House Leader Misuses Charity for Partisan Goals

Tom DeLay, the House majority leader from Texas, and his wife, Christine, have long professed a sincere concern for children. They are foster parents who recently won honors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for leadership in child advocacy, and since the late1980s the DeLay Foundation has supported programs that help abused and neglected kids.

But Mr. DeLay’s commitment to children is undermined by his shameful willingness to use kids and charity to advance his own — and the Republican Party’s — political and social-policy goals. His approach not only runs counter to the spirit of campaign-finance regulation, but also shakes the already-fragile trust that Americans have in charity and philanthropy.

In January, Mr. DeLay crafted new rules for House members that allow charities to pay the travel, lodging, and meal expenses of lawmakers who travel to special fund-raising events. No sooner were the rules in place than the DeLay Foundation held an invitation-only charity golf outing for lobbyists at the Ocean Reef Club resort in Key Largo, Fla.

The gathering aimed not only to raise money for Mr. DeLay’s foundation, but also to give corporate lobbyists the chance to rub shoulders with the powerful majority leader and some of his influential colleagues. After critics expressed outrage at this cynical misuse of charity, the DeLay Foundation announced that it would not accept corporate underwriting for the golf excursion and that members of Congress would pay their own travel expenses. But because the lobby rules Mr. DeLay shaped do not require lawmakers to itemize their expenses or disclose the names of political donors, it is anybody’s guess how the money really got spent.

Then, this month, Mr. DeLay revealed that he had formed a new charity called Celebrations for Children that will host parties and outings for lawmakers at this summer’s Republican National Convention in New York. Managed by Mr. DeLay’s political associates and his daughter, Dani DeLay Ferro, Celebrations for Children will solicit charitable contributions from $10,000 (the “Greenwich Village” level donation) to $500,000 (the “Upper East Side” level) to pay for late-night parties, yacht cruises, and access to a luxury suite to listen to President Bush’s acceptance speech at Madison Square Garden.

Mr. DeLay pledged that 75 percent of the convention-related proceeds raised by Celebrations for Children will go to the work of his foundation and that of other children’s charities. To some that may sound admirable, but make no mistake, Mr. DeLay’s influence-peddling charity schemes are a sham.

While kids will undoubtedly benefit from money raised at Mr. DeLay’s Republican Convention soirees, the overall impression is that charitable status is the vehicle to use to purchase access and influence by political high rollers. That contravenes both the intent of campaign-finance regulation and the spirit of philanthropy.

Representative DeLay has been a consistent opponent of the gift ban from the time when the rules were first enacted under Republican Newt Gingrich’s leadership in 1995. Mr. DeLay favored allowing the charitable freebies in return for disclosing the names of the charitable donors. With the new rules he is now able to use his charities for partisan political purposes and keep the names of the lobbyists secret.

Regrettably, leaders of the nonprofit world have greeted Mr. DeLay’s schemes with a deafening silence — no matter that the majority leader wants to sell political access cloaked as charitable works.

Perhaps the silence stems from philanthropy’s own desire for political access. After all, Mr. DeLay was the instrument of choice this year as big foundations fought the Charitable Giving Act, a House measure that sought in part to make private foundations channel more of their assets to charities in grants by excluding their operating and administrative costs from their required disbursement. Through their lobbyists, the foundations recruited Mr. DeLay to hammer out a legislative compromise that kept most of the current payout rules intact — at least for now.

The Charitable Giving Act is still in front of Congress, however, making it highly unlikely that most of the nation’s nonprofit leaders will condemn Mr. DeLay’s exploitation of charity and philanthropy.

They should be condemning it, though. His use and misuse of charities as vehicles for politicking undermines the faith of donors in charities as much as any of the nonprofit scandals reported in recent months in the media.

And his approach will no doubt be copied by other legislators and the corporate interests that seek their favor. Professional lobbyists around the nation are undoubtedly conjuring charities of questionable substance to play to the needs of lawmakers less well heeled than the majority leader. It would be an odd duck among lobbyists who didn’t try the charitable-giving loophole, with the potential result that sham charities, whose true aim is political fund raising, would begin to compete with legitimate nonprofit groups for limited contributions.

If Democrats try the same technique, they should be excoriated no less than Mr. DeLay and his colleagues. Just this month, word emerged that the Democratic National Convention, having already landed some millions in grants from Boston-area philanthropies, including the Boston Foundation, is still far short of its $28.5-million private-financing goal and just hired a fund raiser to help close the gap. Because Democrats have not been noticeably concerned about the weakening of rules on lobbyists’ gifts to elected officials, Mr. DeLay’s blending of charitable and political fund raising should be a clarion call for the public to watch politicians of both parties.

Paying for political face time through charitable donations is attractive to politicians and lobbyists, of course, because 501(c)(3) charitable status protects against the need to disclose information on donors. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan advocacy group, has long been seeking — without success — the names of the donors to Mr. DeLay’s foundation golf tournaments and the expenses to be paid to participating members of Congress.

And even though the DeLay Foundation said lawmakers would pay their own travel expenses to the Key Largo outing, it has made no similar commitments, to my knowledge, about the donations and expenses behind the foundation’s other golf and spa excursions, or Celebrations for Children’s festivities at the Republican convention.

At this very moment, Mr. DeLay’s House and Senate colleagues are exploring the dubious accountability and ethics of some well-known nonprofit entities. It is distressing — but perhaps not surprising — that they would be voicing concern on Capitol Hill about philanthropic and charitable accountability while undermining it by linking charity and philanthropy to partisan political events.

Rick Cohen is executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington.