The General Accounting Office, or GAO, is shedding some light on the Enron-Washington connection, filing the first ever GAO lawsuit against the executive branch of the government.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, is in part an attempt to make public information about the energy task force that was headed by Vice President Cheney last year — information including who the energy task force consulted and the dates and times of their meetings.
The GAO, led by Reagan-appointee David Walker, had been attempting to gain information about the energy committee since last April, and after repeated rejections and attempts to stall, the GAO filed suit.
“We’re not going to back down,” said Walker.
The non-partisan auditing agency was established by Congress 80 years ago, with the authority to investigate anything relating to taxpayer money.
Cheney refused to hand over documents and information because he claimed it would impair the ability of the president or the vice president to get advice from a group without anyone in Congress being involved.
The White House, however, has already disclosed that the Cheney task force met with ex-CEO Kenneth Lay and other Enron executives six or more times.
University of Memphis history department chair Jack Hurley said that what happened in those secret meetings decided public law and was done with public commissions, and that those conditions make the meeting public. Hurley added that it is unlikely that any court will back Cheney’s reasons for withholding information.
“The collapse of Enron has damaged the American structure,” Hurley said, citing the banks, organizations, employees and other stockholders that lost big in the $6 billion business failure. “There is a lot of bitterness.”
“This is the wrong play for the Cheney office to be making right now,” said Hurley. “It makes (people) think that he’s hiding something.”
The investigation into the energy commission began long before Enron’s collapse, focusing instead on the seventeen or more energy policies that were passed by Congress at the time Enron was donating over $1.1 million to Congressional campaigns. Enron’s collapse only added fuel to the movement for campaign finance reform.
Blatant examples of merging interests between senators and Enron, such as the case of Dr. Wendy Gramm, are exactly the type of campaign finance misuse that reformers want to eliminate.
Gramm, who worked on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1992, helped pass a rule that exempted the trading of energy commodities from government oversight. She later resigned from the CFTC and became a board member at Enron soon after.
In 2000, an Enron-friendly piece of legislature was co-sponsored in the Senate by Gramm’s husband, Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas).
According to Common Cause News, Enron then gave $12,500 directly to Congress members, and a $100,000 soft money gift to the National Republican Congressional Committee. The company made a $50,000 Democratic contribution, and later Kenneth Lay added a $250,000 contribution to the Republican National Committee.
As the piece of legislature progressed, so did Enron’s contribution amounts: two Enron executives donated $340,000 to the Republican National Committee. With Sen. Gramm still only one of two sponsoring the initiative, Enron donated $16,250 to the campaigns of the Senate and House members who would later vote on the bill’s passage.
Nine months and $1.1 million in political donations later, the bill was passed with a special “Enron exclusion,” and Enron continued without government oversight until its collapse.
William Hixon, an associate professor of political science at The U of M, said that the Enron scandal has already done a lot for campaign finance reform. The Shays-Meehan bill, a campaign finance reform initiative, sat for months in a committee, until the Enron issue got enough signatures on a petition to send the bill to the floor.
“The Democratic response to the State of the Union mentioned this Enron situation,” said Hixon. “That shows that their strategy is to use the public to get around the Republican leadership in Congress that does not want this bill.”
Hixon said that the Democratic party will probably play up the issue, since the public is aware of the strong Republican involvement with the failed company.
“This issue isn’t going away,” said Hurley. “The public is going to want answers.”
