KY’s Brett Guthrie holds plum chairmanship after raising big money for House GOP caucus
Republished from Kentucky Lantern
Among the powerful committee leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives, no one ships nearly as much campaign money to his party’s political caucus as Kentucky’s 2nd District Congressman Brett Guthrie.
That’s a finding in a report released last week by the Washington-based political reform group Issue One. And, in the context of the report, it’s not a flattering distinction.
The report is the latest of five that Issue One has released since 2017 that decry a system — employed by both parties — in which House members find themselves under “relentless fundraising pressure” to raise money for their party caucus committee if they want to be appointed to powerful and prestigious committees.
“A little-known fact about members of Congress is that they must constantly raise money not just for their own reelection bids but to help their respective political parties accumulate power,” the report says. “Both the Democratic and Republican parties lean on their most powerful legislators to boost their political war chests, under something called the ‘party dues’ system.”
This forces members to devote vast amounts of time to fundraising — time sometimes spent pleading for money from wealthy interests that lobby Congress and appear before congressional committees, the report says.
The pressure comes from the Republican and Democratic leaders who control committee assignments of their members.
Last December Republican leaders of the U.S. House picked Guthrie to chair the important Committee on Energy and Commerce, the oldest continuous standing committee in the House and one with broad jurisdiction over the country’s health care, energy and environmental policies, telecommunications and technology innovation, and consumer safety.
GOP leaders have handed Guthrie and his committee a big assignment: cut $880 billion in spending, much of which will have to come from Medicaid, the federal-state program that pays for about 72 million Americans’ health care, including almost 1 in 3 Kentuckians. The savings are needed to reduce the federal budget by $2 trillion as Republicans seek to renew and make permanent $4.5 trillion in tax cuts from the first Trump administration.
Issue One examined the contributions of top Republicans and Democrats on four powerful committees of the House since Jan. 1, 2023. The report found that about $1 of every $6 spent by the campaign committees of these 11 key committee leaders (seven Republicans, four Democrats) was in contributions to the party caucus’ political fund. (For Democrats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or DCCC; for Republicans, the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC.)
Among the 11 committee leaders, the report shows Guthrie gave by far the most, transferring $2.5 million from his campaign committee to the NRCC during the period. That amounted to a bit more than half of all of the spending by Guthrie’s committee during the period. (None of the other 10 committee leaders whose campaign finances were examined transferred more than $1.5 million or more than 39% of their total spending during the period to their caucus political fund.)
Guthrie’s Washington office referred questions from Kentucky Lantern last week to a Guthrie campaign spokeswoman who did not reply to an email from Kentucky Lantern.
Issue One reported that in his recent bid for chairmanship of Energy and Commerce, Guthrie was opposed by U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican. Online records of the Federal Election Commission show Latta’s campaign committee transferred nearly $1.3 million to the NRCC in 2023-24. That’s a large amount, but still far less than the $2.5 million transferred by Guthrie’s campaign committee during the same period.
“Fundraising prowess is one criteria that party leaders consider when deciding whom to elevate into important leadership roles … ,” said Michael Beckel, one of the authors of the Issue One report. “Rep. Guthrie’s massive fundraising for the NRCC ahead of the 2024 election certainly didn’t hurt him as he made a bid to become the next chairman of the coveted House Energy and Commerce Committee.”
Punchbowl News reported soon after last November’s elections that Guthrie appeared to be the favorite over Latta. While Latta had an advantage in experience, Punchbowl News reported Guthrie “leads the fundraising race this year by leaps and bounds.”
‘Profound conflicts of interest’
In 2016 USA Today reported that the process involves legislative leaders setting quotas for members. “Lawmakers are supposed to dip into their own reelection accounts to meet these fundraising quotas,” USA Today reported. “Those who make — or exceed — their dues are considered ‘team players,’ a label that lifts their chances of landing plum committee assignments.”
That same USA Today report said another Kentucky Republican, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, refused to pay his dues. “They told us right off the bat as soon as we get here, ‘These committees all have prices and don’t pick an expensive one if you can’t make the payments,” Massie said. “That’s part of orientation.”
On Monday, Massie, in response to questions emailed him by Kentucky Lantern, said, “My opinion of the dues system is still the same: it’s extortion and should be illegal.”
As for how his refusal to participate in the system has affected his committee assignments, Massie said, “I’ve been able to maintain committee assignments to B and C committees without giving to the NRCC, but participation on an A committee is understood to be off the table, so I’ve never sought an A committee.”
Issue One CEO Nick Penniman said in last week’s report, “It’s a betrayal of public trust for legislative leaders in Congress to be constantly worried about fundraising and regularly soliciting wealthy and well-connected donors who have business before their committees. These fundraising demands lead to profound conflicts of interest.”
Guthrie, of Bowling Green, is a former state senator who first won election to Congress in 2008 by beating Democrat David Boswell in a competitive election for the right to succeed retiring Republican Congressman Ron Lewis.
Since then Guthrie has never been seriously threatened in eight reelections. This gives him the luxury of being able to transfer his campaign funds to the NRCC. Last November he won reelection with 73.1% of the vote despite transferring more than half of his campaign war chest during the two-year election cycle to the NRCC.
Beckel of Issue One described the organization as bipartisan and called it “the leading cross-partisan political reform group in Washington, D.C.”
“We unite Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the movement to fix our broken political system and build a democracy that works for everyone,” he said. “We are fiercely bipartisan, working with current and former members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.”
Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: [email protected]. Follow Kentucky Lantern on Facebook and Twitter. Kentucky Lantern stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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