Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


November 19, 1996: The Dirty Dozen have been re-elected to Congress, most by a comfortable margin.

A notable exception: Far-right freshman Steve Stockman (R-Texas), garnered only 46.4 percent of the votes in his district, and faces a December 10 run-off against his opponent, Nick Lampson.

Among the two “good women” singled out for praise due to their strong ethics, Lynn Rivers (D-Mich.) has been re-elected, while Linda Smith (R-Wash.), an advocate of campaign finance reform, is still waiting for the results of a ballot re-count.

In the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen, Lee Marvin forged a band of corrupt misfits into a patriotic fighting unit. The 104th Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, went the other way.

Elected as a patriotic force promising to clean up government corruption, Newt’s recruits perfected the art of legislating favors for financial sponsors. Though often robed in Christian righteousness, these sponsors read like a list of vice peddlers. Gambling casinos. Tobacco giants. Gun lobbies. Big polluters. Arms manufacturers.

In selecting our Dirty Dozen, we looked at House members with financial ties to these and other influential special interests. We paid particular attention to lawmakers who had received hidden money from (or performed covert favors for) these interests; to leading members of the powerful freshman class (which came in promising reform); and to the House leadership, with its vested interest in the status quo. Although there are other candidates who arguably meet these guidelines, we chose those representatives whom we believe best reflect the specific character of corruption in the 104th Congress.

Historically, congressional corruption has sustained itself through artful combinations of public interest and private pork. But there’s a new, permissive culture in the House. This Congress dispensed with the public interest part and took the payoffs — while claiming that God and the Market required nothing less.

Newt led the way, bringing the same creative flair to election financing that Michael Milken once showed on Wall Street. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) upped the ante by openly inviting his corporate sponsors to redraft the nation’s clean air and water laws. And, in a truly bipartisan effort, many Democrats buttoned their lips about the corruption or joined in themselves.

Nor did the media speak up. Particularly in the high-stakes game of the season — telecommunications –media companies did more contributing than reporting, pumping more than $4.5 million into congressional coffers.

None of this has proved to be popular with the still-smoldering electorate. So in this election season, their campaign chests bulging, our Dirty Dozen and their congressional colleagues have dusted off their populist poses. They’re filling the airwaves, trying to sound like Lee Marvin’s World War II hero, with sanctimonious talk of their political courage and superior personal values. Given the amount of money they’ve collected, it might even buy them another round in the House.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate