The setback did not deter Dingell from his industry advocacy. He continued to push for funding for GM and Chrysler. In January, he wrote to Obama and argued for grants for automakers in the $787 billion Recovery Act, ultimately securing $105 million for GM.
Dingell successfully pushed for at least five bailouts for GM and Chrysler, records and interviews show.
The largest was through the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Although the bill was not originally intended to help the auto industry, GM eventually received $63 billion and Chrysler got $24 billion, making them the largest recipients behind the banks.
In shepherding the Cash for Clunkers program, Dingell helped kill a rival bill that had stronger fuel-efficiency requirements for replacement cars bought with program funds. With his negotiations on Waxman's climate-change bill, Dingell steered some revenue from pollution permits to finance $21 billion in upgrades to automakers' assembly lines. (The climate-change bill has passed the House but not the Senate.)
"Do you know what would have happened to my constituents if those companies had gone under?" said Dingell, whose home state has 15 percent unemployment, the highest in the nation. "I went through the Depression as a boy. My mother had to put paper into her shoes and walk around in the snow. . . . We had people starving to death. Do you think I'm silly enough to let that happen again?"
Selling her stockEven with Dingell's help, and bailout funds in hand, GM declared bankruptcy in June.
The stock value had fallen precipitously in the previous 10 months, and Debbie Dingell was caught in a dilemma.
Selling her stock earlier would have opened questions of whether she was motivated by insider information from her husband or her company. So she kept the stock as her husband fought to rescue GM -- and skeptics cast his actions as a battle to save their personal fortune.
"No matter what, people were going to say something," she said.
"Frankly, she rode that stock right into the ground," John Dingell said. "She did that because she had to."
In August, Debbie Dingell -- who has built her own political credentials in the Michigan Democratic Party and is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to her husband -- left GM after 32 years. "I was hoping to finally put this conflicts question behind me," she said.
But she won't be leaving the industry behind. In October, she was hired as a consultant for a new nonprofit trade group, the American Automotive Policy Council. Her salary, which she declined to disclose, will be paid by the group's founders: GM, Ford and Chrysler.
The organization will be headed by auto industry lobbyist Stephen Collins, who said Debbie Dingell was hired largely to devise a public education campaign to promote manufacturing and the auto industry. She will not lobby for the group, nor will she advocate on public policy matters, Collins said.
Asked about the continued potential conflicts, she said it is difficult for a congressional spouse to find work in Washington without such entanglements.
"Are spouses allowed to work?" she asked. "I stayed at GM so no one could say I got my job because of my husband."
As Dingell approaches his career's end, he said the search for ethical perfection will always come down to conscience rather than law.
"The last perfect set of laws came down off the top of Mount Sinai, written by the finger of God on two stone tablets," he said.
Staff writer Paul Kane, database editor Dan Keating and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this article.
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