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DEL.ICIO.USWhat’s good for King & Spalding
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
King & Spalding brought a high-powered panel from its Washington office together for an interesting breakfast session Wednesday on what to expect from the new, Democratic-majority Congress. The future for either party is still murky, but from the firm’s point of view, things are looking up.
There’s likely to be a whole range of congressional investigations, and that should be “a great benefit from the standpoint of the firm,” said former Sen. Daniel Coats (R-Ind.). In other words, if a corporation, an agency or a government official gets hauled up before a committee, they’ll need good lawyers. He’s not the only lawyer thinking this way, as you can see here
“We believe our abilities with respect to Congressional investigations are second to none,” Coats said.
Joining Coats was former Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), Thomas Spulak, who has held a number of top Democratic staff positions on the hill, and George Crawford, until last year Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, who “might prove to be the very best hire anybody’s made in Washington,” said Ted Hester, a senior partner in the Washington office.
Spulak warned that for a time, anyway, Washington lobbyists face a different climate in which they won’t be able to provide so much as a cup of coffee to a House member or staffer (the Senate, more jealous of its prerogatives, isn’t expected to be nearly as stringent in its rules), with a good chance they will be required to disclose much more about their business connections and campaign contributions than before.
“We’ll probably see some prosecutions,” Spulak, who has been general counsel to the House, said.
Mack’s 1988 Senate race was, as he said, a kind of eerie forerunner of the ballot issues that came up again in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. So it was interesting to hear him say he thinks the controversy over Florida’s 13th Congressional District could come down to a vote on the House floor.
That’s the race for Rep. Katherine Harris’s old district, where Democrat Christine Jennings is challenging the 364-vote election margin of Republican Vern Buchanan, claiming that some 18,000 votes cast in other races from predominantly Democratic precincts didn’t show up in the hotly-fought Congressional race.
Spulak, who was chief of staff to legendary Florida Democrat Claude Pepper, said the memory of the 1985 fight over the Indiana 8th District, in which the House voted on party lines to seat a Democrat who had not been certified as the winner by the state. Many in Washington date the rise of a more activist GOP, and the decline of congressional Democrats, to that vote.
But Mack said aggressive coverage of the ballot issues in the Florida race may force the issue, leading to what could be a moment of high drama in the new Congress.
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