Spreading Campaign Cash

Lobbying Showdown Over The Future Of Student Loans - Spreading Campaign Cash

Details: Published on Wednesday, 29 July 2009; Written by Danielle Knight, Huffington Post

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Sallie Mae also has forged close ties to lawmakers in both parties by using its political action committee to shower them with campaign contributions -- more than $2.5 million in the past decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, Sallie Mae has wooed key Democrats. In the 2008 election cycle, Sallie Mae's PAC gave $10,000 to the Blue Dog PAC, and an additional $145,500 to the individual campaign committees of Blue Dogs and Democrats on the House Committee on Financial Services, according to a Huffington Fund review of campaign finance data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), chair of a House Financial Services subcommittee, is one of Sallie Mae's most loyal friends. Sallie Mae is one of the largest employers in Kanjorski's district, and it was the second largest contributor in 2008 to Kanjorski's campaign committee and leadership PAC. The company and its executives donated $26,150.

Kanjorski has boasted of how he has used his leverage on the committee to keep Sallie Mae happy. "I got Sallie Mae here and I kept Sallie Mae here because of my activities with them at a federal level," he once told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, "making sure that we have a very favorable climate for them to remain."

An internal strategy document obtained by Miller, the House education chairman, and published by Higher Ed Watch, a blog of the New America Foundation, shows that top executives of Sallie Mae saw "Democratic control of Congress" as the No. 1 challenge facing the company. They then laid out, as their top "high-level political strategy," a plan to channel PAC contributions to fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats and Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee. The objective, as Sallie Mae's strategy document put it, was simple: "grow pro-FFELP [Federal Family Education Loan Program] coalition within the Democratic Party."

Miller soon announced that he was siding with Obama's plan and on July 21 his committee approved legislation along those lines by a vote of 30 to 17.

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