Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) says he’ll hang on to his contributions from Jack Abramoff. Says the money’s already spent. Taylor is also of interest to Beltway football fans because his likely Democratic opponent is Heath Shuler, a former Redskins quarterback from the lean years before Joe Gibbs’ return.
Rep. John Shaddegg, new entrant to the House leadership sweepstakes and erstwhile principled conservative, was for the Medicare boondoggle before he was against it?
“House Government ‘Reform’ Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) has come up a more creative arrangement. Lobbyists and defense contractors threw the annual holiday party for the Committee which, coincidentally, oversees federal agency contracting.” Read the whole thing here. See the invitation here. It’s not just lobbyists and defense contractors, you have a few non-defense contractors as well.
One would do well to note an ideological point here. Abuse of the government contracting process is bad, and perpetrators of wrongdoing should in no way get off the hook. Nevertheless, the entire concept of farming government out work to private firms is a more-or-less open invitation to corruption. There are instances when contracting is the only reasonable solution. But for some years now — predating Bush, predating the DeLay era — all the pressure has always been to privatize more and more government functions. The theory is that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, so contracting functions out to private firms should save money. The reality has had a lot more to do with union-busting, machine-building, and “honest graft” than money saved or improved efficiency.
The economic policy know-nothings at the Club for Growth endorse John Shadegg for Majority Leader. Note that this is part of a curious effort to redefine what’s at issue here in intra-Republican politics away from the topic of corruption and toward the idea that the problem with Tom DeLay was insufficient fealty to rightwing dogma.
Back on Planet Earth the actual root source of the problem is precisely the tension between rightwing dogma and reality. The tax cut jihad the Club for the Growth has done so much to foster is a serviceable basis for electioneering, but as a basis for governance it has some serious flaws. In particular, it implies very large cuts in federal spending. But actually implementing cuts on the necessary level would be politically untenable. The result is a governing majority that lacks the capacity to govern and instead invests its energy in spinning all sorts of mumbo-jumbo to cover its tracks and a kind of inertia where the majority’s perpetuation in power becomes the primary goal. In some sense, I suppose it’s possible that Shadegg or whomever will return the GOP to the True Faith of massive budget cuts and simply lead everyone over the electoral cliff in a straightforward manner, but that seems very unlikely in practice. And if you’re not willing to do that and you’re not willing to rethink any of conservatism’s prime articles of faith, the only real alternative is to continue with self-interested machine politics.
How deep do they have to cut to get down to healthy tissue? That’s the question.
As you can see somewhere prominently noted on most of the news sites, House Republican leaders have decided to can Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) who now — but check your watches, because probably not for long — serves as chairman of the House Committee on Administration. Ney certainly isn’t the worst offender in the Abramoff scandal. But he may be the sloppiest and most flagrant.
Federal prosecutors have already asserted as fact — in the Scanlon indictment — that Ney accepted bribes. Clearly, there’s an indictment headed his way. So it’s hard to see how House Republicans can make even a colorable claim to cleaning up the mess they’ve created without booting Ney from his committee chairmanship.
(As a side note, let’s observe that it sure ain’t pretty when the members of a gang decide to take out one of their own, is it? Cue your favorite analogous scene from Mob cinema or The Sopranos.)
In any case, is that enough?
Despite the fact that the feds seem to have Ney nailed dead to rights, he’s hardly a big player in this story. Is it really zero-tolerance for those compromised by Abramoff-related criminality? How about the DeLay syndicate? What’s the standard?
Such a small world, such a small world.
You remember defense contractor Brent Wilkes. He was the ur-briber at the heart of the soon-to-expand Duke Cunningham scandal. Mitchell Wade got a lot more attention. But a closer look at the backstory of the scandal shows that Mitch came up through the Wilkes operation.
Anyway, one of the choice nuggets from the Wilkes-Duke saga was the fact that Wilkes set up an actual airline that at one point owned no more than a mere 1/16th of a plane (Don’t worry. It was a share. So it flew okay.). He called it Group W Transportation. And it existed for pretty much the exclusive purpose of ferrying members of Congress around the country on a Lear Jet.
Needless to say, Duke himself logged the most hours of any congressman on Group W. But the article in the San Diego Union-Tribune that broke the story notes that Tom DeLay repeatedly flew the friendly skies of Air Wilkes.
And one other member of Congress flew Air Wilkes too.
Who would that be? None other than Rep. Roy Blunt.
Just the man to clean up the House.
Fly the friendly skies.
Summa Abramoffica.
For a lot of you this will cover old ground. But there have been a number of questions on this. So let me try to briefly sort out some of the main points and make a couple key distinctions.
Did Jack Abramoff give money pretty much equally to both parties? Or did he only give to Republicans?
You can hear people saying both on the web and the airwaves. And in almost every case the seeming contradictions stem from the fact that the people talking — either intentionally or otherwise — are comparing apples and oranges.
Did Jack Abramoff give money to Democrats? To the best of my knowledge Abramoff never contributed any money to Democrats. And that’s hardly surprising. Abramoff is a life-long professional Republican. How much money do you figure James Carville has contributed to Republicans over the last two decades. Or Paul Begala? It’s almost a silly question.
When you hear about Republicans and Democrats getting ‘Abramoff money’ what’s being talked about aren’t personal contributions from Abramoff but contributions from entities he worked for as a lobbyist. So, for instance, Abramoff lobbies for Indian tribe X. Indian tribe X contributes to politician Y. Hence, politician Y got ‘Abramoff money’.
(Often these calculations figure in only the tribes and not other groups and individuals Abramoff worked for; but that’s another story.)
Now, is that logic fair? Is that ‘Abramoff money’?
As a political matter, it probably makes sense now for every pol to unload that money — a conclusion most of them, as you can see, are coming to on their own.
On the merits, though, it’s more difficult to make generalizations.
We know from some of the publicly released emails, that Abramoff in many cases used his clients’ bank accounts very much as if they were his own, often giving them specific amounts and recipients for political contributions. In many cases, too, he had them make donations that had little or nothing to do with their own interests (defined in lobbying terms). For instance, what interest did a couple of Abramoff tribe clients have giving money to the New Hampshire Republican party a day or two before they pulled their phone-jamming scam?
There are other cases though where a given politician was associated with Indian rights issues either before Abramoff came on the scene or because of the state or district they represent. There are members of Congress in both parties who fall into that category and are, to some extent, being unfairly tarred.
For these reasons, pure dollar amounts can’t tell the whole story without getting more deeply into the context.
More generally, I think you’ll see over the course of the next year that these federal ‘hard’ money contributions — either from Abramoff or his clients — aren’t where the real game was being played. The real action was in money funnelled or laundered through various DC-based non-profits or de facto cash payments to members of Congress or their staffs.
Stay tuned.
Ney ‘temporarily’ stepping down as chairman of House Committee on Administration.
Will Tom DeLay even serve in the next Congress. According to a new Houston Chronicle poll “Only half of those who cast ballots for DeLay in 2004 said they will do so again.” Only 28% of voters in his district view him favorably.