central.
This was going to come out next week when the House disclosure filings go public. But Shockey’s own lawyers spilled the beans in a conference call with reporters yesterday. Better to get the news out late on Friday than mid-week.
Now, when we heard about this yesterday, Paul Kiel asked just what sort of severance package pays out 2 million dollars when the severee quits rather than gets downsized or canned. The Copeland Lowery folks say it was actually a buy-out of the practice Shockey had built up as a lobbyist. The firm agreed to pay him a big chunk of the money his clients would have brought in if he’d stayed with the firm.
Now, you don’t have to be too stringent to see that there’s a problem here. Shockey’s working at Copeland Lowery as an earmark-finder. Then he goes to work as the deputy staff director of the earmark committee, basically an earmark-giver. And he’s still being paid by Copeland Lowery, which is of course in the earmark business.
But it’s actually worse than that. You have to go to the article in the Times to find out that “under an agreement with Mr. Shockey, the firm waited to see how much money the clients he signed paid the firm in 2005 to determine the full payment.”
In other words, Shockey didn’t just have a continuing financial interest in Copeland Lowery to the extent he needed them to make enough money to honor their buy-out agreement. His income was still directly tied to how much his ‘former’ clients paid the firm in 2005 — while he was working as a congressional staffer.
Sorta makes you wonder who took over his client list at the firm, doesn’t it?
Well, it gets better.
Who took over Shockey’s client list when he returned to government service? Well, when Shockey left Copeland Lowery, Copeland Lowery turned around and hired Shockey’s wife Alexandra, who also used to work for Lewis. And in an email to Copley News Service’s Jerry Kammer back in December, Alexandra “acknowledged that her client roster includes some of her husband’s old clients.”
The ever-expanding Cunningham investigation appears to be focusing now on Rep. Lewis. And Jeff Shockey seems to be a particular focus of attention, along with fellow former Lewis staffer and Copeland Lowery lobbyist, Letitia White.
Matt Stoller got the scoop: Sen. Harry Reid says he strongly supports Net Neutrality.
In Roll Call (sub.req.), Paul Kane and John Bresnahan are fleshing out the key detail about the compensation package the Copeland 
Lowery lobbying firm paid ex-lobbyist Jeff Shockey after he went back to work for Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) on Capitol Hill: his post-employment compensation was tied to how much his former clients paid his former firm after he was already working on the Hill.
This is an admittedly complicated story. And if it’s new to you, I run through the details at more length in this post from over the weekend.
But the bottom line is that the clients Shockey was paid to lobby for through 2004 had a way to put more money in his pocket while he was helping run the Appropriations Committee as its deputy director in 2005.
We’ll have a lot more on this tomorrow at TPMmuckraker.com.
When the TPM Media offices open up tomorrow morning we’re going to start compiling a list (mentioned Friday evening) of where every senator stands on Net Neutrality — Democrats and Republicans. With help from TPM Readers we already got information on several senators. And it was enough to show us that a lot of them — including a lot of Democrats — are just trying to avoid giving their constituents any straight answers on where they stand.
With the Dems, from what we’ve been able to tell so far, the Net Neutrals are Dorgan, Inouye, Boxer, Clinton, Obama, Wyden and Reid. The Finger in the Wind crowd includes Feinstein, Murray, Cantwell and many others.
We’ll be firming up the lists and hopefully, with your help, getting some basic information on the great majority of others tomorrow.
Now, it’s of course important to know not just the underlying policy issue but also how it is being framed in legislative terms. The fight is already over in the House. Now it goes to the senate. A new telecommunications bill is being moved through the Senate Commerce Committee by Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK).
The question is whether the new bill will include Net Neutrality language or not.
The pro-Net Neutrality legislation is co-sponsored by Sens. Snowe (R-ME) and Dorgan (D-ND) — the Snowe-Dorgan bill (S-2917).
So if you’re interested in trying to find out where your senator stands, the key question is whether they support and plan to vote for the Snowe-Dorgan bill. A supporter of Net Neutrality should say ‘yes’, an opponent ‘no’.
Also, see what you can find out by googling or other Internet research. If you come up with information about where a given senator stands on the issue, from research or calls to senate offices, send us an email and let us know.
Texas Democrats are taking every opportunity to pound The Hammer: this time they’re challenging his attempt to vote — in Virginia. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
More on Net Neutrality.
As you’re considering this issue and contacting your senators, keep in mind that the first name on the pro-Net Neutrality bill in the senate is that of a Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). Snowe’s a quintessential GOP moderate. But in the House, Net Neutrality was supported not only by moderates like Rep. Shays and Leach but also by right-wingers like Reps. Sensenbrenner and Burton. (See roll call vote on HR 5252)
This shouldn’t be or at least doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. It’s more like a monopolists versus open access issue.
Nor is it corporations versus consumer groups, though virtually every consumer-oriented group is on the Net Neutrality side. In industry terms, the division is actually quite clear: it’s content providers versus the owners of the network pipes — so, Google versus ATT and Microsoft versus Verizon.
More to come. And keep sending us info about where your senator stands.