Sinking in the West: Ted Stevens's last hurrah?

IF Republican senator Ted Stevens is worried about the federal investigation that recently led to a joint IRS and FBI raid on his Girdwood, Alaska, home, he's not really showing it. At a moment when a lesser man would be keeping his head down, Stevens hasn't changed his style at all.

Even after he knew federal investigators were scrutinizing his earmarks for the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, the senator blithely tagged another $5.2 million for the center in the Senate's 2008 appropriations. Just after the raid on his home, he told a group of Republican senators that he might put a hold on the Senate lobbying and ethics bill (days later, it passed the Senate easily). Stevens tries to ease the trepidation of his staffers by telling them that the Feds are making "a mountain out of a molehill." To his colleagues, he says, "Stay with me."

The problem Republicans should have with this line is that they have heard it before. It came from the mouths of two former GOP congressmen now sitting in prison, Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney. As Stevens approaches the race for his eighth term in 2008, Alaska Republicans may want to make sure someone else is warming up in the bullpen.

The charges against Stevens are serious. Bill Allen, an executive of the oil-pipeline-service firm VECO, pleaded guilty earlier this year to bribing Alaska state legislators. He and an associate may have paid for more than $100,000 of work on Stevens's home. Apaper trail indicates that one of Stevens's aides, who is now cooperating with the government, acted as the senator's private bookkeeper without reporting any compensation--in other words, she may have been working on the taxpayer's dime. There is indisputable evidence that one of Stevens's top aides received a sweetheart buyout on an asbestos- and lead-laden property in Seward, thanks to an earmark designated by his boss. Then there's the deal made by two of Stevens's business partners, who bought a piece of property and flipped it to the federal government one year later for twice as much--again, all possible because of a Stevens earmark.

Stevens's 38 years in office have made him one of the Senate's top dogs. But the respect he commands in Washington is nothing compared with the adulation he receives back home. In Alaska, he is revered as the state's chief diplomat and statesman. When his plane lands in Anchorage, it does so at an airport named after him. In 2003, Gov. Frank Murkowski declared Stevens's 80th birthday a state holiday--"Senator Ted Stevens Appreciation Day."

"You have to understand that Alaska is what it is today because of Ted Stevens," says one state official speaking from Anchorage. "He's pumped so much money into the state--billions of dollars."

Only the second man to hold the Senate seat he occupies, Stevens is the longest-serving GOP senator. He has earned a reputation as one of his chamber's most colorful characters. A former chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, he is famous for wearing an Incredible Hulk tie during the appropriations season--his humorous way of reminding lawmakers to think twice before crossing him.

And it is indeed unwise to cross him. Stevens's politics have always been moderate (his American Conservative Union lifetime rating is 64.5). But his passion for pork is extreme. Nothing triggers Stevens's famous temper like an attack on Alaska's stream of government funding. He erupted in rage when Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) tried to redirect funding toward hurricane-struck New Orleans after it was earmarked for two questionable bridge projects in Alaska.

It is a tribute to the seniority and skill of Stevens (and of Alaska's long-serving Republican congressman Don Young) that the federal government spent $13,000 in Alaska for every man, woman, and child living there in 2004--more than in any other state, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. Alaskans receive $1.87 of federal-government spending for every dollar they pay in federal taxes.

The question is whether Stevens has become a bit too skillful, using his position to enrich himself and others close to him. He has offered a carefully worded explanation of his home renovation, saying on July 17 that he and his wife "paid every bill that was given to us. Every bill that was sent to us has been paid, personally, with our own money, and that's all there is to it. It's our own money." That statement of course prompts the still-unanswered question of whether any bills were not sent to the senator (and went instead to someone else, such as VECO CEO Bill Allen). Stevens's office did not reply to inquiries from NATIONAL REVIEW.

And then there are the charges involving federal earmarks. In these cases, corruption really is in the eye of the beholder. John Stanton of Roll Call reported recently on just two examples from Alaska. In 2004, when Stevens earmarked money for the National Archives and Records Administration to buy a facility in Anchorage, his business partners Jonathan Rubini and Leonard Hyde happened to have just the property the Archives needed. Coincidentally, they had recently acquired it.

Stanton's second example also involves property. Is it a problem that staff, family, and friends of all three members of Alaska's congressional delegation--Stevens, Young (also under investigation for his ties to VECO), and Republican senator Lisa Murkowski--happen to own (and in many cases recently bought) land in Knik Arm, an isolated part of Alaska? Property values there could explode if a new bridge is built to connect it to Anchorage. As it happens, Young earmarked funds for a new bridge (which is even named after him) in the transportation bill passed by the last Congress.

Such arrangements are ethically dubious, yet in Congress it's hard to draw the line between a fortunate investment and an insider trade. If it were illegal for people to profit from their relationships with lawmakers, many more members of the House and Senate would be under investigation right now.

Congressional earmarks usually go to the well-connected, and Stevens's earmarks are no exception. Since 2003, he has secured $25.4 million for the SeaLife Center in Seward. A significant portion of that money was quietly added in House-Senate conference committees, and thus given little or no public scrutiny during congressional debate on spending bills. One such earmark was added to the conference report on the 2006 interior-appropriations bill. The earmark redirected money from Seward's waterfront-redevelopment project to SeaLife so that it could purchase a property from former Stevens aide Trevor McCabe for $558,000. The federal government had previously refused to pay McCabe's asking price for this property, which the Anchorage Daily News called "a brick-red single-story building riddled with lead and asbestos."

McCabe has already parlayed his former job in Stevens's office into a new role as an independent lobbyist for the fishing industry, taking four clients for an estimated $80,000 in just six months. He and his wife also bought property on Knik Arm in 2002, and are nicely positioned to profit from the bridge earmark. And McCabe has a separate arrangement, Roll Call reports, to give boat tours for the SeaLife Center through a company owned by Stevens's son, Ben, who is himself under investigation for taking bribes from VECO executives.

In Seward, as in Washington, the coincidences never seem to end.