Tea Party Group Files Ethics Complaint Against Harry Reid Over Koch-Bashing

The Tea Party Patriots on Monday filed an ethics complaint against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for his breathless criticism of the Koch brothers, Roll Call reported.

“It’s been generations since a member of the Senate has abused the power of his office to attack private citizens the way Harry Reid has sought to vilify Charles and David Koch,” the group’s co-founder, Jenny Beth Martin, said in a statement.

“Reid’s repeated and mean-spirited attacks violate federal laws and Senate rules against using taxpayer-funded resources for partisan politics and he knows it, yet he repeatedly takes to the floor of the Senate and the media to attack those with whom he disagrees – and then turns around and devotes the Senate floor to a ‘talk-a-thon’ on a major donor’s key issue of climate change,” she continued.

The formal complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee will unsurprisingly not stop Reid from bashing Charles and David Koch’s political spending.

“We are shocked — shocked! — that a publicity-seeking, extremist Tea Party group which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Koch brothers’ secret bank would attempt a frivolous publicity stunt to distract from the Kochs’ efforts to rig the system for billionaires like themselves,” Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson told Roll Call in response to the complaint. “The shadowy, billionaire Koch brothers are pulling out all the stops to get Senator Reid to stop shining a light on their efforts to buy our democracy, but he will not be silenced.”