PACs Felt Heavy Republican Pressure to Donate

The furor over campaign fund-raising has focused largely on Democrats, but some Republicans may find themselves in glass houses when it comes to stone-throwing time.

Republican leaders, in fact, have spent the last 2 1/2 years shaking the money tree with a vigor that impresses even old Washington hands.

GOP chieftains have not only demanded that political action committees give more to Republicans but also instructed the PACs to end the common practice of hedging their bets by giving to Democrats as well. Republicans have made lists of who’s naughty and who’s nice among donors. They have even criticized the GOP’s traditional cash cow--the business community--for not doing enough.

It may have paid off. The Federal Election Commission recently reported that for the first time since it began keeping records in 1978, Republicans in the House and Senate raised more PAC money than the Democrats did during the 1995-96 election cycle: The GOP windfall was $116 million (up from $72 million in 1993-94), compared with Democratic collections of $99 million (down from $118 million in 1993-94).

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But in the process, the GOP may have overreached. Business leaders have bridled at the criticism dished out by former Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour and other GOP leaders in the wake of the 1996 election.

“He went too far in attacking the Republican Party’s golden goose,” said Charles Mack, head of the Business-Industry Political Action Committee.

Some Republican strategists say they intend to continue their aggressive fund-raising tactics to meet the challenge of a renewed labor union effort to defeat GOP congressional candidates in 1998.

“The best way to get a pig’s attention is with a 2-by-4,” said one top aide to the House Republican leadership. “When your agenda is at stake, subtlety is not necessarily the best weapon you have in your arsenal.”

But there are some signs that the GOP may try a little more finesse.

“I don’t think anyone’s backed down from anything they said in the last cycle,” said Rich Galen, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, a party fund-raising arm. “But I don’t think you have to say it again.”

The most pointed allegations of GOP strong-arm tactics involve reports that Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), chairman of the House committee investigating campaign fund-raising, threatened to retaliate against an American lobbyist for Pakistan if he failed to raise $5,000 for Burton’s campaign.

(Burton has acknowledged that he asked Mark A. Siegel, a longtime Democratic activist, to help raise funds in the Pakistani American community. But he has disputed claims that he demanded money from Siegel or had threatened to interfere with the lobbyist’s access to Congress.)

Few members of Congress resort to such extremes, which could violate federal anti-extortion law. But reports of hardball fund-raising, even within legal bounds, provide a window onto an often-overlooked aspect of the campaign finance system:

While the caricature of congressional fund-raising is one of special-interest donors foisting money on politicians to win legislative favors, the fact is that members of Congress often besiege potential donors with requests for money.

“It’s wrong to conceive of this as the evil interest groups plying their nefarious trade among innocent members of Congress,” said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution think tank. “The members are in the driver’s seat. They are the ones that are extorting contributions from those who have business before the Congress.”

Faced with skyrocketing campaign costs, members of Congress in both parties clamor for contributions with fund-raising tactics running the gamut from polite invitations to sharp nudges to veiled threats. More and more, Mann said, lawmakers are sending the message: “You want me to listen? Pony up.”

The polite invitations come by the bagful. Jeff Tassey, an official of the American Financial Services Assn., estimates that his group’s PAC is already receiving more than 10 fund-raising solicitations a day for congressional elections still 18 months away.

New members waste no time joining the scramble. The day after the 1996 election, freshly elected House members were faxing requests for donations to help retire their campaign debt. Some even went to PACs that did not support them during the campaign.

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Some members of Congress do not let their invitations go unanswered. Rep. Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.) in March sent out a second round of invitations to a $1,000-a-head fund-raiser with a handwritten note scrawled at the bottom: “My fund-raising breakfast is only a week away, and I was surprised that you have not yet responded. . . . Please give me a call today or tomorrow.”

One episode from years ago lives on in Capitol Hill lore. In 1985, then-Sen. James Abdnor (R-S.D.) had a fund-raising letter hand-delivered to PAC officials around Washington and instructed the messenger to wait in each PAC’s office until he received a reply on the spot. One lobbyist who received the letter recalls that he responded with an obscenity.

When it comes to strong-arm fund-raising, many lobbyists and lawmakers say the trailblazer was a Democrat: Former Rep. Tony Coelho of California, as chairman of the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s, was infamous for his hardball drive to get PACs to give more to Democrats.

For example, Coelho once reportedly leaned on the National Assn. of Home Builders after the group refused to give $5,000 to a Democrat’s campaign. Coelho told them in a letter that “your action in this race causes us to be concerned that the relationship [between the home builders and House Democrats] will be damaged,” according to “Honest Graft,” a book by Brooks Jackson.

The pressure to give--and give big--has gotten particularly acute in recent years as the cost of congressional elections has skyrocketed and campaigns have become more competitive. The pressure got especially intense after Republicans in 1994 won control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. GOP leaders mounted a concerted drive to reverse the fund-raising disadvantage they suffered after so many years in the minority.

“I’ve never seen such a systematic shakedown of the money trees as I have in the last two years,” said one veteran lobbyist who asked not to be named.

Democrats may be heavy-handed fund-raisers too, but “Republicans are making a much more coordinated effort of doing it,” said Clyde Wilcox, a professor of government at Georgetown University.

When House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) spoke to PAC officials just before the 1994 election, he was famously blunt in urging them to give generously to the party about to take power. “For anybody who’s not on board now, it’s going to be the two coldest years in Washington,” Gingrich was widely quoted as saying.

Word spread quickly among PAC directors and the business community: They should not only give generously to Republicans but also cut off money to Democrats or suffer political consequences.

“In meetings with the new leadership, I am being told that they are scrutinizing to whom companies and business associations are currently giving,” Mack of the Business-Industry PAC wrote in a 1995 memo to associates. “Lobbyists who are hedging their bets with an eye to reversal of last November’s outcome in 1996 will find the next two years rather lean ones, I’m informed.”

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The National Republican Congressional Committee prepared a report for all GOP members on how much every PAC gave to each party in 1993-94. Each PAC was ranked as “friendly,” “neutral” or “unfriendly.” Critics decried the list as a blatant effort to intimidate PACs into giving more to the GOP.

The campaign to keep business from giving to Democrats continued even after the 1996 election, when Barbour complained that big business had done too little to help blunt the political onslaught of the labor unions.

“The left, led by the union bosses, fully committed its entire arsenal to electing Democrats,” he said in a speech shortly after the election. “But with most of big business the 1996 election was business as usual: no special effort; giving to both sides; bipartisanship.”

Many business officials, particularly those of the big companies that make up the Business Round-table--which Barbour singled out for specific criticism--remain embittered by that attack after they had been hammered for contributions in the closing weeks of the 1996 campaign.

“To say the things he said was really excessive,” Mack said. “They felt milked and bled dry.”

Times staff writer Alan C. Miller contributed to this story.