As I noted last night, the House GOP caucus just voted to kill the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (it loses its independence and now needs Congress’s permission to investigate anyone or report anything it finds). The vote is secret. But you can find out! Yes, you can! If you live in a district represented by a Republican member of Congress you can call their office and ask how they voted on the Goodlatte proposal. Here are the details of what happened. And here’s an example of how we did this the last time something like this happened back in 2004.
Call your Republican Rep. and ask how the member voted on the Goodlatte proposal. Remember, always be polite and courteous. You’re not speaking to the member. You’re more than likely speaking to a junior staffer who is just there to do their job. Being polite but firm is not only more effective it’s just the right thing to do.
In the latter days of the Bush Administration, the House of Representatives was rocked by a long, slow burn corruption scandal known mainly by the name of Jack Abramoff, a GOP operative whose lobbying operation was at the center of much of it. But there were actually a group of scandals which collectively grew out of the system of technically legal organized corruption that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had built to run and permanently dominate the House with an iron system of money and favors. The first major blow-up was the case of disgraced ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham (after whom the Golden Dukes are named), the comically iconic Bush/DeLay Era corruption scandal. He literally produced a ‘menu’ for things crooked contractors could buy from him and at what cost. There was the Cunningham scandal and various sub-scandals that grew from it; there was the bigger and more wide-ranging Abramoff scandal and various sub-scandals that grew from it. But what really set the stage was something that happened in November 2004, just after President Bush’s reelection and the dawn of the GOP’s ‘permanent majority.’ That was when DeLay, then under indictment in Texas, got the GOP House caucus to push through a rules change (the ‘DeLay Rule‘) to allow an indicted member of the leadership to remain in office.
Just tonight, at what I suspect is a historically similar moment, we have a replay in the again-GOP-run House.
A good short piece here from the Times edit board on why corporations like Sprint and others are helping Trump lie about creating jobs. Simple: he can provide regulatory help on things like mergers and a lot more. If going along with his ruse helps, it’s a great deal. In the case of Sprint, he can help them (or at least they hope he can and will) waive through their merger with T-Mobile which will probably lead to quite a few job losses.
Not everything about Donald Trump is so bad. In today’s New York Times’ article about Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach and, perhaps, the site of the winter White House, one paragraph jumped out at me:
Mr. Trump’s arrival was greeted with sneers by the Palm Beach elite, and he opened up Mar-a-Lago’s membership to Jews and African-Americans, who had been excluded from other members-only establishments. He was also the first club owner on the island to admit an openly gay couple.
We’re all almost tired of winning, the Trump Transition has been going so well. But one of his top congressional supporters says the Transition is actually struggling to pay salaries. Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) told a Buffalo area radio station: “Mr. Trump held a fundraiser down in New York City a few weeks back and did raise some money, but they have – I would use the word – ‘struggled’ to raise the private funds needed to pay these individuals who are working on behalf of the taxpayers but not being paid by the government.”
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Several of us have criticized the Clinton campaign for relying on identity politics. Mark Lilla’s essay in the New York Times sparked the most fervent reaction. I want to discuss one of the calmer, but no less wrong-headed, responses that seems prevalent among Vox’s editors. Matthew Yglesias, David Roberts, and now Sean Illig have made the point, in Yglesias’s words, that “there is no other way to do politics than to do identity politics.” In other words, all politics is identity politics.
TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Tenth Annual Golden Duke Awards recognizing the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior, The Crazy, nonsense and all relevant betrayals of the public trust. The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal.
Our celebrity judges—Susie Bright & Jon Bailiff, Megan Carpentier, Jeb Lund, Simon Maloy & Charles P. Pierce—waded their way through all 32 finalists in seven categories, and selected the winners.
Check out the lucky nominees and the reader emails that selected them here. And now, without further ado, the winners: