Impropriety Between Lines of Political Letters?

Members of Congress like to flex their muscles, and Rep. John D. Dingell, who has served in the House longer than any of its other 434 members, is about as powerful as they come. That’s true even though his party is in the minority.

So when he read about auditors who owned stock in the companies they audited, the Michigan Democrat fired off a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the nation’s big accounting firms.

“I want to know what the commission . . . , having taken little meaningful action to date, [is] doing to clean up this mess,” Dingell wrote on Jan. 6 to SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt.

The missive is part of a genre that makes many federal regulators cringe: letters from lawmakers that try to cajole, browbeat or otherwise influence the federal bureaucracy. Often the writers are trying to help an ordinary constituent out of a jam. Sometimes, they are genuinely seeking good government.

But critics charge that occasionally they cross an invisible line and become pleaders for special interests. That is the line that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is crusading for political reform in his presidential campaign, was accused of breaching when he wrote to regulators on behalf of a major donor to his campaign.

So ingrained is the custom of the congressional letter that both Congress and the regulators regard it as a permanent part of the Washington landscape. Yet recent history shows that such letters--not to mention phone calls and face-to-face meetings--can raise serious questions about how far senators and representatives are willing to go to help financial backers.

The sorts of letters Dingell wrote--and posted on his committee Web page--do not suggest any quid pro quo. Rather, they simply give a picture of an elected official with an activist vision of the congressional role in government. Dingell, now in his fifth decade in Congress and for many years chairman of the House Commerce Committee, is famous around town for his prickly “Dingell-grams.”

But few in Congress hesitate to pick up the pen on issues large and small. A few clicks away from Dingell’s public letter page is one maintained by Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), the Commerce panel’s current head. The public can browse letters from Bliley to the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, to name a few.

“A great part of the function of a member of Congress is to get answers to questions and try to find solutions,” said one committee aide who asked not to be identified. Letters, he said, “are done on behalf of the American people. Our mission is to make sure the executive branch is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.”

But Charles Lewis, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, charged that Congress is becoming a realm of “private legislators for private interests.” To those who call such suspicions unfair, Lewis replies: “One disinfectant to disabuse all us cynical do-gooders is to open it up with a little bit of sunshine. Prove everybody wrong. Show us the letters.”

No statistics are kept on how many letters members of Congress write. Even estimates are hard to come by because Congress has exempted itself from the Freedom of Information Act--perhaps the best way to obtain a complete set of federal documents on a given subject.

Snippets of data are available, however. The Department of Agriculture reported that its senior officials got 3,676 congressional letters last year. Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, gets on average 150 congressional letters and 20 phone calls a month.

Several federal agencies contacted by The Times were reluctant to open up their correspondence files, or even to make available for on-the-record interviews the officials who handle them.

The FCC, recipient of the much-publicized McCain letter that urged a quick decision on a television station purchase sought by his campaign contributor, said this week that it plans to release more of its congressional files in response to Freedom of Information requests from several news organizations, including The Times. It received 6,364 congressional letters in 1999.

Without full public disclosure, it is all but impossible to verify the assertions of several congressional and administration sources that members of Congress have become much more careful in recent years to dot their ethical I’s and cross their legal Ts. No one, these sources say, wants a repeat of the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal of a decade ago, in which five senators were accused of improper intervention with federal regulators on behalf of prominent campaign donor and S&L; owner Charles H. Keating Jr. McCain himself was a member, though in a peripheral role, of the so-called Keating Five. The others were Democrats.

The House and the Senate adopted new rules on constituent casework after the Keating scandal. Senate Rule 43 says that a senator may not decide to help constituents “on the basis of contributions or services, or promises of contributions or services, to the member’s political campaigns or to other organizations in which the member has a political, personal or financial interest.” In other words, no quid pro quo.

Ethics committees in the House and Senate have not reported any disciplinary measures against members since then for breaches of those rules.

But whether the committees received any allegations of rule-breaking is unknown. Deliberations by the panels are secret.

One of the newsworthy letters that have come to light in recent years involved former Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas.

Dole, then the Senate Republican leader, went to bat for E&J; Gallo Winery in 1992 in a letter to the Treasury Department seeking to change labeling requirements for certain kinds of sparkling wine. At issue was whether a particular product had to be labeled “bulk-processed,” which Gallo feared could devalue the wine. Dole wrote regulators that “champagne is champagne, regardless of the production.”

Treasury officials said the senator’s staff followed up with phone calls. The next year the company got its way.

In a span of several years before and after Dole’s labeling letter, the Gallo family donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Dole’s causes.

Earlier this month, commenting on the McCain flap on ABC-TV’s “This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts,” Dole said, “I would guess if you searched the files of the hundred senators, they’ll all have letters like that.”

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Times staff writer Art Pine contributed to this report.