Pew Foundation, Laurence Tribe, and more

Pew Foundation, Laurence Tribe, and more.
From the April 4, 2005 issue: Behold, the Laurence Tribes song.
By The Scrapbook
The Weekly Standard
April 4, 2005, Volume 010, Issue 27

Peee-ew

Back in March 2004, former Pew Charitable Trusts program officer Sean Treglia attended a conference at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. Treglia must have felt gabby, because he launched into a long, discursive tale of how his former employers at Pew had used tens of millions of dollars to simulate a wave of popular support for campaign finance reform.

"I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," Treglia crowed. He probably assumed his anecdotes would stay between him and his sympathetic audience. But Treglia was being videotaped, and the videotape fell into the hands of Ryan Sager, an intrepid polemicist for the New York Post. Last week Sager posted a partial transcript of the speech on the Post's website (www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/transcript0.htm). Here's Treglia:

We wanted to expand the voices calling for reform to include the business community, to include minority organizations, and to include religious groups, to counter the Christian Coalition. The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington [the U.S. Congress]. The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform . . .

Over seven years, I spent about $30 million of Pew money on this effort. And the money led directly to key elements of the McCain-Feingold legislation: the ban on soft-money, the issue-advocacy provision, the better disclosure and the stand-by-your-ad. . . . We funded the business community, minority groups, religious groups.

No worries, Treglia went on. "We did everything by the letter of the law." Except "we just never released press releases saying that we were funding these grants at the time." The strategy was a stunning success. "If you look at the Supreme Court decision, you will see that almost half of the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding [McCain-Feingold] are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts"--some of which research, incidentally, was horribly flawed, as David Tell pointed out in these pages two years ago ("An Appearance of Corruption," May 26, 2003).

No matter. "If any reporter wanted to know" about the connections between Pew and its grant recipients, Treglia explained--like the nexus Tell pointed to with New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice--"they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't."

Maybe that's because some of the organizations those reporters work for were taking Pew's money, too. Sager points us to "Campaign Finance Reform Lobby, 1994-2004," a recently released report by Political Money Line, which details how in the last decade eight pro-reform, typically left-leaning foundations spent over $123 million to lobby for changes to campaign finance law. Not all that money went to business, minority, and religious groups. Since 1994, for example, National Public Radio has accepted over $1.2 million from pro-campaign-finance-reform foundations. According to "official disclosure statements," Sager reports, the funds were earmarked for "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making," including original programming such as the show "Money, Power and Influence." The Scrapbook missed that program, but we can guess what angle it took.

So by the look of things--and remember, it's the mere appearance of wrongdoing that has always raised the blood pressure of the campaign-finance reformers--Pew was engaged in a massive influence-buying scheme. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt, however, since The Scrapbook has always thought actual wrongdoing is what matters, not appearances. Plus Pew's CEO insists that Treglia's "comments have no basis in fact."

But in its frenzy to root money out of Washington (except for its own), Pew does seem at the least to be guilty of what the Freudians call projection--attributing one's faults and impulses to others.

Under Embargo

For more than a year, the European Union and its leading members have pushed to lift the embargo Brussels placed on China following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, arguing that it was no longer appropriate to lump China in with other embargo-targeted countries like Burma and Zimbabwe. As Javier Solana, the E.U.'s foreign policy representative, puts it, "Things are moving" ahead on human rights.

Solana must not be reading his mail. At the same time he was uttering those words, more than 500 human rights and democracy activists--including Chinese still residing in China and family members of those imprisoned or slain at Tiananmen--were writing him saying that, in fact, the human rights situation in China has not undergone a fundamental change since 1989. This should come as no surprise since, as they also point out, "sixteen years ago, the European Union set specific human rights conditions when it imposed" the embargo, which still have not been met.

After serious lobbying by both sides of the aisle in Congress and the administration, it appears the E.U. will not be lifting the arms embargo--for now. Yet one thing we know for sure is that Brussels, Paris, and Berlin will continue to push for lifting the embargo, in the process ignoring their own pledges of 1989 and the voices of those who know firsthand whether things really are, as Solana put it, "moving" ahead when it comes to political and religious freedom in China.

He's Tribe!

Showing the sophistication and depth of learning that once marked him as the next great liberal hope for the Supreme Court, Harvard's Laurence Tribe on March 19, as reported in the New York Times, weighed in on the Schiavo case: "'McCarthy, for all his abuses, did not reach out and try to undo the processes of a state court,' Professor Tribe said, referring to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose cold war hearings into communism were widely viewed as Congressional overreaching."

We'll cut Tribe some slack on this strained analogy, since it's always possible that someone else wrote the soundbite for him. Readers will recall, from Joseph Bottum's report in these pages a few months ago, that Tribe has sometimes passed off other people's words as his own.

That report apparently also made an impression on students at Harvard Law School. Consider this original song performed in early March at the annual Harvard Law School parody show:

"I'm Larry Tribe"
(to the music of Gloria Gaynor's
"I Will Survive")

(Tribe)

At first I was afraid
I was petrified
I had nothing new to write
I thought my muse had died
But then I opened up a book
And copied down the words I saw
A fatal flaw
And who would know I broke the law?

For 19 years
I wasn't caught
I made a killing on my books
Assigned in every class I taught
It would've never been revealed
The Weekly Standard wouldn't see
I would still be at the top
If not for stupid Ogletree

(Duncan Kennedy)
He studied math!
He studied law!
He's the most prolific scholar
That the whole world ever saw
He's drafted foreign constitutions
He's the president of Spain!
In the book they say he copied
He thanked Clinton aide Ron Klain!

And so on, in the same vein. (If you email scrapbook@weeklystandard.com, we'll forward you a highly entertaining sound clip from the actual performance.