Abbott Laboratories Coordinated Contributions Prop Up Steve Stivers
The pharmaceutical corporation Abbott Laboratories is not fond of Mary Jo Kilroy. In her first term in Congress, Rep. Kilroy has pushed against “Pay to Delay,” the practice in which big drug manufacturers pay off generic suppliers to keep inexpensive medicine off the market. She also cosponsored H.R. 684, a bill that would have saved money by requiring the government to negotiate drug prices down for Medicare patients.
These policies would cut into Abbott’s profits, and so the corporation’s political action committee contributed the maximum allowable $5,000 to Kilroy’s challenger, corporate lobbyist Steve Stivers.
That’s all Abbott Laboratories is allowed to contribute as a corporation. But the employees in the “government affairs” offices of Abbott Laboratories didn’t stop there. Jason Grove, Kristin Morris, Rosemary Haas and Thomas Evers, each an employee of the Abbott Laboratories government affairs division — and each a federally-registered lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories — have also kicked in their own contributions to the congressional campaign of Steve Stivers this year. Despite the fact that they live in three different communities in two different states, Grove Morris and Haas even sent their checks to Steve Stivers on the very same day, March 8 2010. According to the Federal Election Commission, another registered lobbyist for Abbott Laboratories named Darren Willcox joined them in making a Stivers contribution on March 8. Haas and Grove gave synchronized contributions to Steve Stivers again on June 17. Abbott lobbyist Kelly Childress is the wild one of the bunch: she gave Steve Stivers her money on a completely different day, March 23.
It’s not at all clear that Abbott Laboratories is in violation of the law for its activities. But there is a breach of trust here with the Stivers campaign: coordinated contributions by corporate employees magnify the influence of those corporations in the electoral process and diminsh the freedom of Americans to participate in politics by and for themselves.
