Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nev., owes between $100,000 and $250,000 on his home mortgage in the old mining town of Searchlight. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., owes more than $500,000 on a pair of mortgages that were financed in 2010 for homes in Arizona and Arlington. And Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., is down to more than $15,000 on his mortgage for his family home in Brooklyn.
Those are just a few of the details found in the tens of thousands of pages of documents released on Thursday on members of Congress and their personal financial disclosures. An annual exercise aimed at revealing any potential conflicts of interest, this year's documents provide an added disclosure: the particulars of a lawmaker's mortgage on his or her personal residence.
For years the financial disclosure forms for members of Congress did not require lawmakers to reveal any details about their personal residences, only for homes that were used for rental properties that derived income. That changed after Congress approved a new ethics law this year that clarified insider trading laws so that lawmakers and congressional staff were not allowed to make financial trades based on nonpublic information gleaned from their work on Capitol Hill.
Under the new disclosure rules, lawmakers must reveal existing mortgages for personal residences. In addition, they must list the creditor, the date the mortgage was obtained and the interest rate charged. Reid, for instance, took out a 30-year mortgage with Wells Fargo in 2004 on his property in Searchlight, a rural town south of Las Vegas with about 800 residents in which his home is among the finest.
The financial disclosure forms also offer a window into the finances of the potential running mates for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
One leading contender, freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., disclosed a minimum of $550,000 in debt from loans and mortgages. At least $100,000 of that comes from lingering student loans that the 40-year-old senator took out in the 1990s to pay for his undergraduate education at the University of Florida and his law degree at the University of Miami, a costly expenditure that Rubio highlighted during a floor speech last month as the Senate debated legislation to continue low-interest loans.
Another potential Romney running mate, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., also has a high level of personal debt, at $200,000 worth of mortgages on his South Dakota residence that were taken out from banks in Iowa and Nebraska in 2008 and 2011.
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