Capitol Assets
A Washington Post examination of the intersection between the personal
finances of lawmakers and their work on Capitol Hill. View the series.
Sessions has adhered to all Senate ethics rules and principles and did not seek an ethics opinion because the rules were clear, Miller said.
“The Senator’s reform efforts with respect to timber are part of a larger, broader effort to ensure the competitiveness of American industry and to defend the American worker on the world stage,” he said.
An in-depth, interactive look at the personal wealth of members of Congress - how they made it and how they handle their finances.
Family ties
After Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) took office in 2007, he asked the House Ethics Committee whether he could vote on legislation that might affect his personal holdings, including an investment worth as much as $5 million in his brother’s home health-care business, Louisville-based Almost Family. The panel advised he was prohibited from actions that would benefit his assets in a “direct and distinct manner, rather than merely as a member of a class.” Otherwise, the committee said, he had a duty to vote.
In office, Yarmuth joined the congressional Home Health Caucus, a group of two dozen lawmakers that promotes the value of in-home health care.
He also has helped co-sponsor a handful of bills of interest to the industry, including the Home Health Care Planning Improvement Act. That pending bill would expand the number of health professionals who can refer patients to home health care. And, in May, Yarmuth co-sponsored a legislative amendment to block across-the-board Medicare cuts to providers, including home health aides. The effort failed.
Yarmuth declined to be interviewed through a spokesman, who said the congressman’s policy since his 2011 appointment to the House Ethics Committee was not to comment on issues that could relate to committee business. But his communications director, Stephen George, said the lawmaker has avoided conflicts of interest and adheres to the ethics committee’s guidance. During congressional matters involving home health care, Yarmuth has disclosed his investment.
“None of the bills that Congressman Yarmuth has co-sponsored has or would directly benefit Almost Family or even only private home health-care companies,” George said. “His support for each is consistent with his longtime interest in and strong advocacy for health-care reform, as well as the interests of his constituents and the significant health-care industry in Louisville.”
He added: “All these bills are about improving care for patients, not special tax treatment or increasing the bottom line for the home health industry.”
Yarmuth’s ties to Almost Family date to the late 1970s, when he invested in his brother’s firm. In the late 1980s, Yarmuth served as its vice president of marketing. He values his share of Almost Family at between $1 million and $5 million and reports no annual income from it. His 2010 opponent asked during a debate if the investment posed an ethical conflict, the Courier-Journal in Louisville reported. Yarmuth said there was no conflict.
Almost Family is one of the nation’s largest home health firms and employs about 9,000 people across 11 states. The firm spent more than $500,000 lobbying Congress and regulators in the past two years. Almost Family chairman and chief executive William Yarmuth said his company is “part of the industry efforts in Washington,” but he “rarely” speaks to his brother about legislation. “Most of my interactions are with other members of Congress,” he said.
The company is a member of the industry’s largest trade group, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, which has lobbied on five bills John Yarmuth has co-sponsored. The group said it supported three of those bills and opposed all or parts of the other two. The group’s president said they have had “little interaction” with Yarmuth on legislation.
George said Yarmuth has met occasionally with Kentucky-based home care providers, but the congressman does not discuss legislation with his brother and has had little contact with the representatives from home health trade groups or lobbyists.
Yarmuth joined the Home Health Caucus as a “symbolic way to show support for the industry,” George said. He said Yarmuth signed a caucus letter opposing further cuts in Medicare to home health but described his role otherwise as “almost entirely aesthetic.”
In some cases, Yarmuth’s legislative actions have run counter to the home health-care industry’s broader interests, George noted. One of Yarmuth’s most significant legislative actions was to help draft and pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law overhauling health care hit the home-care industry hard with reduced reimbursement rates and new rules.
In a congressional hearing last year on the new law, Yarmuth quizzed an official from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services about its fiscal impact on health-care providers. “I have a vested interest in this. I admit, my brother runs a home health-care company. I am a stockholder. I have to make that clear,” Yarmuth said. “But back in the late 1990s, there was a severe drop in the reimbursement to home health-care companies. About half the companies in the country went out of business.”
Natural gas connections
When Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) was elected to Congress in 2010, he and his wife owned shares in two privately held natural gas companies, Phillips Resources Inc. and TWP Inc. They were founded by his wife’s great-great-grandfather. When Kelly filed his candidate papers, he listed his shares at a relatively modest level — between $2,000 and $30,000. His wife’s shares were valued at between $1.5 million and $6 million.
At the time, big energy firms were eyeing the two companies, which had a leasehold on 317,000 acres in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale basin, industry and shareholder reports show.
The couple made between $10.1 million and $50.2 million when Exxon Mobil bought the companies in June 2011.
An Exxon Mobil subsidiary is now at the basin using hydraulic fracturing — commonly referred to as fracking — to break apart the shale and free the gas by injecting large volumes of water, sand and other chemicals.
Kelly and his wife, Victoria, also continue to be partners in two other natural gas companies: Campbells Gas Partners and PC Exploration Ltd., which also have land along the Marcellus Shale, records show. The couple earned between $37,000 and $100,000 from their holdings in 2011, Kelly’s latest disclosure statement shows.
Both as a candidate and congressman, Kelly has taken a high-profile stand in favor of Marcellus Shale gas development.
“We are poised to be on the forefront of the new energy economy thanks not only to our rich history but also to our proximity to large deposits of natural gas known as Marcellus Shale,” Kelly’s campaign Web site said.
After he was elected, Kelly joined more than a dozen caucuses, including the Marcellus Shale Caucus, which held its organizational meeting on April 1, 2011.
Six days later, he voted for a bill to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases, which passed the House but not the Senate. Some scientists have warned that large quantities of greenhouse gases can be released during fracking.
The following day, April 8, an opinion piece by Kelly appeared in a local newspaper. Kelly wrote that “burdensome” regulations in Washington were impediments and emphasized the economic benefits to the region. “Reports have shown that for each mile of pipeline throughout the Marcellus Shale, nearly $1 million is poured into Pennsylvania’s economy,” he wrote.
Kelly did not disclose on his Web site or in the opinion piece that he held a financial stake in such endeavors.
In two congressional hearings in May, he railed against the EPA for efforts to regulate the industry and for investigating concerns about water contamination in relation to fracking. He thinks such work is better handled at the state level.
In June, his co-sponsorship of a natural gas bill — pushed by business magnate T. Boone Pickens — became an issue. The legislation would have provided between $5 billion and $9 billion in federal tax credits for a variety of initiatives to increase the number of passenger vehicles and long-haul trucks powered by natural gas.
The American Conservative Union and tea party groups launched an intensive lobbying effort to kill the bill, calling it a “boondoggle” as they attacked lawmakers, including Kelly, who had campaigned on a message of fiscal conservatism and promised to reduce government spending. Kelly withdrew his support, along with a host of other Republican lawmakers, and the bill died.
That same month, Exxon Mobil bought Phillips Resources and TWP for $1.69 billion. Kelly and his wife received their payments from the company the following month, according to Kelly’s accountant and financial disclosure statements.
Kelly and his wife continued to be partners with the two other gas companies, and his efforts to promote Marcellus Shale natural gas development have also continued.
In October, Kelly was the lead signatory on a three-page letter from the Pennsylvania delegation to the White House about four federal agency studies on fracking and the environment. “We are concerned that the economic benefits of shale gas to ordinary citizens in states such as Pennsylvania and across the country are not part of the discussion,” the letter said.
In a prepared statement, Kelly’s chief of staff, Matthew Stroia, said the lawmaker has followed all rules and laws set by Congress regarding public disclosure of assets and conflict of interest.
Stroia said Kelly has completed ethics training as a newly elected member of Congress, reviewed the House’s ethics rules and sought “informal” guidance from the ethics committee.
“Rep. Kelly rejects any insinuation that his motives are anything other than to get Americans back to work and pursue policies that will help lead to our country’s economic turnaround and energy independence,” the statement said. “Rep. Kelly did not run for political office for a career or personal gain but for a cause.”
Bobbye Pratt and Dan Keating contributed to this report.
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