What's Left In The Tank?

by: huntsu

Tue Jul 22, 2008 at 09:52:50 AM EDT

On NPR this morning they had a report on leadership PACs of retiring members of Congress and how many retirees use them as slush funds. So I decided to look into our two retirees (so far), Jim Saxton (NJ3) and Mike Ferguson (NJ7).

Jim Saxton has SAXPAC, which has been closed down with $0 cash on hand after expenditures of $13,000 fro legal fees (anyone know what that's about?), $8,000 to a election compliance specialist (was there an issue that might deal with lawyers and election compliance?), $5,000 to Chris Meyers and $5,000 to Duncan Hunter's run for President. Really.

Ferguson is a little harder to write out, but we'll try. His Mike PAC is still open, but only has about $1800 left after a little less than $95,000 in expenditures since the last election. He's got a lot of $1,000 contributions to local campaigns and out-of-state members of Congress, with only Chris Smith seeing any House money in state.

$20,000 went to the Somerset Republicans, $8500 to the Hunterdon Republicans, and $1,000 to Union County.

On the other hand, Saxton has over a million dollars in the bank and Fergie has about $250,000.

So there's a lot of money in the campaign war chests even if the PACs are dead. I wonder if they'll use them for anything.

huntsu :: What's Left In The Tank?

Tags: Jim Saxton, Mike Ferguson, pac, (All Tags)

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What's Left In The Tank? | 1 comments

But... (0.00 / 0)

Our fears, that is, that Saxton would give this money to Myers and therefore begin to even the playing field with the cash-rich Adler, may be unwarranted.

Saxton is constrained by spending limits to whom he can give his money:

"Saxton can't give the cash directly to Myers, as federal law prohibits him from giving more than $2,000 to any one candidate. And he can only give a maximum of $37,000 to each of the 3rd District's three Republican county committees -- he's already given $25,000 to the county party in Camden, which has only one town in the district."

In the past, Saxton already gave $250k the NRCC, and he seemed reticent to do so again. If he doesn't give more to the NRCC, he's left with money that he'd probably use for his own district and state projects -- and a little bit that he could, theoretically, give to the OceanCo GOP and the BurlCo GOP (the latter of whom has never been his bosom buddy, though, seemingly).

by: Martin @ Tue Jul 22, 2008 at 15:30:40 PM UTC