Is Santorum Mixing Campaign and Senate Office Data?

At the outset of the Pennsylvania Senate Race, I signed up at the Santorum website in order to gain access to the information there. Among other things, when I signed up, I was asked to identify the issues in which I had an interest. Among them, I listed the environment.

While I corresponded with Senator Santorum's office prior to this election cycle -- never that I recall on any environmental issue. I have written to him with respect to military pay issues, blood diamonds, civil rights, and flag-burning. Other than the flag-burning and miltary pay, all other correspondence was at least two years ago. I never before received a spontaneous e-mail from my junior Senator.

Yet, today, I received from his Senate Office -- not the campaign mind you, but his Senate Office -- an email beginning "Knowing of your interest in preserving our Commonwealth's environment". Now, unless in addition to all of his other powers, the Senator is claiming to be psychic, the only communication which I have had with him indicating my interest in the environment was through his campaign website.

The Senate Ethics Manual has an extensive chapter on this sort of thing, and makes it pretty clear that mixing campaign information with Senate resources is a no-no:

Title 31 of the United States Code, section 1301(a) states that ‘‘appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law.’’ This principle of federal appropriations law has been interpreted in Congress to mean that congressional employees receive publicly funded salaries for performance of official duties and, therefore, campaign or other non-official activities should not take place on Senate time, using Senate equipment or facilities. . . . Senate employees are compensated from funds of the Treasury for regular performance of official duties. They are not paid to do campaign work. In the words of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia: ‘‘It is clear from the record that Congress has recognized the basic principle that government funds should not be spent to help incumbents gain reelection.’’

Since the combination of my e-mail address and interest in the environment could only have been found in the campaign database, I've got to conclude that there's been some mixing of purposes going on here. It may or may not have technically violated Senate Rules. But it sure doesn't smell good.

I had a similar experience with Republican Senate Candidate Katherine Harris. Way back when she first decided to run for the US House, I received an e-mail from her announcing her candidacy. The e-mail said that my address had been obtained from prior communications with Ms. Harris.

The only prior communications that I had with Ms. Harris had been when she interfered with Democracy, as Secretary of State. You might recall that -- that was when Gore beat Bush but not the Supreme Court. In a reply to the Harris announcement, I wondered aloud about the propriety of the partisan use of the property of the State of Florida (the Secretary's offical correspondence files) in her campaign. I didn't hear from her again.

I'm just sayin' . . . .