Senate Rivals in Pennsylvania In a Dead Heat on Mortgages

By Charles Babington and Jonathan Weisman
Sunday, February 26, 2006

In Pennsylvania's fiercely contested Senate race, Democrats last week thought they had received a gift courtesy of the Philadelphia Daily News. The newspaper reported that embattled Republican incumbent Rick Santorum's mortgage on his Leesburg, Va., home looked suspicious.

The loan was made in 2002 by an obscure private bank, the Philadelphia Trust Co., which is run by major donors to Santorum's campaigns. And the company says it caters only to "affluent investors," not run-of-the-mill homebuyers. Santorum, the father of six, has said he lives "paycheck to paycheck" and sometimes receives money from his retired parents.

Democrats thought they smelled favoritism. But their hopes diminished when Santorum released details of the mortgage: a five-year, interest-only balloon loan at 5 percent, which were not unusual terms in 2002.

The potential partisan implications of the controversy were further dulled when likely Democratic nominee Robert P. Casey Jr., the state treasurer, revealed that his $120,000 mortgage is from First National Community Bank, whose politically active board members have contributed to his campaigns.

"It doesn't sound like either of them got a particularly good deal," Keith Gumbinger, vice president of mortgage information publisher HSH Associates, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Polls show Casey, whose father was a governor of Pennsylvania, leading Santorum, who is seeking a third term.

Boehner Faulted as a Provider

Tip O'Neill may have believed that all politics are local, but don't tell that to the editors of House Majority Leader John A. Boehner's hometown newspaper.

For weeks, the editorial page of the Hamilton (Ohio) Journal-News has been lobbing missiles at Boehner. Their complaint: He's not bringing home the bacon while he is busy playing for a national crowd.

In his recent bid to be elected majority leader, Boehner boasted of his longtime refusal to play pork-barrel politics -- using "earmarks" in the appropriations process for hometown projects -- as a major selling point. Many Republicans fear that the practice has gotten out of hand, and, as the ostensibly conservative party, they looked like hypocrites for larding so many local favors into spending bills.

But the Journal-News said it would not mind seeing a little lard.

"It's time to acknowledge that millions of dollars a year are not flowing into Butler County specifically because Boehner won't ask for or accept funding for his district," the paper groused just before the leadership election. "The surest way for Boehner to lose out on a leadership position is for him to pledge to other Republican congressmen that every district will be treated as his own if he is elected."

Boehner photocopied the zinger and distributed it to colleagues just before they elected him to the top slot in the Republican Conference.

Undeterred, the Journal-News editorialized this month: "We are not asking for federal dollars for 'pork' projects to build a spoon museum or a bridge to Fairfield. We are asking for a fraction of the millions we pay in taxes to come back to this county for special highway projects or redevelopment or job creation or even public transportation. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of a powerful congressman working on his golf game in Scotland, we could get a bus from here to the doctor's office in Oxford?"

Anti-Disclosure Lobby Is Broad

One of the most far-reaching and controversial proposals that the Senate is scheduled to debate this coming week would for the first time require lobbyists to disclose their grass-roots lobbying expenditures for such things as letter-writing campaigns.

At the moment, only direct lobbying of lawmakers has to be reported.

Opposing the plan, written by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) among others, is an unusual coalition of interest groups from the political right and left. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is among the conservative groups against the notion, which isn't a surprise. The nation's biggest business lobby has long tried to block additional government regulation, which the proposal would certainly impose.

But this time, some prominent left-leaning groups, which normally support government activism, are also arguing against the measure's extra paperwork. Twelve organizations including the Alliance for Justice, League of Conservation Voters, NAACP and NARAL Pro-Choice America have written to congressional leaders to ask them to block grass-roots disclosure.

"We must do everything we can to eliminate corruption in today's lobbying practices, but we cannot do so at the expense of free speech," Alliance for Justice President Nan Aron said. "The grass-roots lobbying reform . . . will interfere with the rights of Americans to receive information about important public issues and to meaningfully engage their elected representatives."

Staff writer Jeffrey H. Birnbaum contributed to this report.