The Grassroots Will Defeat Trump, But The Democrats In Congress Have A Role To Play Also

This is how the Republican Party depicts women of color fighting for their rights

This week, UC Berkeley political science professor Taeku Lee explained Trump's fears of women of color and how Democrats take them for granted instead of mobilizing them. "Women of color, especially black women," he wrote, "are potent forces in progressive politics, both in office and as organizers who mobilize voters. It seems that liberals take this for granted, but conservatives tacitly recognize the political power of women of color when they try to discredit them through ridicule and harassment. Consider President Trump’s attacks on the members of 'the squad' who have proven to be remarkably deft and savvy politicians. Or recall that Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia played referee, scorekeeper and contestant so he could tip the scales in his favor in the 2018 election for governor against Stacey Abrams, whose voter protection efforts had begun years earlier.

That’s why it’s important to note that the outcome of the 2020 election will likely depend upon the efforts of independent groups led by women of color-- like Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta and the New Virginia Majority Education Fund-- that are expert at the nuts and bolts of politicking.

A new report called Ahead of the Majority, by the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund and Groundswell Fund uses recently released census data, polling data from the 2018 midterm elections and interviews with community organizers to illuminate the political power of women of color. Their numbers are growing, and they are turning out to vote; mobilizing their families, friends and communities; and taking to the streets.

Since 2008, women of color have grown by 18 percentage points in the general population and by 25 percentage points among registered voters. This is starting to show up at the ballot box. The 2018 election set new benchmarks for turnout in a midterm election, with a whopping 30 million more people voting than in 2014. For women of color, the increased turnout was even more stark, at 37 percent; for Latinas it was 51 percent; and for Asian-American and Pacific Islander women, 48 percent.

Women of color incited this change because they mobilized their friends and family in significant numbers. Black women led the way, with 84 percent convincing members of their social networks to register and vote, followed by 76 percent of Asian-American and Pacific Islander women, 72 percent of Native American women, 70 percent of Latinas and 66 percent of white women.

Turnout also substantially relied on the efforts of independent political groups. Consider that nearly half of 2018 voters who were contacted to register or go to the polls reported that the contact came from a group unaffiliated with a political party.

Voters of color were more likely to have been contacted this way, and these numbers buttress the experience of community-based organizations on the ground that carried out an uncommon range of nonpartisan civic engagement activities to reach those who had recently become citizens or who were classified as having a “low propensity” to vote.

The impact of community groups is especially impressive given their limited resources. Those focused on reaching communities of color have even fewer resources.

Women of color who are organizers on the ground testify that they were effective because they came from the same communities they were organizing. These independent community groups see women as the original influencers in the family and designed culturally informed programs for them. Those programs drew from the knowledge of existing networks and were used to help develop homegrown talent instead of simply relying on outside strategists who parachute into communities to extract surgical campaign victories.

...We are in a time of extraordinary challenges and opportunities for our democratic politics. At moments like this, people most directly impacted best understand the urgency for change and action. In 2018 women of color showed America what that urgency means in terms of political engagement.

Ninety-three percent of black women voters supported a Democratic House candidate as did 68 percent of Native American women, 76 percent of Latinas and 73 percent of Asian-American and Pacific Islander women. This does not bode well for the incumbent president.

Mr. Trump’s re-election strategy is focused on energizing his base of disaffected white men. And with white women evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, we would do well to heed the potential for women of color to decide the outcome of the 2020 election.

Thursday there was a lot of discussion online of Jim Lardner's American Pospect piece, Have Democrats Forgotten How to Do Oversight?. Lardner suggests what Democrats in Congress can do to help to unseat Trump while the grassroots defeats him. His panel of experts came to the conclusion that the Democrats "should not see their task simply as one of picking up the package of evidence handed to them by Robert Mueller and continuing to pursue the case he was either unable to nail or unwilling to state. Mueller felt bound to define his investigation narrowly, sticking to the trail of a potential Trump-Russia plot to meddle in the 2016 elections and adjacent offenses. The House, my panel of authorities agrees, needs to define its investigation broadly, as an inquiry into the bigger and more basic problem of kleptocratic corruption-- of self-enrichment, crony enrichment, and betrayal of the public trust." Sounds about right.

That rich realm encompasses three sub-territories. The first consists of all the areas where the Trumps have tried to turn the presidency to personal profit, whether by sneaking a $60 million real-estate developers’ tax break into the Republican tax package; getting government entities, contractors, and supplicants to purchase overpriced lodgings at Trump properties; or doing whatever they did with the $100 million supposedly raised for the inauguration ceremonies. In the second zone lie the various members of the president’s circle who, following his lead, have taken financial advantage of official positions or Trump ties. That domain blurs over into a third, in which we find the galaxy of federal departments and agencies that, thanks to the strategic placement of industry lobbyists and corporate insiders in the decision-making ranks, now routinely bow down to corporate interests at everybody else’s expense.

...In Trump’s case, the immediate loot was supposed to come from a real-estate boondoggle in Moscow. But he had also developed a taste for Russian financing when past sources had run dry. “After multiple bankruptcies in the 1980s and ’90s, Trump turned to Russian oligarchs and crime figures for a ready supply of cash,” Representative Jamie Raskin pointed out to me. “They were looking for ways to launder and safeguard money looted from the former Soviet Union.” Those transactions and thoughts of more like them appear to have been the original source of Trump’s desire to cozy up to Vladimir Putin, and in that sense, they drive U.S. Russia policy today.

Democrats, Raskin and others say, should rethink the aim as well as the subject matter of their inquiry. A scholar of constitutional law by trade (a former professor of same at American University’s law school), Raskin has no doubts about the impeachment-worthiness of credible allegations already on record. But regardless of what the House decides about impeachment or how long it takes to decide, it is time, he says, to concentrate on points of fact rather than law, and to lay out the facts to “tell a coherent and digestible story to the American people about how the president’s campaign and administration have both been money-making operations from top to bottom.” Storytelling must be the mission. And the story has to go beyond the act of corruption, says Paul C. Light, an oversight specialist and professor of public service at New York University; it needs to include the injury to government’s ability to do right by everyday people. “There’s a lot of outrage in the Democratic bloodstream,” Light says. “Unfortunately the House has not paid much attention so far to the effects of Trump’s corruption. Why does it matter to the American people? How does it affect your pocketbook or your children’s future? Who’s he robbing?”

Eight years in the minority have sapped the Democrats’ supply of oversight know-how. One of the party’s past masters of the art, former Representative Henry Waxman, counsels persistence and a willingness to “hit the same point over and over again.” The Democrats, he says, should borrow a page from Trump’s “No collusion, no obstruction” playbook. They should be willing to keep pounding away at a concise (in their case, true) message about crooked government and innocent people being shafted. “Sometimes it’s hard to get something across except in a cumulative way,” Waxman says.

...On top of the usual challenges, Democrats must now deal with a president and an attorney general telling everyone under their authority (and quite a few people who aren’t) to withhold cooperation. “Lots of norms are being thrown out the window,” says Molly Claflin, a former Senate Judiciary staffer now employed at American Oversight, an anti-corruption nonprofit that files lawsuits and surfaces official documents to compensate for the recent neglect and underfunding of Congress’s investigative work.

To get over the Trump stonewall, House committee staffers will have to cast a wide and imaginative net for witnesses, what with all the Trump-dependent people likely to resist testifying. One place to look, Light suggests, is in the middle ranks of corrupted entities, private or public. The Financial Services Committee, for example, might bring in some of the Deutsche Bank financial-crime watchdogs who tried to warn their superiors against continued lending to Trump family interests. The Natural Resources Committee could question some of the career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency who have been blocked from going after polluters. If such people feel skittish about testifying, they can be offered the option of wearing masks and having their voices distorted—a nice touch, perhaps, for the committee’s attention-getting purposes as well as the witnesses’ job-security purposes.

The ultimate victims of crooked government-- everyday people-- can also be called in. A Department of Education in the clutches of for-profit college companies and private student lenders is one unlikely to implement a loan forgiveness program for holders of student debt who commit themselves to public service. Light points to that program as a neglected and ripe target for oversight. “You have tens of thousands of people,” he says, “who have made their payments on time and are working as police officers, nurses, medical professionals and can’t get a dollar of forgiveness.” The testimony of a carefully chosen sample of those people could be the perfect prologue to a round of student-loan hearings.

Powerful stories can be aired more than once in forums with different frames of reference. The House Education and Labor Committee could hold a stand-alone hearing on the loan forgiveness program, for example; but that problem could also be examined by the Oversight and Reform Committee, under the spirited leadership of Elijah Cummings of Maryland, as part of a multi-agency investigation of the role of the former corporate lobbyists and executives now littered across the federal government. They’re all over: David Bernhardt, the fossil fuel lobbyist turned interior secretary, proud of his readiness to hand out oil-drilling leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; Daniel Elwell, the former airline guy running the FAA while it slow-walked its response to the safety issues of the Boeing 737 MAX; Jay Clayton, the ex–Goldman Sachs lawyer (married to an ex–Goldman Sachs executive) presiding over the Securities and Exchange Commission, and on and on. “Trump has found a fox for every henhouse in Washington,” Raskin says. That point could be effectively dramatized not only by the testimony of career public servants trying to do their jobs, but by an electronic map of the Trump administration with one agency after another lighting up as its conflicted leaders are identified.

Tax policy and tax enforcement is an obvious hearing topic. The Ways and Means Committee, under the cautious chairmanship of Richard Neal, took a woefully long time to sue for Trump’s tax returns, and it is unclear whether or how soon that litigation will bear fruit. The practical consequences of a New York law intended to force the release of Trump’s state tax returns are also up in the air. But Neal’s committee should have plenty of fodder for investigation, including an “opportunity zone” tax break with potentially large benefits for Jared and Ivanka, the disposition of a $7 million back-tax debt owed by the hedge fund manager and Republican donor Robert Mercer, and the strangely fast-tracked Senate confirmation of an Internal Revenue Service general counsel who had previously helped the Trump Organization with its taxes.

...The country needs Congress to do more oversight, not less. It’s time for the Democrats to map out a coordinated and thoughtfully sequenced series of hearings and investigations designed both to expose new information and to stir more awareness and outrage over what is already known and half-known. Old stories, vividly told, can have fresh impact; that is true even if they have a sketchy basis in reality, as the House Republicans proved with their endless claims about Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s emails. The Democrats can proceed, moreover, with confidence that more dirt will surface, even if they cannot say exactly what it will be or where it will be found. Elected by fraud and fluke, Donald Trump has given us the crookedest presidency in our national memory, if not our history. Never has anyone with so much to hide occupied such a central and visible place. That is a formula guaranteed to keep the flow of ugly information coming as long as anyone keeps looking.

Mueller and his team, in the course of not quite finding an actionable Trump-Russia conspiracy, unearthed evidence of a multitude of other offenses, and that haul helped the Democrats retake the House of Representatives last year. By Election Day next year, Trump’s crimes could be his undoing, and they could pose an impossible burden for his Republican partners in Congress as well. The Democrats cannot be sure of that-- but it would be a terrible mistake to discount the possibility. Donald Trump himself is clearly troubled by the prospect of renewed scrutiny. We caught a recent glimpse of that fear in his racist fulminations against Elijah Cummings-- a crazed preemptive effort to undermine one of the senior House members and committee chairs most bent on pressing ahead with aggressive oversight. If the president doesn’t think he’s home free, the Democrats had better not make that assumption either.

We'll close for now with a poignant message-- some ideas for a song and video perhaps?-- from Lee's son, Mötley Crüe lead singer Tommy:

What Happens AFTER The Wave? What Can Democrats Accomplish?

Never afraid to tell the voters what he plans to do

Over the weekend, Politico released a new poll of registered voters from Morning Consult. A couple of points:41% approve of Trump (22% strongly) and 54% disapprove (42% strongly). A full 60% of respondents said it would be inappropriate for Trump to pardon Manafort (which he plans to do) and only 11%-- hardcore Trumpists-- say it would be appropriate. Interestingly, 60% also said that Michael Cohen's guilty plea and Paul Manafort's guilty verdict make them more likely to vote for Democratic candidates in the midterm and only 10% say that would make them more likely to vote for Republican candidates. Asked if they think congressional Republicans are doing a good job in providing oversight for Trump, 7% said excellent, 17% said good, 20% said fair and 40% said poor. In terms of the DC swamp, 26% said it's gotten better since Trump took office and 50% said it's gotten worse. Favorable/Unfavorable ratings for political figures:

• Mitch McConnell- 18%/42%
• Paul Ryan- 29%/45%
• Nancy Pelosi- 26%/49%
• Chuck Schumer- 20%/37%
• Mike Pence- 39%/41%
• Trump- 41%/54%
• congressional Republicans- 33%/53%
• congressional Democrats- 38%/48%

44% of voters feel Trump's campaign worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election, 36% say the campaign didn't and 19% don't know. 49% say Trump tried to obstruct the investigation and 34% say he didn't. 42% said Congress should begin impeachment proceedings, the same number who say they shouldn't. Then there was this: "Would you be more or less likely to support a candidate for U.S. Congress who called for impeaching President Trump, or would it not make much difference in your support for the candidate either way?"

• Much more likely- 21%
• Somewhat more likely- 14%
• Somewhat less likely- 6%
• Much less likely- 26%
• Not much difference- 21%
• No opinion- 12%

If you've been getting blurred over, now's the time to start paying attention. Voters were also asked how much of a priority they put on investigating the Trump campaign's role in Putin-Gate:

• A top priority- 39%
• Important priority0 16%
• Not too important- 17%
• Should not be done 18%
• No opinion- 10%

OK, now Cook's mostly silly guesses about what will happen in November. Dave Wasserman still sees a wave, but it might be big or it might be small. Thanks, Dave; you rock. "The most critical phase of the battle for the House isn't October; it's right now," he wrote. "Republicans' only hope of defying a 'Blue Wave' and saving their 23-seat House majority is to personally disqualify Democratic nominees on a race-by-race basis with quality opposition research. But there's a narrow window of time to do so before the airwaves get clogged, and Republicans will need to be selective." They basically have one-size-fits-all, ads already clogging the airwaves, calling everyone a Pelosi clone, and a few especially vicious attacks on Democrats they fear most, like Randy Bryce in Wisconsin. Conservative billionaire donors continue to spend very heavily in Democratic primaries to try to knock out progressives like Alan Grayson (FL) and Matt Heinz (AZ) on Tuesday, by pushing Republican-lite conservatives like Darren Soto and Ann Kirkpatrick. The strategy has worked in some races-- notably in Chicago where the No Labels poisonous smear campaign destroyed Marie Newman and reelected Blue Dog worm Dan Lipinski-- and failed in others, where progressives like Sue Wild (PA) and Debra Haaland defeated GOP-lite candidates John Morganelli and Damon Martinez, backed by big bucks laundered by Republicans into No Labels.

Back to Cook's prognosticatications. "The playing field of competitive races." wrote Wasserman, "has expanded, and not in a good way for the GOP: of the 66 races in our 'Lean' and 'Toss Up' columns, Republicans are defending 62 and Democrats just four... Many Republicans wish they could simply run on a great economy, but complain President Trump's constant distractions won't let them. Instead, Republicans will have to convince voters that the Democratic alternatives are unacceptable."

The DCCC is making the same mistake they made-- so disastrously-- in 2010 by letting the Republicans define Democratic candidates while they sit on their asses doing nothing but figuring out how of a rake-off from campaign donations their pals can get. Ryan's SuperPAC "is already unloading blistering attack ads on Democratic nominees in 15 key districts," while the DCCC is still spending their energy and resources against progressives and ignoring Republicans.

Wasserman is betting that 5 incumbents in seats Hillary won will survive the wave: David Valadao (CA-21), Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), John Katko (NY-24), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01) and Will Hurd (TX-23). In one of the races the DCCC intervened in on behalf of an establishment candidate, they were beaten back by local Democrats and the winning candidate was Dana Balter. Wasserman's lack of belief in her comes straight from the DCCC. I'd bet she'll win her race. We'll know who's taking on Curbelo on Tuesday night but TX-23, CA-21 and PA-01 has DCCC-type uninspiring candidates who can only win if the wave if big enough-- just like the DCCC itself, a lesser-of-two-evils operation that always loses unless Republican overreach generates an anti-red wave, like the one headed towards shore now. Wasserman should get to know Balter so he stops makings foolish predictions about NY-24.

The next month of ads and polls will tell us a lot about the intensity of voters' opposition to President Trump in these seats. In 2010, very little of what Democrats threw at Republicans stuck. It's possible that in 2018, suburban professional women will be so desperate to send a message to Trump that they'll be willing to overlook a lot of Democratic nominees' flaws.

The 66 competitive races below don't include three open GOP seats that are already "in the bag" for Democrats (NJ-02, PA-05, PA-06) and one Democratic open seat that's already sure to flip to Republicans (PA-14). Effectively, Democrats start out with a net gain of two off the bat and would need to win only 25 of these 66 races (38 percent) to capture the majority.

Cook's opinion, that's all

There are still more races in Lean Republican than Lean Democratic, and if those races fell to the favorites and the 30 Toss Ups were to split evenly, Democrats would gain 22 seats, one short of a majority. But there's still time for many of the races in Lean and Likely Republican to develop into more competitive contests, and in wave election years, the Toss Ups typically break disproportionately towards one party.

Democrats remain clear but not overwhelming House favorites. On the low end, it's possible House control may not be decided until days after the election. It's also possible a "Blue Wave" could propel Democrats to historic gains, well past the 23 they need. Right now, Democrats appear poised to gain between 20 and 40 seats, with 25 to 35 the likeliest outcome.

Ratings Changes:

• NY-25: OPEN (Slaughter) | Likely D to Solid D
• NC-02: Holding | Likely R to Lean R
• OH-01: Chabot | Lean R to Toss Up

So why did I put you through all this, on a Sunday morning, no less? It was all leading to Paul Blumenthal's HuffPo report from Friday about what the Democrats plan to do if they win back the House in November. With Trump in the White House and the Senate tied in knots (or worse), forget any real legislative accomplishments. What they will gain, however are committee chairs, subpoena power and the ability to investigate and hold hearings.

Democratic members on the committee have asked the Republican majority to issue subpoenas related to the administration’s conduct 52 times during the first 20 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Republicans turned down each of those 52 requests. If Democrats held the committee gavel, the subpoenas would be approved.

Vigorous use of the subpoena power, which was granted to Congress to oversee the executive branch, could bring real attention to the many stories of inept governance, malicious policy and outright corruption that seem to bubble up as brief controversies, only to sink under the flood of the president’s Twitter froth.

“If Democrats win the majority in November, we would finally do what Republicans have refused to do, and that is conduct independent, fact-based, and credible investigations of the Trump Administration to address issues like the security clearance process, conflicts of interest, the numerous attempts by Republicans to strip away healthcare from millions of Americans, postal service reforms, prescription drug pricing, and voting rights,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (MD), the ranking Democrat on the oversight committee, said in a statement.

The 52 subpoena requests fell into three categories. First, Trump administration and Trump Organization corruption, conflicts of interest and violations of norms of good governance. Second, the committee’s core oversight functions, including agency reorganizations, the issuance of security clearances and the 2020 census. And third, overall issues of waste, fraud and abuse.

Here are just a dozen of the general investigations we can look forward to:

• Trump's corruption
• Kushner's corruption
• Putin-Gate
• 2020 Census
• Security clearances
• hurricane response in Puerto Rico
• AT&T-TimeWarner merger
• the proposed gag rule for Title X family planning
• loyalty tests
• Flint water disaster
• Niger ambush
• politicized hiring of immigration judges

Oh, yeah... and the kidnapping of children at the border. That one alone should last at least right into 2020.

Congressional Oversight Of The National Security State-- Only Patsies Like Patrick Murphy Need Apply

Just under a year ago, the House had a rare victory over a U.S. spying and surveillance establishment that has no effective oversight and that has long ago run completely amok. It passed a toothless NSA "reform" bill." 51 Republicans and 70 Democrats, including Alan Grayson, of course, voted against it, but, tragically, it passed by an overwhelming 303-121. But, as I wrote at the time:

Grayson did more than just vote against the flawed bill. Miraculously, he managed to add and pass a bipartisan amendment-- the first ever to actually limit the powers of the NSA in a substantive way-- in the Science and Technology Committee that was ultimately part of the bill that passed. Grayson's bill protects encryption standards from NSA tampering. This is the letter Grayson sent his colleagues on the committee that persuaded them-- and, as you know, most are Republicans-- to pass it:

These are serious allegations. NIST [The National Institute of Standards and Technology], which falls solely under the jurisdiction of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has been given "the mission of developing standards, guidelines, and associated methods and techniques for information systems." To violate that charge in a manner that would deliberately lessen encryption standards, and willfully diminish American citizens' and business' cyber-security, is appalling and warrants a stern response by this Committee. Many businesses, from Facebook to Google, have lamented the NSA's actions in the cyber world; and some, such as Lavabit, have consciously decided to shut their doors rather than continue to comply with the wishes of the NSA. Changes need to be made at NIST to protect its work in the encryption arena.

Until then, the NSA had been allowed to influence decisions about encryption standards. And the NSA was interested in finding ways to circumvent the standards to make it easier for them to intercept communications and data that the senders think are secure. The agency even prevailed upon NIST to publish a standard which many in the cryptography community warned had been weakened and probably contained a backdoor for easy NSA access…

That was hardly Grayson's only battle with the National Security State. At the time, he said:

The question for the American public is this: do you believe that this is the way it has to be? Do you believe that we must give up our privacy, our liberty, our autonomy-- the very essence of what makes us Americans and human beings-- in order to be safe? My answer is “no.” There is no threat to national security when I call my mother, and there is no reason for the NSA to obtain information about that call-- and every other call we make. If it were up to the NSA, there would be a camera on every street corner, and a meter by every bed. I know that it is possible to preserve both privacy and security, and it’s up to Americans to take back our privacy to make that happen. 

Yesterday, after Lee Fang's Intercept exposé about who in Congress can and can't be trusted to protect their constituents from domestic spying and National Security State overreach, Grayson told me that "the spying-industrial complex thinks that it can stick its nose into everyone else’s business, but that not even Members of Congress can find out what the spies are up to: how they are violating our laws and our Constitution, how they are wasting taxpayer money..." They're probably not looking forward to seeing him get into the Senate, not when a patsy like Patrick Murphy is the alternative.

Here's what Lee Fang reported:

Congressmen who asked about oversight of NSA mass surveillance and domestic spying in 2013 could have “compromise[d] security” and were denied the records they sought because of concerns they lacked formal government security clearance, a former member of the House Intelligence Committee says in a newly-released video.

The footage, from an August 29, 2013 town hall meeting, sheds new light on why lawmakers were denied key rulings and reports from the secret courts overseeing the National Security Agency-- even as the Obama administration and intelligence officials claimed that all NSA programs were subject to strict congressional oversight and therefore could be held accountable.

In the video, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., then a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, discusses why Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., and Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., should not and did not receive information they sought from the committee. The committee had previously declined to explain why the information was withheld, going so far as to tell Grayson that even its discussion of his request was classified. Because the committee, like its Senate counterpart, tends to be particularly sympathetic to the intelligence community, getting information to non-committee-members like Grayson and Griffith is potentially crucial to reforming U.S. spy agencies. And in late 2013, following revelations of mass surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were any number of reform bills pending.



At the time, President Obama defended bulk collection of telephone metadata, claiming in a press conference that “these programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate. And if there are Members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up.”

Writing for The Guardian, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out that several lawmakers, including Sen. Richard Blumental, D-Conn., were unaware of the NSA’s bulk data collection efforts, and even more concerning, other lawmakers, including Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., Griffith, and Grayson were blocked from accessing oversight documents even after making multiple requests. Griffith, a Tea Party-aligned lawmaker, had requested access to FISA court orders concerning the NSA program, but was repeatedly ignored. Grayson, a progressive, faced similar treatment after requesting FISA court opinions and documents relating to the PRISM program. The House Intelligence Committee denied Grayson’s request, and later told the congressman that the committee discussion regarding his denial was classified.

...Grayson says he was ultimately denied the information about NSA surveillance activity that he sought. “The Republicans on the Intelligence Committee were unhappy that I discussed the Guardian coverage of the Snowden revelations on the floor of the House,” he says in an interview.

Grayson noted that the House Intelligence Committee maintains rules requiring lawmakers not on the committee to obtain permission from them to view classified information. “The committee has no authority to make those kinds of distinctions,” says Grayson. “They’ve created two tiers for members of Congress,” he adds. “I’m not aware of any statutory authority for such a distinction; but it’s just a power grab as members of Intelligence and I have the same constitutional authority.”

“It is a practical impossibility for members of the House of Representatives to do effective job of oversight of the intelligence community given the current structure of the House and its rules,” says Patrick Eddington, the Cato Institute’s policy analyst in Homeland Security and civil liberties. He explains that only a “tiny set of members” and staff have access to information about the NSA and other classified matters.

“Let’s remember that what Mr. Grayson and Mr. Griffith and others were seeking access to was information on programs that they were asked to cast votes on,” adds Eddington, a former senior policy advisor to Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., and a former CIA analyst. “These revelations from Mr. Snowden and potentially other sources … should have sparked the creation long ago of a Joint Congressional Investigative Committee to explore all of this stuff, and it hasn’t happened yet, and it’s just another example of the collapse of congressional oversight.”

Guess Who's Watching The Hen House?

During the election, we talked a bit about how the CIA and other spy agencies worked hard to insert their own operatives into Congress as members, with the object of getting control over oversight of their own agencies. There were some successes (William Hurd in Texas) and some failures (Kevin Strouse and Bobby McKenzie) but electing Members of Congress isn't the only way the National Security State can keep control of their shit. This week, investigative journalist Lee Fang, writing for Republic Report, exposed another: high-paid lobbyists being hired by Intelligence shills to run the oversight committees. How about... Blackwater in charge?

After lobbyist-run SuperPACs and big money efforts dominated the last election, legislators are now appointing lobbyists to literally manage the day-to-day affairs of Congress. For the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees government intelligence operations and agencies, the changing of the guard means a lobbyist for Academi, the defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater, is now in charge.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), the incoming chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the House reconvenes in January, announced that Jeff Shockey will be the new Staff Director of the committee. As a paid representative of Academi, Shockey and his firm have earned $80,000 this year peddling influence on behalf of Academi.

In previous years, the House Intelligence Committee has investigated Blackwater over secret contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, the shoe is on the other foot. As Staff Director, the highest position on a committee for a staff member, Shockey will oversee the agencies that do business with his former employer.

Shockey also represents a number of other companies with business before defense agencies: General Dynamics, Koch Industries, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance, Innovative Defense Technologies and Boeing.

The role reversal, for lobbyists to take brief stints in Congress after an election, has become a normalized. In a previous investigation for The Nation, we found that some corporate firms offer employment contracts with special bonuses for their staff to return to government jobs, ensuring the paycut they receive for passing through the revolving door to become public servants doesn’t have to alter their K Street lifestyle.

Other committees are also hiring lobbyists. Congessman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) replacement as chair of the Oversight Committee, just hired Podesta Group lobbyist Sean McLaughlin as his new Staff Director. McLaughlin’s client list includes the Business Roundtable, a trade association for corporate CEOs of large firms. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) also hired a new chief of staff, Mark Isakowitz, who represents BP.

Essential reading: the comment below on Shockley's background as a longtime crooked Beltway insider going back to when Jerry Lewis was the most corrupt man in Washington and Shockley was one of his top bagmen.

Is Steve Israel Helping The CIA Infiltrate Congress With Its Own Agents?

I don't know the answer to the question posed in the title above. I've been trying to find out and I've been tracking down several leads. The names that come up most frequently are Kevin Strouse, who like all CIA spies bills himself as an "ex-CIA analyst" and is running against Mike Fitzpatrick in Bucks County (PA-08); Bobby McKenzie, another former CIA spy who glosses over that and calls himself an "ex-US State Dept. Counterterrorism Official" and is running in MI-11 against Michigan's least attractive politician, Dave Trott the state's foreclosure king; and Jerry Cannon the former comandante of the Guantánamo gulag/torture prison who is running against GOP sad sack Dan Benishek way up in the sparsely populated, desolate Upper Peninsula of Michigan, flush up against Canada.

I spoke to one Bucks County political expert this morning about Strouse's CIA connections and he told me Strouse has no chance to win and that the DCCC, after recruiting him and pushing him against a plausible grassroots Democrat, Shaughnessy Naughton, has abandoned Strouse entirely. "There is no way," he told me, "that Strouse wins this race unless the CIA arranges to kill Fitzpatrick. I'm hearing Strouse is down by 20 points." 20 points?!!?! This is an R+1 swing district that Obama won 53-46% in 2008 and then fought Romney to a 49-49% head heat 4 years later. How does a Democrat-- even a crappy Steve Israel Mystery Meat candidate like Kevin Strouse lose a district like that by 20 points.

Meanwhile, as of the June 30 FEC filing deadline, Strouse had only raised $1,016,010 to Fitzpatrick's $2,482,114 and only had $268,721 cash-on-hand to Fitzpatrick's $1,906,830. The DCCC hasn't spent a dime on Strouse's behalf so far. However, the DCCC as reserved $1.9 million on Philadelphia broadcast from Oct. 21 to Nov. 4, which could mean ads for Strouse or Manan Trivedi (PA-06) or Aimee Belgard (NJ-03). Their House Majority PAC has reserved another $1.2 million for unspecified candidates in the Philly area. Despite the rumors that the DCCC has kicked Strouse to the curb, unlike some of the candidates that they have dumped, he's still on the most current Red-to-Blue list soliciting money for their candidates. I guess if Michael Fitzpatrick turns up dead or suddenly resigns for some bizarre reason, we'll know the CIA plan is operational.

Jerry Cannon has also been seriously underperforming as a candidate. He and Benishek last reported on July 16 and Benishek had raised $1,497,655 and had $830,703 on hand while Canon only raised $647,734 and had $336,663 on hand. This unlikely red-to-blue district has a PVI of R+5 and would be a steep climb for even a good Democratic candidate. Obama, though, did beat McCain, 50-48%, although he lost to Romney four years later 54-45%. (Benishek barely fended off his last challenge by another bad Democratic recruit, Gary McDowell, 167,060 to 165,179.) What McDowell and Cannon have in common is that they're both conservatives from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Is the CIA behind Cannon? I haven't found anything that would make me comfortable asserting as much, just rumors.

The DCCC has spent $237,304 in negative ads against Benishek so far, part of a $450,000 Traverse City broadcast from Sept. 2 to Sept. 22 they reserved. They have another $490,000 on hold for Oct. 14 through election day. Yesterday, Emily Cahn at Roll Call reported that the NRCC just reserved a million dollars worth of ad time in the district to defend Benishek and will start running them on Friday and not stop until November 4.

OK, now let's go back to MI-11, Kerry Bentivolio's mostly suburban district north and northwest of Detroit that includes parts of Oakland and Wayne Counties, an R+4 district but good hunting for a Democrat, especially with such an awful and indefensible candidate like Trott. But the CIA agent, or, supposedly, "ex"-CIA agent, McKenzie, just wasn't closing the deal. Trott, who wrote his campaign a casual $2,423,402 check for the primary, had $1,018,913 cash-on-hand on July 16. McKenzie only raised $375,432 and had $68,448 left after the primary, which shouldn't be enough to stay competitive. The DCCC hasn't spent any money in the district yet but they've reserved $850,000 in the Detroit broadcast market and $290,000 in the Lansing market between Oct. 21 to Nov. 4, money that could go to help McKenzie (who is no longer on their Red-to-Blue page at all) or Pam Byrnes (who the DCCC has reportedly given up on entirely). Strange. I suppose they could use the reservations to support Eric Schertzing against Mike Bishop in the district Mike Rogers is abandoning (MI-08, Ingham and Livingston counties, R+2 PVI) but there is no indication they are getting behind Schertzing or any other Michigan candidates.

And now the big "however" in this race. Someone (a CIA cutout, supposedly) persuaded Bentivolio to run as a write-in candidate and pull the extreme right away from Trott, who he really hates, so that McKenzie wins the seat. Yesterday, the Detroit Free Press reported that a very bitter Bentivolio just wants Trott to lose.

“Everywhere I went here at home or in D.C. I had a Trott tracker working for a self-serving, self-absorbed entitled bully,” Bentivolio said in an e-mail to the Free Press. “Now they want unity?”

In last month’s primary, Trott beat Bentivolio by nearly a 2-to-1 margin. In the race to represent a district widely considered to lean Republican, Trott faces Bobby McKenzie, a former U.S. State Department employee and the Democratic nominee, who Bentivolio said he also opposes.

Bentivolio told MIRS he was “pretty frustrated” by the loss and the amount of money Trott spent defeating him. He said he has been approached by “a lot of people out there” who want him to run as a write-in “because they don’t see much difference” between the two parties.

…[H]e e said that it’s difficult for him to listen to Republican Party calls for unity and support given that he was targeted for defeat by mainstream elements in the party when former U.S. Rep. Thad McCotter resigned abruptly in 2012 and left Bentivolio the only other GOP name on the ballot.

I'm trying to track down what Bentivolio meant exactly when he said he's being pushed to run by "a lot of people out there." It would mean a lot to the CIA and other intelligence entities to have one of their own-- or 3 of their own-- inside the branch of government charged with overseeing all the unconstitutional activities.

Here's why entrusting gov't to the care of benevolent billionaires may not be such a great idea

Mayor Mike: Hath Hell any fury like a grumpy billionaire?

by Ken

Boy, when billionaires don't get their way, things can get ugly. No, this time around I'm not talking about the imperial Koch brothers, though there's lots more to talk about in the newly released report, "The Koch Club," two years in the making, from the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. (The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, not surprisingly, has already picked up on one of the findings in a new "News Desk" post, "Koch Pledge Tied to Congressional Climate Inaction.")

No, this time I'm back to picking at New York City's own "Mayor Mike" Bloomberg, who's in a snit over a pair of bills aimed at getting back some measure of control over an increasingly out-of-control NYPD which were recently passed by the City Council by votes large enough to make mayoral veto overrides possible -- unless the little fella can make a bunch of councilmembers see things his way. And he has announced that he plans just such a campaign of persuasion, relying heavily on a favorite tool, the sledgehammer.

Bloomberg to Target Councilmembers Who Backed Stop-and-Frisk Restrictions

By Trevor Kapp

THE BRONX -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued Monday to blast the two City Council bills passed last week that would restrict the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk tactic, saying he would back candidates running against the councilmembers who supported the legislation.

"I'm telling you I'm going to support those candidates," the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in The Bronx. "Some of these things are life-and-death issues, like these two horrendous bills in the City Council. They're going to put our police officers at risk, and they're going to put the public at risk. And I've got an obligation to tell people that."

Bloomberg did not explicitly say that he would use his political action committee's funds to target the councilmembers, but he has previously poured millions of dollars into political races across the country on issues including gun control and education.

The City Council's anti-racial profiling bill, which passed 34 to 17 early last Thursday, would allow people who think they were stopped and frisked because of their skin color to sue the city.

The inspector general bill, which passed 40 to 11, would task the Department of Investigation with overseeing police practices.

Both pieces of legislation received more than 33 votes, making them veto-proof, but Bloomberg said he would try to persuade councilmembers to change their minds by saying he would support their future opponents.

If you consider the poorish-and-diminishing results we've been getting via most of the other angles we've taken on this democracy thing, especially as our politics has become increasingly focused on money, a case can be made that maybe our best bet is to entrust authority to benevolent billionaires.

So far the prime test has been our Mayor Mike, whose benevolence and billionarity have indeed borne fruit in a number of areas. Nationally as well as locally there's the work he has done to bring a measure of sanity to gun use. And in his mayoralty there have been a number of initiatives he's undertaken which genuinely rose above the constituency-vs.-constituency bickering that normally defines municipal political grubbing -- innovations in street use, the million-tree-planting program, the crackdown on smoking in public smoking, public-health initiatives like the restaurant grading system.

But when we turn over the authority for deciding what's in the public interest to one individual, and so heavily business-oriented a one as this one, we also get his tastes and whims in other matters, like the transformation of a number of sectors of the city via mega-projects that hugely benefit narrow sectors of the public and screw most everyone else (sometimes throwing in sops to the public that he has no intention of fulfilling, like the mysterious vanishing affordable housing promised to sell the Willets Point redevelopment plan), or his obsessive and highly dubious insistence that he knows how to transform public education, or his essentially fascist idea of public order that treats the Bill of Rights as, well, toilet-paper substitute.

And now we have him "protecting" the police in ways that to a lot of us seem dangerous to public safety. The notion that the two City Council bills -- establishing some form of extra-departmental oversight and trying to bring some control over the out-of-control use of stop-and-frisk -- are life-or-death dangerous is blatantly false and frighteningly demagogic. Is the guy just a liar, or could he be a little bit nuts? It has been kind of terrifying to watch the way he has turned the NYPD into an occupation paramilitary force, or even an imperial palace guard.

And now the mayor, in his guise as bully, seems to have it in mind to buy himself a City Council. It's at times like these that worry less about being nostalgic for the Good Mike once the son of a bitch is finally forced to get his carcass the hell out of City Hall.

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The message Wall Streeters get from Chuck Schumer: "We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals"

Here's some cheery Sunday reading, from the NYT's series "The Reckoning":

A Champion of Wall St. Reaps the Benefits

Senator Charles Schumer meeting with Neel T. Kashkari, center, the official in charge of the $700 billion federal bailout.

By ERIC LIPTON and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

"We are not going to rest until we change the rules, change the laws and make sure New York remains No. 1 for decades on into the future."

-- Senator Charles E. Schumer, referring to financial regulations, Jan. 22, 2007

WASHINGTON -- As the financial crisis jolted the nation in September, Senator Charles E. Schumer was consumed. He traded telephone calls with bankers, then became one of the first officials to promote a Wall Street bailout. He spent hours in closed-door briefings and a weekend helping Congressional leaders nail down details of the $700 billion rescue package.

The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.

"We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals," one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer's remarks. "We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust."

The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.

Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown's most important business.

An exceptional fund raiser -- a "jackhammer," someone who knows him says, for whom " 'no' is the first step to 'yes,' " -- Mr. Schumer led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, raising a record $240 million while increasing donations from Wall Street by 50 percent. That money helped the Democrats gain power in Congress, elevated Mr. Schumer's standing in his party and increased the industry's clout in the capital.

But in building support, he has embraced the industry's free-market, deregulatory agenda more than almost any other Democrat in Congress, even backing some measures now blamed for contributing to the financial crisis.

Other lawmakers took the lead on efforts like deregulating the complicated financial instruments called derivatives, which are widely seen as catalysts to the crisis.

But Mr. Schumer, a member of the Banking and Finance Committees, repeatedly took other steps to protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules, a review of his record shows. Over the years, he has also helped save financial institutions billions of dollars in higher taxes or fees.

He succeeded in limiting efforts to regulate credit-rating agencies, for example, sponsored legislation that cut fees paid by Wall Street firms to finance government oversight, pushed to allow banks to have lower capital reserves and called for the revision of regulations to make corporations' balance sheets more transparent.

"Since the financial meltdown, people have been asking, 'Where was Congress? Why didn't they see this coming? Why didn't they provide better oversight?' " said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America. "And the answer for some, including Senator Schumer, is that they were actually too busy pursuing a deregulatory agenda. Their focus was on how we have to lighten up regulation on Wall Street."

In recent weeks, Mr. Schumer has worked closely with the Bush administration to try to mitigate the damage to New York's financial institutions. And as members of Congress and President-elect Barack Obama have called for new regulations to prevent future upheavals, Mr. Schumer has endorsed the need for reforms while still trying to make them palatable for Wall Street.

Calling himself "an almost obsessive defender of New York jobs," Mr. Schumer has often talked of the need to avoid excessive regulation of an industry that is increasingly threatened by global competition. At the same time, Mr. Schumer has cast himself as a populist who looks out for the middle class.

In an interview, Mr. Schumer said that until the recent market turmoil, he did not fully appreciate how much risk Wall Street had assumed and how much damage its practices could inflict on ordinary Americans. "It is a learning process, no question about it, an evolution," he said, adding that he now believed that investors and homeowners must be better protected.

But he defended his record. "Wall Street and Main Street are tied together," he said. "Often times, they are not in conflict. When they are in conflict, I tend to side with Main Street."

While Mr. Schumer has taken some pro-consumer stances, his critics fault him for tilting too far toward Wall Street in balancing his responsibilities.

"He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public," said John C. Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group, the giant mutual fund house. "It has hurt the American investor first and the average American taxpayer."

Navigating the Street

Brash and brainy (perfect SATs and double Harvard degrees), Chuck Schumer, now 58, learned early in his career how to talk to the financiers and chief executives who would become a vital constituency for him. Though he did not grow up in that world -- his father owned a small exterminating business in Brooklyn -- he quickly showed a keen grasp of complex financial issues.

And, recognizing how central Wall Street is to the city's economy, he committed himself to keeping it strong.

"So much of what happens in this town is because we are the world financial center," Mr. Schumer said at City Hall in January 2007. "It helps support our museums, it provides the tax base for schools and health care. If we lose being the financial center, the rest goes down the drain."

Soon after arriving in Congress in 1981, Mr. Schumer snared a seat on the Financial Services Committee, which he viewed as the best way to help New York. While reliably liberal on many social issues, he established himself as a pragmatic Democrat willing to align with powerful business interests.

Mr. Schumer's political rise -- he moved in 1999 to the Senate, where he now has a party leadership post -- paralleled Wall Street's growing influence in Washington. As more Americans invested in the markets and financial institutions had a greater global reach, the industry came to rival the manufacturing sector as a driving force of the United States economy.

And in the 1990s, Democratic officials developed close links to a new generation of Wall Street leaders -- labeled "New Moneycrats" by one author -- who shared a free-market agenda.

Mr. Schumer became a magnet for campaign donations from wealthy industry executives, including Jamie Dimon, now the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase; John J. Mack, the chief executive at Morgan Stanley; and Charles O. Prince III, the former chief executive of Citigroup. And he was not at all reluctant to ask them for more.

Donors describe the Schumer pitch as unusually aggressive: He calls repeatedly to suggest breakfast or dinner, coffee or cocktails. He enlists intermediaries to invite prospects to events and recruits several senators to tag along. And he presses for the maximum contribution -- "I need you to max out," he is known to say -- then follows up by asking that a donor's spouse and four or five friends write checks, too.

"He was probably the kid that sold the most candy in grade school," said Julie Domenick, a Democratic lobbyist who has given to the senatorial campaign committee. "He is not shy."

Mr. Schumer, in the interview, acknowledged his full-speed-ahead approach. "Any job I do, I work hard at and I try to succeed at," he said.

As a result, he has collected over his career more in campaign contributions from the securities and investment industry than any of his peers in Congress, with the exception of Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which analyzed federal data. (By 2005, Mr. Schumer had so much cash in reserve that he shut down his fund-raising efforts.)

In the last two-year election cycle, he helped raise more than $120 million for the Democrats' Senate campaign committee, drawing nearly four times as much money from Wall Street as the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Donors often mention his "pro-business message" and record of addressing their concerns. John A. Kanas, the former chief executive of North Fork Bank, said: "He would solicit my opinion, listen to my advice and he appeared to take it into consideration."

Lee A. Pickard, a lawyer representing clients including the Bank of New York, whose employees have been significant donors to Mr. Schumer and other Senate Democrats, turned to Mr. Schumer last year to successfully beat back a regulatory initiative by the Securities and Exchange Commission. "If you get Chuck Schumer on your side, you are O.K.," he said.

That may help explain why some of the wealthiest financiers in Manhattan attended the Sept. 22 breakfast hosted by Mr. Kravis at his office overlooking Central Park. A Republican with long ties to the Bush family, Mr. Kravis spent much of this year trying to help Senator John McCain, the eventual Republican nominee for president.

But last year, Mr. Kravis went to Capitol Hill to oppose a proposal that would have more than doubled taxes for executives at hedge funds and private equity firms like his, costing them up to $25 billion over 10 years.

Mr. Schumer had said publicly he would support the measure only if it also applied to executives at energy, venture capital and real estate partnerships, and he introduced alternative legislation that would do just that. His position was identical to that of lobbyists for a group paid by Mr. Kravis and other finance industry executives.

The Schumer bill, called a "poison pill" by the leading Republican advocate of the tax increase, went nowhere after provoking opposition from an array of industries.

At the breakfast meeting, Mr. Schumer, accompanied by fellow Senate Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Maria Cantwell of Washington, assessed the political landscape as debate over the bailout was beginning.

"On the right, you have those who view any government intervention as a threat to free markets," one executive recalled Mr. Schumer explaining. "On the left, you have people who choose to view this as a government handout to the rich. In the middle, you have everyone who knows and takes the Treasury secretary seriously and recognizes that if something is not done here, we could be staring into an abyss."

Within days, the businessmen sent out checks to the Senate campaign committee.

'Their Go-To Guy'

To Christopher Cox, the Republican chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the need for action was obvious in the spring of 2006.

His agency, which would later be criticized for a 2004 ruling that let banks pile up debt, had grown deeply concerned about lack of oversight of the nation's largest credit-rating agencies, like Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service. Linchpins of the financial system, their ratings are vital to safeguarding investors by evaluating the risks of bonds and other debt. After the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, which had repeatedly been awarded favorable ratings, the agencies had agreed to meet voluntary standards.

But the S.E.C. concluded that those agreements were inadequate, so Mr. Cox urged Congress to give his agency oversight powers. "Without additional legislative authority, the S.E.C. will not be able to regulate in a thoroughgoing way," he told the Senate banking committee at an April 2006 hearing.

The plan drew broad, bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But executives at the credit-rating agencies soon began pressing Mr. Schumer and other allies in Congress to block the proposal or at least limit its reach, according to current and former employees.

"They knew Schumer would support them," said one former Moody's executive, who asked not to be named because he still works in the industry. "He was their go-to guy," the executive said.

While the Manhattan-based agencies were not significant campaign donors to Mr. Schumer or the Senate campaign committee, their lobbyists and many of their clients were.

At that time, revenues for the agencies were skyrocketing. The housing market was robust, and Wall Street investment firms were paying the agencies to rate various mortgage-backed securities after first advising the firms -- and also collecting fees -- on how to package them to get high credit ratings.

It was an obvious conflict of interest, financial experts now say. Despite their high ratings, many of those securities, based on risky loans, would prove worthless, roiling markets and threatening financial institutions worldwide.

But Mr. Schumer argued that the companies voluntarily met requirements to eliminate such possible conflicts. He suggested that regulators simply encourage competition and disclosure of agencies' ratings methods. There was perhaps no need for an intrusive new law, he said in the spring of 2006. "They've implemented their codes of conduct," Mr. Schumer told Mr. Cox at a Senate hearing. "They're making good-faith efforts."

Mr. Schumer could not stop the legislation from passing, but he managed to get the measure amended so that it explicitly prohibited the S.E.C. from regulating the procedures and methods the agencies use to determine ratings.

Richard Y. Roberts, a former S.E.C. commissioner, said the amendment Mr. Schumer won was troubling, adding that it could block the S.E.C. from punishing a credit-rating agency that consistently issued unreliable ratings.

Sean J. Egan, managing director of a small Pennsylvania agency, Egan-Jones Ratings, and a proponent of the tougher regulations, was more blunt. "The bill was eviscerated," he said. "You have stripped away basic safeguards for the investors."

At times in Congress, Mr. Schumer has teamed up with Republicans, like former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who aggressively promoted a free-market agenda. Mr. Schumer pushed for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley law, passed in November 1999, which knocked down the walls between investment banks and commercial banks and allowed financial supermarkets to flourish. The law also weakened regulatory oversight by fracturing it among different agencies.

In 2001, Mr. Schumer and Mr. Gramm jointly proposed legislation that would cut fees paid by Wall Street firms and others to the S.E.C. in half, or by $14 billion, over the coming decade. Their proposal included some extra money for salaries of commission employees.

But with trading volumes high, Mr. Schumer argued, the government was collecting far too much money from those fees and using it to subsidize other government operations. "It is a tax, an unintended but very real tax, on all sorts of investors," he said at the time.

But some Democrats, pointing to the recent corporate accounting scandals, argued that the S.E.C. budget should be doubled or tripled so it could more effectively combat fraud that could lead to a major economic collapse.

"We are making a tragic mistake," Representative John J. LaFalce, Democrat of New York, warned in arguing for a much smaller reduction in S.E.C. fees.

"We give the industry what it asks for unwittingly."

Mr. Schumer's argument prevailed, and the fee cut passed overwhelmingly.

Some consumer advocates laud Mr. Schumer for his stances on consumer finance issues, including combating high interest rates on credit cards, challenging predatory lending practices and advocating legislation to allow bankruptcy courts to force banks to accept lower interest rates so that families facing foreclosure could stay in their homes.

"He is a strong advocate for families and homeowners to make sure they are not taken advantage of," said Eric Stein, senior vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit group that combats abusive lending practices.

But those efforts mostly affect commercial banks and mortgage lending operations around the country and in New York, not the securities and investment businesses in Manhattan.

"He built his career in large part based on his ties to Wall Street," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, which advises investors on the regulatory system. "And he has given the Street what it wanted."

Mr. Schumer, though, has a surprising defender in Alfonse M. D'Amato, the onetime Republican senator he ousted.

"Don't take someone to task simply because a group has supported him politically and now he supports legislation that helps them," Mr. D'Amato said. "The question is, is the legislation good or bad? With Chuck, it is clear he tries to do what is best for the state and city as a whole."

Doling Out Criticism

For Mr. Schumer, Wall Street's crisis has been especially painful to watch. "It is horrible, just awful," he said in the interview. "And it affects everybody."

And he has already begun identifying those he faults for the devastation. Subprime lenders top the list, but he has lashed out with particular fury at the credit-rating industry, which he once defended but now says misled him and the investing public.

"The work at these ratings firms was severely compromised, and the companies were some of the biggest contributors to the current financial crisis," Mr. Schumer said earlier this month in response to an S.E.C. move that same day to tighten control over the agencies. "The lesson from this is that the three major firms' stranglehold on the ratings industry must be loosened." Mr. Schumer has also blamed the Bush administration for its push to ease rules. "After eight years of deregulatory zeal by the Bush administration, an attitude of 'the market can do no wrong' has led it down a short path to economic recession," Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor in September.

He has not assigned responsibility to himself or fellow Democrats, saying he had no way of knowing of the misdeeds going on on Wall Street. "I wish I was omniscient," he said. "I'm not."

Since the economy began to fall apart, Mr. Schumer has joined others in calling for new regulations to combat abuses. He has proposed tougher rules for credit-rating agencies, even changing the way they are paid so they are compensated by investors, not by the companies they are evaluating. He has said he is open to imposing regulations on hedge funds, which currently operate with limited government oversight.

And while he previously succeeded in limiting consumers' rights to sue financial institutions, he says he now favors offering that remedy in certain circumstances.

But he is also warning that any new rules must be carefully crafted so they don't impose excessive burdens.

"You need to provide safety and security to investors in order to attract them to the markets," Mr. Schumer told Wall Street executives in a speech last month. "On the other hand, you must be sure that regulation does not snuff out the entrepreneurial vigor and financial innovation that drives economic growth and makes financial institutions successful and profitable."

And he is seeking some regulatory concessions for some Wall Street supporters. He has proposed, for example, that the government lift a cap on how big the giant banks can get, an issue important to institutions like JPMorgan Chase. Lifting the cap would allow the biggest banks to absorb weaker ones, but it would also limit competition and increase the risks to the financial system posed by failure of one of the giants.

Mr. Schumer is also calling for the adoption of European-style regulations that impose far fewer rules and instead require banks to meet certain performance standards, a system institutions generally prefer but some banking experts criticize as not rigorous enough.

In recent weeks, Mr. Schumer has listened to Wall Street leaders for advice on what should come next. At a dinner at Morgan Stanley's headquarters the night before the presidential election, John Mack, the chief executive, and a dozen top hedge fund officials talked with Mr. Schumer about possible changes affecting their industry.

"People feel like he is going to be fair and reasonable," said one Morgan Stanley executive, who asked not to be identified because the session was private. "He is mindful that this is a very big part of his constituency -- Wall Street."

Griff Palmer contributed reporting from New York.

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