Why The Latest Scandal Makes Me Yawn
The Abramoff Scandal (R, Beltway) (Rich Lowry, NRO)
The GOP now craves such bipartisan cover in the Jack Abramoff scandal. Republicans trumpet every Democratic connection to Abramoff in the hope that something resonates. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), took more than $60,000 from Abramoff clients! North Dakota Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan used Abramoff's skybox! It is true that any Washington influence peddler is going to spread cash and favors as widely as possible, and 210 members of Congress have received Abramoff-connected dollars. But this is, in its essence, a Republican scandal, and any attempt to portray it otherwise is a misdirection.
Abramoff is a Republican who worked closely with two of the country's most prominent conservative activists, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Top aides to the most important Republican in Congress, Tom DeLay (R., Tex.) were party to his sleazy schemes. The only people referred to directly in Abramoff's recent plea agreement are a Republican congressmen and two former Republican congressional aides. The GOP members can make a case that the scandal reflects more the way Washington works than the unique perfidy of their party, but even this is self-defeating, since Republicans run Washington.
Republicans must take the scandal seriously and work to clean up in its wake.
Abramoffed (Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker)
“The scandal is not what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal.” So goes Kinsley’s Law of Scandal, handed down many years ago by the iconoclastic writer Michael Kinsley. By this definition—probably the more pertinent one—the Abramoff affair is not just a Republican scandal, and not just a “bipartisan” one, either. It’s simply the currently most visible excrescence of a truly national scandal: the fearful domination of private money over the public interest. And it’s going to take something a lot more serious than the fall of Jack Abramoff—or an outbreak of bogus charity—to fix it.
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid writes a letter (Steve Sebelius, Las Vegas CityLife)
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid writes a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, urging her to reject an Indian tribe's application to open a tribal casino.
One day later, a rival tribe opposing the casino request sends Reid's PAC $5,000, while a second rival tribe ponies up another $5,000.
Coincidence? Or the kind of quid pro quo of which federal indictments are generally made?
The question has been repeatedly asked in the past month, after the Associated Press revealed a massive letter-writing campaign from both Republicans and Democrats on behalf of Indian tribes represented by controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Dean denies party ties to Abramoff (Donald Lambro, Washington Times)
[Howard] Dean has stepped up attacks on Republicans, charging, "Every person named in this scandal is a Republican."
"Every person under investigation is a Republican. Every person indicted is a Republican. This is a Republican finance scandal," Mr. Dean said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition."
But Republican officials and a major public-integrity group counter his assertion with a growing list of Democrats who have received contributions from American Indian tribes represented by Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud in connection with his lobbying activities.
"What our list shows is that both Republicans and Democrats received contributions from Indian tribes that were represented at one time by Jack Abramoff," said Lawrence Noble, executive director and general counsel for the Center for Responsive Politics.
"So the answer to Dean depends on how you define scandal," Mr. Noble said. "I would say, broadly defined as a question of the tribes' buying influence in Washington, it includes Democrats."
Abramoff-linked probe focuses on five lawmakers (Jerry Seper and Audrey Hudson, Washington Times)
A Justice Department investigation into influence-peddling on Capitol Hill is focusing on a "first tier" of lawmakers and staffers, both Republicans and Democrats, say sources close to the probe that has netted guilty pleas from lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Law-enforcement authorities and others said the investigation's opening phase is scrutinizing Sens. Conrad Burns, Montana Republican; Byron L. Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat; and Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, along with Reps. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Republican, and Bob Ney, Ohio Republican.
[snip]
The sources also said that at least two legislative directors and other lobbyists are under investigation in the preliminary round of inquiry. The probe is expected to widen and could ensnare "a minimum" of 20 members of Congress, they said.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has not been directly implicated by Abramoff in the probe, but the Texas Republican's former deputy chief of staff, Tony Rudy, has emerged as a person of interest in the preliminary probe, the sources said.
DeLay Tried, Failed to Aid Abramoff Client (Suzanna Gamboa, AP)
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay tried to pressure the Bush administration into shutting down an Indian-owned casino that lobbyist Jack Abramoff wanted closed — shortly after a tribal client of Abramoff's donated to a DeLay political action committee, The Associated Press has learned.
As Orrin Judd pointed out, shouldn't you at least get influence when you're influence-peddling? :)
And yes, while so many partisan bloggers are huffing and puffing about their "side" and the "other side" and "Republican scandal" and "bipartisan scandal" I am cracking jokes.
Uncle Kev's take on money and politics really hasn't changed since May, when I wrote:
Money and politics are and will forever be intertwined. blogHOUSTON advises readers to be wary of politicians, bloggers, pundits, or anyone else who sanctimoniously suggests one political party is somehow more pure than the other on the topic of money and politics.
The National Journal's Hotline thought it was linkworthy, I'm told (I don't have a subscription). I'm not sure if they agreed or disagreed, but my thoughts haven't really changed in spite of all of the huffing and puffing.
Still, there's a little something for GOP and Democratic partisans in the excerpts I've chosen above. If your object in reading the news or analyzing politics or even blogging is to boost your "side" or point out the evils of the other "side" then I hope I've made your life easier. Please borrow freely. Go write about it on your own blogs. Enjoy yourselves!
And since some folks seem to enjoy obsessing over these posts in the hopes of ripping a single sentence out of context and playing "Gotcha!" I'll even help out those folks with a few stream-of-consciousness observations:
I wish to hell someone would send me good talking points. I could just paste them in, save myself a lot of thought and typing, and boost my Google ad revenue. Please let me know where I can find these talking points.
Rich Lowry is sometimes prone to hysterics. The above is one of those times.
Interestingly, I agree more with liberal Hertzberg than conservative Lowry re: their respective assessments of the nature of this scandal. But neither one quite gets all the way to the nature of the scandal -- that is, human nature.
Liberal Hertzberg and conservative Lowry do have one thing in common: they seem to believe that a magic pill -- that perfect legislative reform -- can fix the "problem" of money in politics. This conservative, on the other hand, does not believe in the perfectibility of man through legislation. But we probably will have some "reform" out of political necessity. And we will have another scandal at some point. A bigger one. Surely nobody believes otherwise? Yet Lowry and Hertzberg seem so hopeful, gawd bless 'em.
Anybody who broke existing laws ought to be punished. Republican, Democrat, whatever. Those chips can fall where they may. How anybody could read this post to suggest otherwise is beyond me, but I'm sure somebody will. Like I said, knock yourselves out.
Anyway, this scandal makes me yawn. I'm not going to waste my time tracking every detail or blogging about it. Not when there's NFL playoffs, college hoops, and college baseball is a month away. Are you kidding me?
Good night.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/11/06 23:40 | American Politics | Technorati
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Comments
I'm still feeling my way through this issue (as a whole, I think I've made my feelings on DeLay pretty clear over time), so let me play devil's advocate for a moment, or at least feel some ideas out in comment form.
Like you, I accept that to a degree money, power, and corruption (though you may not call it that) in Washington are pretty inevitable. I also find a lot of the sparks of outrage to be pretty disingenuous as I find outrage on the whole. I want a bumper sticker that says "If you aren't outraged, maybe you don't mistake outrage for moral conviction"... but it probably wouldn't fit.
But accepting a certain degree of money-turn-corruption (and I call it corruption because one doubts that DeLay really earnestly cared about Indian casinos), it seems to me that the greater degree we tolerate this in public the more that will happen behind the scenes. Parents that keep their teen on a 10:00 curfew may have kids sneaking out to stay out till midnight, but the mere having to sneak out will provide a disincentive to make it a more rare event than a parent that doesn't keep a curfew at all. A willingness to hold leaders accountable to the law is helpful (to say that "everyone does it" and therefore it should be excused - legal or no - is to not only discontinue a curfew but to buy the kid a new car), but is it sufficient? Knock DeLay down and you get someone else. New king same as the old. Is the consequence that DeLay himself has suffered sufficient to make his successor more careful? Maybe, though holding the entire party accountable would make the entire party more likely to put someone in power that is to fiscal corruption what Denny Hastert was to marital fidelity. Outrage, canned though it may be, matters.
The second and more problematic issue running through my mind is the conservative belief that a corruption in government is enabled and encouraged as much as anything by its size. It's the fact that the government is so big and has its hand in so many pies that so many people want to pay it off. The way to cut down corruption, by this thinking, is to cut down government.
That has not been happening under current Republican leadership. Instead of focusing on size, the focus is on direction. Not how much money is spent, but how it is spent. Though I find the GOP way more preferable than the alternative by a longshot, it doesn't begin to address the issue of how government size enables and encourages corruption.
In fact, the more privitized way easily provides greater incentive to. Instead of a company trying to make money by way of favorable legislation, privitization means that they have a more direct way of making money - spending $1 million in order to secure a $1 billion contract. I'm not sure how that's substantially different from the public-sector workers voting politicians to take better care of public-sector workers, but the lack of difference alone is disconcerting.
Anyway, that's the food that I'm thinking at the moment. You happen to read Slate's John Dickerson on the matter? (http://www.slate.com/id/213...) One of the few original takes on the matter.
Posted by RAW @ 00:16 on 01/12/06
Part one:
I want a bumper sticker that says "If you aren't outraged, maybe you don't mistake outrage for moral conviction"... but it probably wouldn't fit.
Friggin' awesome! I think I'm going to post that as the pithy statement at the top of the site for a while (with credit to RAW of course).
But accepting a certain degree of money-turn-corruption (and I call it corruption because one doubts that DeLay really earnestly cared about Indian casinos), it seems to me that the greater degree we tolerate this in public the more that will happen behind the scenes. Parents that keep their teen on a 10:00 curfew may have kids sneaking out to stay out till midnight, but the mere having to sneak out will provide a disincentive to make it a more rare event than a parent that doesn't keep a curfew at all.
I have no disagreement with the general point that we (society) ought to hold "corruption" in contempt. You're not reading me that way, but I'm sure some of our reading-challenged friends might. That's a mistake. But, I will never be shocked to discover that in a free society, people/interest groups with money will seek to influence the political process legitimately (some people think no influence is legitimate; that's silly), that some people will blow through any loophole and use creative interpretation of law to advocate for their party/agenda (to a large extent, this is my view on Tom DeLay, but a jury will have the final verdict on whether laws were broken), and that some people will find it very easy to profit personally (and unethically/illegally) with all the money floating around (nothing here should be read as approval for that).
Why is this? Well, some of it's human nature. And there's also the aspect you point out:
The second and more problematic issue running through my mind is the conservative belief that a corruption in government is enabled and encouraged as much as anything by its size. It's the fact that the government is so big and has its hand in so many pies that so many people want to pay it off.
Because the acts of government can benefit or disadvantage SO MANY PEOPLE/GROUPS/INTERESTS these days, gaining influence over those in government matters! Yeah, I can buy into that to a very large degree.
Posted by Kevin @ 09:02 on 01/12/06
Part two (the comment was too long, so I had to break it up):
I grew up in Osage County, the home of the Osage Indian tribe, oil/gas (on the decline even when I was growing up, with the big bust in the 80s from which the area never really recovered), and cattle. The Department of the Interior had a Bureau of Indian Affairs Office in town. It was always sort of a mystery to me what BIA actually DID or why we needed it, even though a good friend's dad worked for them. But, hey, we had treaties with Indian tribes, and the Osage Indian tribe owned mineral rights to land over Osage county (important, considering the regional oil boom that helped make Frank Phillips and nearby Phillips Petroleum a major oil and gas player), and it just seemed to be an accepted state of affairs, even if I couldn't quite figure it out. But in the 1980s, if you had told me there would be a big scandal involving the Department of Interior, Indian tribes, influence peddling, and the like, I would have found it inconceivable. Back then, I was just surprised that on Osage Indian land, my mom could get her smokes a hell of a lot cheaper than anywhere else. Hey, I was a pre-teen and wasn't observing the world like I do now, or maybe I would have guessed that if they can sell cigarettes, they can also make a TON of money promoting gambling, and THAT will eventually become of interest to the pols, and being a designated Indian tribe might actually be big business, instead of just a sign that your people got screwed by the white man a long time ago.
So yes, the fact that Congressional influence over the little ol' Department of Interior could be tied to such an exciting SCANDAL really OUGHT to be a shocker to limited-government types. The biggest controversy I'd like to see involving Interior is whether there ought to be more user fees to support national parks (and hardcore libertarians would call me a sellout on that, since I'm conceding in a way that Interior ought to be involved in land management AT ALL).
But, I digress. That's a big, long, rambling discussion of the type that I actually find interesting, and it's probably full of single sentences that the reading-challenged can rip out of context and make into something it's not (that sort of thing is not my idea of conversation, but like I say above, knock yourself out if that's how you get your jollies).
I sort of asked the question you're getting at on Tom Kirkendall's blog yesterday: If a majority of the electorate WANTS big government (at least big government as you and I would probably define it) and the social safety net, then how do Republicans win on a limited-government philosophy? Is there an option besides third-way compromises that at least attempt to empower individuals?
http://blog.kir.com/archive...
Not one response over there, and Tom has some smart readers. Surely the question is not that uninteresting. Surely it's more interesting than what "side" did what today. But maybe/apparently not.
Posted by Kevin @ 09:03 on 01/12/06
Rich Lowry is just exercised over this because he, like a lot of conservative media people, is always looking for a way to throw their own under the bus. Got to show your NY liberal "friends" that you can be "fair-minded," ya know:)
BTW, Kevin, how does it feel to have a majority of the people flat-out agree with you for once, per the latest Pew poll on this. Don't get too big of a head, now:)
Posted by Brad S @ 09:46 on 01/12/06
Brad S: Don't EVEN get me started on what I almost referred to as Rod-Dreher syndrome! I almost worked that into the post's comment on Lowry, and just decided to leave it at hysterics. Maybe my good friend Anne can pop in and elaborate on Dreher at some point. :)
Posted by Kevin @ 09:48 on 01/12/06
Kevin, doesn't Dreher nowadays work for the Dallas Managed News? Guess we shouldn't tap ol' Rod on the shoulder and mention the old saw about Lying Down with Dogs should we?
As far as attempts at gaining influence with govt officials being immoral/unethical goes, I would simply point out that there is a certain morality behind the notion of knowing which side your bread is buttered on. After all, if it weren't for certain attempts at gaining help on getting a govt contract in my business (telecom), I would have trouble paying rent right now:)
Posted by Brad S @ 10:03 on 01/12/06
Further to the conversation, George Will's column, which makes many points touched on here:
http://www.washingtonpost.c...
One point not touched on here -- term limits.
I'm a fan of term limits, but I'm not convinced it will solve the problem as George Will perceives it. Isn't there a chance that term limits will only increase the power of permanent staff and lobbyists, and will not affect the real problem (government doling out favors that benefit some and don't benefit others in areas that shouldn't even be concerns of government!)? And back to my earlier question: How do Republicans win elections when they probably can only get 35% of the people to agree that many government programs must be cut and government's reach must be reduced significantly?
More fodder for discussion.
Posted by Kevin @ 11:10 on 01/12/06
Rod Dreher! What a disappointment he's become. You can sense that he just wants his fellow DMN editors to love him. Two recent highlights from The Corner where he occassionally posts:
http://corner.nationalrevie...
Scroll up for other Cornerites reaction.
Then a few days later, a Cornerite highlighted a column Dreher wrote for the Times of London. Again, scroll up for reaction, but don't miss these two:
http://corner.nationalrevie...
http://corner.nationalrevie...
RDS -- Rod Dreher-syndrome -- is the perfect description for it!
Posted by anne @ 11:30 on 01/12/06
That's an excellent post and some fantastic comments.
We don't have to call you Uncle Kev now, though, do we?
Posted by Rob Booth (Slightly Rough) @ 19:25 on 01/12/06
Rob: Thanks for the kind words. It's mostly just stream-of-consciousness stuff, but it's sometimes nice to get these thoughts off the mind and down somewhere. That some excellent comments followed -- including that great line from RAW -- is what makes this little blog hobby fun for me. I've kind of been turned off on posting on national politics at all lately because "my side/your side" death matches aren't interesting or entertaining to me and I don't really want this to be that sort of blog. I outgrew usenet in grad school! :)
On Uncle Kev -- folks can call me whatever they'd like, although we do hope for polite behavior in the comments. :) But elsewhere -- hey, profanities, Coven member, right-wing shill, whatever folks prefer. Be creative, I say!
Posted by Kevin @ 08:44 on 01/13/06
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