Tag Archives: corruption

Roy Blunt sees no evil, hears no evil and says nothing of substance about PutinGate

15 Saturday Jul 2017

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Senator Roy Blunt (R) is a piece of work.  Donald Trump, the leader of his party, is demonstrably, publicly corrupt, and almost surely owes his slim election victory, at least partly, to the machinations of a hostile and equally corrupt Russian autocrat. Yet now that the evidence of Trump campaign collusion with said autocrat is all but undeniable, thanks to the missteps of president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., Senator Blunt still wants to equivocate.

With a straight face Blunt declares that he believes that the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is a member, should indeed ” follow wherever the facts take them, including the possible involvement of President Donald Trump’s campaign with the Russian government.” Nothing wrong with that statement in itself, but did you note the use of the qualifier “possible” to weaken its impact? At this stage of the game yet? And he almost immediately qualified his dedication to finding the truth in three ways that, parsed carefully, make it clear that he is not really interested in what Trump actually did or didn’t do:

Roy Blunt sees no evil if it comes wrapped in dollar bills:

First, Blunt asserted that, although the entire situation with its suggestion of unsavory business contacts reeks of ill-gotten gains, money laundering and influence peddling,  “following the money”  should be off limits:

Blunt told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Wednesday afternoon that the Intelligence committee, which he sits on, shouldn’t examine financial ties between Russian and the Trump campaign organization.

“I wouldn’t think so” said Blunt. “I would think that the intel committee, when we get this more pressing issue of Russian involvement in the election, and any involvement that others had with them, if that turns out to be the case, I thinks that’s got to be the top priority.”

Blunt, evidently, doesn’t think it’s remotely possible that there’s a financial angle to the corruption of our electoral process by Russia, and, if there is, it shouldn’t be of interest to the committee investigating said corruption. Whose leg is Blunt trying to pull anyway? Given his glory days in the House of representatives where he served to great renown as corruption meister, Tom DeLay’s, chief GOP bagman, he surely recognizes the stench that often arises at the intersection of money and power.

It’s now well-established that the powerful President of Russia directed an extensive and sophisticated intervention in the 2016 U.S. election. This intervention was intended to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump, a man who has shown himself willing to use the Presidency to line his own pockets, hides his tax returns, and who, according to all indications, has had shady dealings, likely of a financial nature, with the new, gangster-style Russian oligarchy. Evidently Roy Blunt hasn’t heard of kompromat. Yet Roy Blunt sees no potential in pursuing the financial issues.

Roy Blunt would prefer to hear no evil:

After asserting that exploring the relationship between Trumpian corruption, possible Russian extortion, etc. should be off limits in the Intelligence Committee’s RussiaGate investigation, Blunt managed to declare that he wanted to cut off the information spout that led to the investigation in the  first place:

Blunt wants the committee to expand its inquiry to find out who in the federal government is leaking classified and confidential information to the press.

“It’s within our responsibility as the intel committee in the Senate to look at the leaks, to look at how secure our own national security structure is” Blunt told MSNBC. “That’s probably where we expand to.”

A number of Republicans have accused career government employees of trying to sabotage the Trump presidency with a flood of leaks.

Can  you imagine folks so devoid of a moral center they think that it’s okay to ignore the crime and go after the whistleblowers – no matter that the “presidency” they may be “trying to sabotage” is clearly sinking under the weight of its own corruption and ineptitude? I can. We call them Republicans and that fact goes a long way toward explaining Blunt’s investigative druthers.

Roy Blunt will, though, speak a little backhanded evil :

Blunt was, however, unable to resist indulging in a little Schadenfreude on the topic of Trump, Inc. troubles. The consummate insider just couldn’t resist having a little fun at the expense of the bumbling reality star and his stable of incompetents who are mucking up the business of government after bad-mouthing pros such as Blunt:

Blunt doesn’t think the Trump campaign had the political experience to entertain the notion of collusion. “What you had in the Trump campaign was a candidate who had figured out the exact communicating spot to be with the American people in 2016, and a campaign around him that I was never sure had the capacity to collude with the Republican National Committee, let alone anybody else” said Blunt on MSNBC.

Well of course they  didn’t. That’s why they’re in the hot seat now. The New York Post said it best when it proclaimed in an editorial headline that Donald Trump  Jr. is an idiot. Apropos of which, it’s  clear that Trump Jr. is his father’s son, and that, as far as their team goes, like attracts like. Neither incompetence or stupidity, however, is a defense.

Several commentators have also brought up the lack of a “moral compass” when discussing Trump’s campaign machinations. Perhaps congressmen like Senator Blunt, who clearly understand how huge the stakes are for the country, might be said to lack the same accoutrement as well when they show themselves willing to hedge and deflect serious issues surrounding our openly compromised president in order to preserve the advantages of partisan power

*First two paragraphs revised for stylistic and clarity reasons.

 

 

Clay and Cleaver go after corrupt Trump

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Given the urgency of the RussiaGate investigations and what it implies about the man playing at being President of the United States, his corrupt finances as well as the important national security implications of his tangled financial dealings – from which he has refused to divest – have been given short shrift. It’s even worse because the same rot infects the entire Trumpian apparatus. His cabinet consists of industry insiders who will now regulate the industries that feathered their very nice nests. Indeed, one of his cabinet appointees, Tom Price, was confirmed even after unethical insider trading on his part was exposed. What does it take, one asks, to get the Republican majority congress to actually do the people’s business and get to work cleaning up this mess rather than sit back and wait to enable the rich businessmen who pay their campaign bills?

A lawsuit maybe? Specifically yet another lawsuit (there are at least two others) inspired by the reek of corruption emanating from The Donald:

Nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress agreed to file a lawsuit Wednesday against President Trump alleging that by retaining interests in a global business empire he has violated constitutional restrictions on taking gifts and benefits from foreign leaders.

The lead senator filing the complaint in federal district court, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), said Tuesday that the lawsuit has already drawn more congressional plaintiffs — 196 — than any legal action previously taken against a president. No Republicans had joined in the lawsuit so far, although they will be invited to do so, Blumenthal said.

An advance copy of the legal complaint reviewed by The Washington Post argues that those in Congress have special standing because the Constitution’s “foreign emoluments clause” requires the president to obtain “the consent of Congress” before accepting any gifts.

And I’m proud to tell you that both of Missouri’s Democratic House members, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II and Rep. William Lacy Clay, are part of this historical effort to protect the interests of the American people from fat cat predators like Donald Trump and his minions.

I would suggest that you phone Clay and Cleaver and thank them for their good work. If you live in their districts you can email them: Go to the Website for the U.S. House of Representatives, select the Representatives from Missouri, click on their individual Websites, choose the contact form, and fill it out thanking them profusely for what they’re trying to do for us.

And if your representative is a Republican, you can follow the same process to ask them why they’re Okay with the rampant Trumpian corruption in Washington D.C. Point out that they can let us know whether or not they believe in honest, fair and open government by joining this lawsuit. By their actions, ye shall know them.

Trump world is Blunt world when it comes to climate change and big oil money

01 Thursday Jun 2017

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Today Donald Trump declared his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. There are lots of pragmatic reasons that this is just dumb, no matter what you think about global warming:

  1.  Under the terms of the agreement, participants can’t effectively withdraw until 2020 – and with luck Trumpy and his oil-love minions will be gone. Meanwhile, there’s no immediate big bang for the buck.
  2. If anyone really thinks the carbon reduction targets designated by the U.S. – historically one of the biggest contributors to the problem – are unfair, we don’t need to withdraw from the agreement to change them – or even just ignore them. They are voluntary. Of course, they’re also desirable, but that’s another story.
  3. The U.S. will sacrifice its leadership role in world climate policy by withdrawing from the main forum for world climate policy formation.
  4. Many businesses, even Exxon-Mobil, oppose the move for many of the foregoing reasons, as well as the fact that many realize that climate change isn’t going to be good for business in the long run. Others are indifferent.

Then there are, of course, the moral reasons. The world is at risk; the agreement represented a collective effort to meet the challenge. Without the U.S. the future of the agreement is unsure. Even if other participants persevere, the loss of cooperation from one of the biggest polluters will hurt. Do we even need to point out that we owe our children a future, one which will be either impossible, or brutish in the extreme, in a ruined earth?

But, still, as they say, elections have consequences, and if one of those consequences is going to be environmental doomsday along with corresponding economic chaos, so be it. I’m old, I won’t be around in twenty years, I have no children; it’ll only be a little skin off my nose – you know, higher risk due to extreme weather events, warmer winters, etc. I’ll probably be fine as will most of us older folks.

Although Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt qualifies as older, he does have children, some of whom have children of their own, but he evidently feels the same way I do, to hell with his progeny. Or else he thinks that they’ll be part of an elite insulated from the consequences. At any rate, though, he seems to think it’s no skin off his nose either. Which is probably why he was one of twenty-two Republican Senators who signed a letter to Trump, begging him to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement. Also it may have made it easier for him to put his name to arguments advanced in that letter that are specious at best.

Blunt and his pals argue that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will insure that the U.S. retains a seat at the negotiating table when it comes to climate policy. We don’t need, they argue, to be part of the Paris agreement to have a seat at the table. This arguments ignores the fact that it is the Framework that has provided the basis for the Paris agreement, the participants of which will dominate climate policy in the future.

Of course, if you read the letter, you’ll notice that the real object of the Senators’ ire is the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plant regulations. The regulations do reflect the former administration’s effort to meet carbon reduction targets agreed to in the climate pact. However, contrary to the letter’s assertions, legal authorities deny that there is an actionable, legal linkage between administrative regulations enacted by the U.S. and the rather vague requirements of the Paris agreement. Guardian writer Dana Nuccitelli, quotes David Doniger, a Senior NRDC attorney, who stated unequivocally that:

They are making things up. EPA did not rely on Paris to justify the Clean Power Plan, and none of the parties defending the Plan has cited Paris as a legal basis. On Clean Air Act Section 115, no one I know has made, or even thought of, this argument.

What the letter doesn’t say, though, is probably more important than the strained arguments it does make. Another Guardian report notes that each of the signatories, including our own inestimable Senator Blunt, have received buckets of cash from the oil and gas industries who have urged the President to withdraw from the agreement:

Unmissable behind the elected Republicans stand other interests: the oil, gas and coal industries, which together are some of the most influential donors to Republican candidates.

The big-money supporters got a return on their investment last week, when 22 Republican senators whose campaigns have collected more than $10m in oil, gas and coal money since 2012 sent a letter to the president urging him to withdraw from the Paris deal.

Nor should we ignore the fact that the $10 million that these public servants have openly collected from the fossil fuels industries isn’t even the lion’s share of their haul. The Guardian report adds:

Visible donations to Republicans from those industries exceeded donations to Democrats in the 2016 election cycle by a ratio of 15-to-1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that does not include so-called dark money passed from oil interests such as Koch industries to general slush funds to re-elect Republicans such as the Senate leadership fund.

At least $90m in untraceable money has been funneled to Republican candidates from oil, gas and coal interests in the past three election cycles, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics.

It’s truly inspiring to watch the intricate dance of political influence taking place in our new Trump world. Interesting also to note which of our politicians seem to be finally ready to really flourish, unchecked,  in what seems to be their natural environment.

Conservative morality

24 Friday Feb 2017

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Nancy LeTourneau of the Political Animal Blog recently wrote a provocative article on the issue of morality in a pluralistic society. The gist of her argument is that conservative Christians, by making their deal with the devil, i.e. Donald Trump, have not only abrogated their claim to superior morality, but opened the door to a discussion of morality that is more in harmony with liberal pluralistic values. LeTourneau implicitly suggests the existence of a gap between the moral universe inhabited by liberals and that of conservatives. It strikes me that this gap is both more substantive and coarser than LeTourneau in her effort to be fair, suggests.

The difference between the two points of view was clear when the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) revoked an invitation for Breitbart provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, to speak at their annual meeting after tapes surfaced in which he seemed to speak approvingly of pedophilia. Just a few weeks earlier conservatives professed to be horrified when he was similarly disinvited to speak by UC Berkeley. The difference? The Berkeley protestors whose actions precipitated the cancellation of Yiannopoulos talk were disturbed by his “free” exercise of “hate speech, racism, misogyny and transphobia.” CPAC couldn’t handle Yiannopoulos speaking “freely” about sexual practices that they consider especially taboo.

Time and again, it seems that the only behavior that can get conservative morality roiling is sexual. Here in Missouri we have a legislature that is all but openly selling influence when they’re not busy slurping the swill ladled out by lobbyists. But it took a sex scandal – legislators hustling interns – to provoke a backlash and, temporarily at least, lend some force to discussions about the need for ethical oversight. The results were rules governing interns (including a widely ridiculed proposal to keep those young sluts from dressing provocatively – our state legislators, it seems, shouldn’t be expected to resist temptation all on their own), and a few limp efforts to address legislative corruption.

Get the picture? If it involves sex, conservatives get worried about morality. Bullying, vicious slurs directed toward groups that conservatives view askance, along with financial and political corruption, not so much.

It’s no accident that conservative and ostentatiously Christian Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO4) objected to the Women’s march as much because of the signs, which she characterized as “very pornographic,”as anything else. I saw lots of signs about the ACA, Social Security and the full range of economic justice issues. To be fair, I also saw signs that would have shocked my very sedate grandmother. Words like “uterus” and Hartzler’s avowed president, Donald Trump’s, favorite, “pussy,” were visible, along with statements that the organs in question were the property of the women holding the signs, and, consequently, not subject to the control of the patriarchs.

Hartzler had much less to say about the issues that brought all those the men, women and children with the “pornographic” signs out. She doesn’t, for example, give a tinker’s you-know-what about healthcare, an issue that motivated many of the marchers – that’s why she’s voted some fifty or sixty times to repeal the ACA – but she’s worried that people who do care about it showed their concern with what she believes to be pornographic signs. It’s all about sex with these folks.

Even the issue that represents one of the most persistent areas of moral disagreement between conservatives and progressives/liberals, abortion, hinges on differences between the way the two camps respond to female sexual behavior. Despite the hysterical evocation of “baby-killilng” and silly labels like “pre-born,” the relationship between abortion and the fear of unfettered female sexuality is, as Sara Erdreich, argues obvious when one considers the prevalence of arguments about whether or not victims of rape or incest “deserve” to get an abortion, but women whose sexual behavior is voluntary don’t. And don’t get me started on Catholicism, female sexuality, and abortion.

Progressives are frequently advised to frame issues in moral terms if we want them to have wide resonance. However, if our concept of what is morally most important differs so radically from the “other” guy, it leaves us with one simple question: How do we talk about the full spectrum of moral issues – which are often life and death issues – with people whose concept of what can be considered moral or immoral seems to be so limited?

Roy Blunt and GOP sugar mama Betsy DeVos

03 Friday Feb 2017

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Orange Buffoon’s nominee to Head the Education Department is so unqualified that at least two normally compliant GOP Senators can’t bring themselves to hold their noses long enough to vote for her. Here’s how unqualified she is: DeVos has been supportive of shifting public financial support to charter schools. Yet a major supporter of charter schools, philanthropist Eli Broad,  thinks she is so unqualified that he has written to U.S. Senators imploring them to deep-six the nomination.

DeVos will probably make it through the process and end up running the Untied States’ educational system as long as no more than two Republicans defer to a preference for the public good. Why? The lady’s rich. Really rich. And she’s showered many of the very Republican senators who will be voting for her with lots of rich folks special type of pocket-book love. That means very large direct donations as well as big PAC spending.

One of those Senators is Missouri’s Republican Senator Roy Blunt. DeVos has assisted Blunt’s electoral efforts with $33,100. It’s a foregone conclusion that our Roy will vote “yea” when DeVos faces the final confirmation vote. To be fair, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) got more dosh than Blunt, $43,000, to be exact, and she has elected to follow her conscience and oppose DeVos’ appointment. But she’s the exception that proves the rule.

There’s more going on, of course. There may be some Republicans who are just as ignorant as DeVos and/or are so ideologically blinkered that they think she’s just fine. Our Roy, of course, seems to want to climb the leadership ladder in the Senate, so we can count on him to toe the line even when we suspect he’s smart enough to know it’ll lead to disaster. To judge by his past deportment, Roy’s rule has always been what’s good for donors is good for him, what’s good for him is what he went to Washington for and devil take the hindmost. Missourians are, of course, the hindmost.

Nevertheless, there’s a big question raised by DeVos’ candidacy and the almost lockstep Republican support for a manifestly unqualified, but rich and generous – to Republicans – nominee. Shouldn’t the senators who have benefited most significantly from her largesse recuse themselves from voting on her nomination? Who’s to say if it’s just an “appearance” of corruption or the substance – does any fool really think we can trust the beneficiaries of that appearance of corruption to tell us the truth? Nevertheless, we’re expected to take their assurances of their own probity at face value and shut up about the impropriety of their actions.

DeVos herself has been pretty unequivocal about the fact that she expects her greenback “free speech” to do some big talking, observing in 1997, when asked what she expected to receive from politicians who accepted her money, that ” we expect a return on our investment.” Looks like she’s going to get it. Big time.

Selling government? It’s pretty clear that this is just the beginning. We’ve entered the age of Trump, folks. Americans – or a particular minority of Americans, at any rate, wanted to shake things up. Who’d have guessed that what would get shattered in the process would be the ethical norms we’ve observed or tried to observe for generations?

Running government like an unfettered, unregulated business turns out to be a pretty ugly, cutthroat phenomena and the only folks who make out well are those with power and those with money enough to buy  power. For politicians like Roy Blunt the next few years should rival his heyday when he rode high with Tom DeLay.

Why congressmen and women need to boycott the inauguration

19 Thursday Jan 2017

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As of 10:29 am to day, Jan. 19, 2017, 65 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have announced that they’ll be skipping Trump’s inauguration. Rep. Lacy Clay (D-1) is one of the 65. He’s the only one of the three Missouri Democrats who is standing up and refusing to normalize the incoming Trump administration.

It takes guts to make your line in the sand as clear as these 65 representatives have done. Inevitably there are those who bridle self-righteously and claim to be above the vulgar fray, insisting that the inauguration celebrates the peaceful transfer of power in our democracy, not the dangerous clown who will assume the office, and that that fact means that we have to pretend that it’s business as usual.

There’s also another popular excuse for refusing to draw a line in the sand at the outset against the Trump Mafia, one expressed by Missouri’s other Democratic member of the House, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-5), as well as in a recent editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

This newspaper opposed Trump from the beginning. We have yet to see anything to change our belief that he is misguided. But far more abhorrent is the notion that he doesn’t even deserve a chance to succeed. Americans, regardless of ideology, must enter the Trump era with minds open to the possibility that he could actually foment positive change.

Opponents should not decide in knee-jerk fashion that anything with the Trump stamp is automatically wrong. Measure the new administration by its results, not just its abrasive words.

This piece of self-righteous twaddle holds that one must hope for the success of the incoming president no matter what doubts that president inspires in otherwise sane individuals. Naturally, this line of thought rarely bothers to define what Trump’s “success” might mean in what business people designate as operational terms.

Neither of these arguments address the well-founded doubts that many entertain about the legitimacy of Trump’s incipient presidency. Don’t we – and by extension our elected representatives – have an obligation to oppose the peaceful transfer of power to compromised individuals? Should we or they sit back with averted eyes and pretend that there’s even the remotest chance that we could ever get a silk purse out of this especially filthy sow’s ear?

First, in spite of efforts to ignore it on both sides of the political aisle, there’s the serious problem of Trump’s Russian connections. At this moment, our President-elect’s Russian ties are under investigation by  six different government agencies – and we’re expecting our representatives to politely applaud when he’s handed the keys to the well-being of the nation? We cannot treat the ascension of a candidate already compromised by foreign entanglements as if it’s the usual business of democracy.

Second, Trump has massive financial conflicts of interest that potentially present a threat to American policy and security . As the owner of Trump Towers in Washington he will be violating the law the minute he becomes the President of the United States – a fact that is well known to him and his staff and which they consistently blow off as immaterial. He may well be in violations of the emoluments clause of the constitution when he takes office – there’s a reason that Trump will not release his tax return.

These problems have been well-aired, but our future President has failed to make a serious effort to address them. We do not need to wait to see what corruption of the sort that Trump will embody on day one of his presidency will do to destroy the ethical norms that have governed American political life up to this point. We need to make our opposition to his arrogance and his contempt for ethical norms known now, not after the fact when the problem has become institutionalized and we have become citizens of the United States of Corruption.

Third, we cannot overlook the fact that we now have a President-elect who managed to secure his position by dredging up the worst type of ugliness from America’s racially tormented past. We cannot in anyway normalize the presidency of a man who secured the job by virtue of mobilizing hate and bigotry. Nor, even for the duration of the inauguration ceremony, can we turn our face away from such moral corruption and the chaos it promises to bring.

None of the three reasons listed above for protesting the peaceful transfer of power that we all esteem stem from opposition to Donald Trump’s likely political goals, terrible though they may be to me and like thinking people, and which can easily be surmised from the sad set of corrupt and inept cabinet nominees he has selected – a lineup characterized by Paul Waldman as “worst cabinet in American history.” Reasons to protest the inauguration simply and purely address the fact that our president-elect is seriously compromised before he takes the office.

Donald Trump’s Russian entanglements were not known prior to the election. Nor did he make clear his intentions to ignore ethical norms – although one did not have to be terribly astute to figure out what was on the way. These issues could have been addressed, however, when the members of the electoral college took its vote. This type of situation, in which a manifestly unfit candidate manipulates democratic process to secure office, is exactly what that body was designed to deal with. Unfortunately, the electoral college has so fallen under the sway of partisan politics that it has become meaningless and we are left with no recourse but to signal our opposition in the only ways available to us.

So thank you Representative Clay. I’m not in your district, but you are still my representative because you are representing my interest in maintaining an uncompromised democracy. Sadly, you may be the only real representative I have in Missouri.

Cross-posted in slightly edited form to Daily Kos.

Holding our own folks accountable – and I mean you Emanuel Cleaver

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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As I read yesterday about the GOP’s sneaky effort to neuter the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), the most disheartening thing I encountered was an account of the reaction to the anti-ethics coup by Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-5):

The overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats in the House detest the Office of Congressional Ethics and want to revamp it, said Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri.

“When that happened to Sam, I thought, ‘This is horrible.’ Then it happened to (North Carolina Rep.) Mel Watt. Then it happened to (Mississippi Rep.) Bennie Thompson. And all these people were cleared,” Cleaver said in an interview Tuesday.

“Some people say, ‘Well, if they were cleared, don’t worry about it,’ ” he said. “But once it hits the newspaper it’s just like mud thrown against a wall. It can fall to the ground but the stain is still there.”

Cleaver said Democrats stood ready to work with Republicans to repair what many of them considered a very flawed ethics office. But not in secret.

Yeah, I get that it’s hard to have to be accountable for every little thing that you do – but that type of accountability goes with the type of power wielded by congressmen. You get the goods, you pay the price. And, yes, accusations can spoil a reputation. But that’s better than weak oversight by a House Committee that’s all too susceptible to partisanship and good ol’ boy pressure.

Despite Cleaver’s concern, the OCE investigation didn’t seem to do much harm to the folks cited by Cleaver as examples of its overreach. Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) was indeed cleared of trying to sell his vote, but he still harbors a grudge against the OCE for even considering the charges – in spite of the fact that he was reelected subsequent to the investigation. While I don’t know the details of the improprieties alleged against Bennie Thompson (D-MS) to which Cleaver refers (here’s one such story reported by TPM), I do know that he’s still serving in the House so it looks like he survived scrutiny by the OCE. Personally, I’m relieved that we have institutions that will investigate such allegations.

As for Cleaver’s outrage about Rep. Sam Graves, it might be just a little misplaced. Graves may have been cleared by the aforesaid weak House Ethics Committee after the OCE passed its findings along, but, if his hands are not absolutely filthy, he still seems to have fairly soiled fingers. In 2010 the US News and World Report’s Paul Bedard reported allegations that Graves “has been the subject of a new scandal every few months over the past two years.”

The DailyKos account of another of the “horror” stories the GOPers mustered to motivate their action – the sad story of Duncan Hunter’s rabbit – also falls a little short when it comes to mustering the type of righteous indignation Cleaver expresses. It seems that the OCE may have taken exception to travel reimbursements for transporting Hunter’s family’s pet rabbit in-cabin on flights. Hunter alleges this charge was an oversight, an honest error. Yet as DailyKos’ Laura Clawson notes, “this was just one $600 rabbit travel oversight among $62,000 in jewelry, video games, resort stays, oral surgery oversights and mistakes under specific circumstances.” Oh my!

Just these few examples are enough to show us why the Republicans are so eager to “reform” ethics oversight. As a former OCE attorney observed about their latest attack, “it effectively allows the committee to shut down any independent investigation into member misconduct. Historically, the ethics committee has failed to investigate member misconduct.” A sweet deal indeed for members of the party of Trump.

But a sweet deal for Democrats too? I don’t get Rep. Cleaver’s tender sensibilities. What’s he got to hide? When Elizabeth Warren tweets “who, exactly, thinks that the problem with Washington is that we have too many rules requiring the gov to act ethically?,” isn’t it embarrassing to answer that it’s one of the two Democratic representatives from Missouri?

Sam Graves at the heart of the GOP attack on the Office of Congressional Ethics?

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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The big news today was that the House GOP members tried last night to defenestrate the independent Office of of Congressional Ethics (OCE). Given the imminent installation of what will almost undoubtedly be one of the most corrupt presidential administrations since the Gilded Age, independent ethical oversight must have seemed to be so, you know, yesterday.

Republican majorities evidently are so used to operating with impunity that they did not count on the massive blowback that materialized literally overnight and which led them to backtrack today and declare that they would put the matter off until later in the session. As their President-elect tweeted, they had other priorities to accomplish – like gutting Medicare or passing massive tax cuts for the wealthy – before they move to enable wholesale congressional corruption.

The vote was – what else – secret, but according to the vote tally TPM is toting up, based on reader’s phone calls to their representatives office, Ann Wagner (R-2), to her credit, voted “no,” Blaine Luetkemeyer’s (R-3) office staff refused to disclose his vote, Billy Long’s (R-7) office promised to get back to the caller, while Jason Smith (R-8) is unaccounted for in the TPM list. Voting yes were Vicky Hartzler (R-4) and Sam Graves (R-6). Grave’s vote is not surprising, but it is especially interesting. According to McClatchy DC:

Graves’ experience with the watchdog came up during Republicans’ closed-door meeting Monday as an example of how costly and damaging such investigations could become for members, even if the accusations are never proved.

In 2009, the Office of Congressional Ethics recommended a formal investigation of Graves for inviting a business associate of his then-wife to testify on renewable fuels before the Small Business Committee, which Graves chaired. The businessman, Brooks Hurst, was invested in the same ethanol and bio-diesel cooperative as Graves’ wife.

Graves’ colleagues on the House Ethics Committee eventually cleared him of any wrongdoing and criticized the watchdog for its handling of the case.

The situation, however, could just as easily be construed as illustrative of the weakness of the House Ethics Committee. The OCE unanimously requested that the Ethics Committee investigate Graves for “potentially creating the appearance of a conflict of interest in selecting Hurst as a witness.” However, the Committee decided to let Graves off because  they could not demonstrate explicit personal gain and “no House rule prohibits the creation of an appearance of a conflict of interest.” I bet there’s no explicit House rule prohibiting pedophilia either.

Just to provide a little more context, this investigation wasn’t Grave’s first conflict of interest entanglement. Grave’s propensity to dabble in ethanol production for fun and profit has led him into questionable territory before. In 2008 he was involved in a state-level conflict of interest imbroglio centered on financial incentives for Show Me Ethanol LLC. Yet Republicans and some Democrats – Rep. Emanuel Cleaver for one – will tell you that Graves was vindicated and that his ill-treatment by the committee is evidence that it is running amok and needs to be restrained.

Makes you wonder what they’re so worried about – maybe something about a culture of corruption and those pesky chickens that always come home to roost?

Sen. Rob Schaaf kinda, sorta wants partial public financing of elections

29 Tuesday Nov 2016

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Tn a column in Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch State Senator Rob Schaaf writes about his soon to be introduced Senate Bill 1: The Taxation With Representation Act. (Get it? “with” representation. Cute, Huh?) He seems to believe that because Eric Greitens and Donald Trump managed to get themselves elected while dropping a few comments about cleaning up ethical “swamps,” now is the time to do something to stop big money from cracking the whip in Jefferson City:

This Election Day, we Missourians voted overwhelmingly against pay-to-play politics and in favor of anti-corruption reform. We reinstated contribution limits at the state level, elected a governor committed to fighting corruption in Jefferson City, and chose a president who ran against the status quo, promising he would return government to the people.

All I can do is shake my head sadly and look away. Poor naif. Schaaf think we elected a governor “committed to fighting corruption,” whereas, from where I sit, we elected a governor who allowed dark money interests to buy him the governorship – which, I assume, is the reason he opposes limits on campaign contributions, and likely part of the reason he’s been so eager to put his signature on a right-to-work bill lots of the big money types really want. And while the president-elect did run “against the status quo,” the particular status quo he opposes doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with corruption if we are to judge by his personal conflicts of interest, or his emerging plans to engineer one of the biggest corporate giveaways in U.S. history by privatizing just about everything from Medicare and Education to highways and bridges.

Somebody ought to tell Schaaf that it might not be the best time for campaign finance reform after all.

Nevertheless, Schaaf should still get some credit for proposing to redirect public tax revenue to partially fund political campaigns – not a position with which your garden variety GOPer is often very comfortable. The bill would allow Missourians to “subtract up to $100 per year from their state income taxes, letting them claim a dollar-per-dollar credit for donations to county-level party committees and to candidates for state representative, state senator and statewide office.” Well and good. Almost anything is better than the status quo in Missouri where many public office holders seem to be up for sale to the highest bidder. Schaaf’s may be a back-door approach to public funding, but any movement in that direction has some potential, no matter how small, to dilute the influence of wealthy special interests.

And Schaaf might just get some GOP support for this plan since it does not mandate any effort to allocate public funds equitably or based on some special criteria, but instead allows public tax revenue to be redirected in a partisan fashion – and right now, given the sun-blistered shade of the state’s politics, that could be a plus for GOPers. Whether or not underwriting public spending in a lopsided partisan way is a real reform is, of course, another question.

Schaaf claims several advantages to this system of funding: (1) it would encourage both candidates and parties (via the option to contribute to political committees) to be more responsive to “everyday citizens” as opposed to the big donors who have dominated Missouri political funding over the past few years. (2) He asserts that the bill would encourage engagement in the political process and empower individuals who feel sidelined by the influence of big money. He envisions his everyday donors evolving into mini “bundlers,” who solicit “friends, family and neighbors” to donate – which is not universally regarded as a good thing.

Schaaf also tells us that “such a system has worked in other states. However, while it is true that there are four states , Ohio, Virginia, Arkansas, and Oregon, that currently offer a similar tax credit, the evidence that it has widened political participation and lessened the influence of big money donors is not readily evident.

Oregon, for example, offers a loosely applied tax credit of up to $100 for households. According to PolitiFact Oregon, as of 2013, “the credit gets claimed most often during presidential election years, according to the Secretary of State’s office, but even at it’s [sic] peak, only about 7.8 percent of filers took advantage.”

Nor is Oregon exceptional in this instance. In Ohio the credit has been available for the last 26 years, but few Ohioans are aware of it. Among those who do know about the credit, “only 14 percent of donors said it was a factor in their decision to donate and only 5 percent of those who did not contribute said they would have been very likely to give if they had known about the credit.” Efforts to publicize the tax credits in Ohio have been shown to increase their use by a small percentage, it did so at a disproportionate cost.

The experience of Hilliary Clinton’s Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine, the former governor of Virginia, makes it clear that the Virginia tax credit does little to rein in the influence of big donors. In the 2012 cycle he raised $18,000,000 for his senate bid, with only 17% coming from small donors who contributed $200 or less, but “28 percent of his $18 million came from 1 percent of the 1 percent, a subgroup of America’s most elite political givers.” If you look at political spending in each of the other four states, I think you will find that the imbalance between large and small donors persists and that the preferences of the former often set the governing agenda.

If Schaaf is really serious about evening the political playing field for big and small donors, there are lots of other, better approaches. According to the information on the Website of the National Conference of State Legislators, there are two main systems of public financing in use over thirteen states, clean elections programs, or matching funds programs, . Both of these types of public financing collect money which is disbursed to candidates who must meet requirements such as agreeing to limit total expenditures to agreed upon limits, and/or demonstrating their viability by either collecting signatures from potential supporters or meeting a specified fund raising threshold. Public funds are also often restricted to candidates for specific offices and only four states allow money to be disbursed to political parties to help with organizing activities.

The League of Women Voters notes that the experience of jurisdictions that have evolved systems of public funding over time shows that the following elements are likely to produce the best results: a customized system for small- donor fund matching; eligibility criteria for receiving funds; voluntary expenditure limits; accurate and timely disclosure requirements. And, of course, we all know in our secret heart of hearts that there’s no real political spending reform without limits on giving that cut down the volume of the free-speech megaphone that wealth gives to some donors in these sad, money-is-speech days.*

But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of these requirements to be incorporated into Schaaf’s bill – if it even makes it to the floor where the GOP bottom-feeders will poke and prod it into a shape more to their liking, just as they have done with most of the half-hearted ethics reform bills introduced over the past couple of years. As a matter of fact, as Schaaf’s new president, that enemy of the status quo, gets going, look for him to make sure that he puts all the people in place to ensure that he meets the GOP campaign platform promise to do away with all campaign finance laws.

Which leaves us with poor Rob Schaaf, a Republican pol in the wrong place at the wrong time.

*Addenda: Of course, Missourians did vote for limits on campaign donations, but enforcement protocols or lack thereof remains important question for the future; also the current scuttlebutt is that the money will just go “dark.” The problem goes deep.

The Mike Pence comedy routine in Chesterfield

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Many think that when it comes to Trump-Pence, Trump is the entertainment arm of the duo. But Mike Pence has his moments. Speaking at a stopover in Chesterfield Mo today, he, according to a local NPR report,* asserted that the Trump-Pence campaign would have a narrow focus on (oddly broad) issues like national security and “the integrity of the President’s office.” As a strategy, this approach is a natural for The Donald and his side-kick Mikey. It eliminates the need to dig around in the policy weeds – a really good idea for a candidate who rather obviously doesn’t know how to “pull dem weeds.”

But the real kicker was the effort by Pence to draw a contrast between Trump and the woman he has, on the basis of cooked-up evidence, dubbed crooked Hillary, insisting that the major part of their joint campaign’s “narrow” focus would be its emphasis on integrity. After what we’ve seen of Trump, that bit of boilerplate would always have been amusing, but it’s a real knee-slapper when you hear it uttered only a few days after allegations of illegal campaign contributions and potential quid-pro-quo bribery on the part of Donald Tump have started bubbling up.

It seems that a Trump “charitable” foundation contributed about $25,000 to the campaign of the Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi, in 2013. The grisly details are summarized in The Hill:

In September 2013, the Florida attorney general’s office announced that it was considering joining a New York state inquiry into Trump University and the flood of consumer complaints from people who felt that they were ripped off by the so-called “university.”

In roughly the same time period, Bondi spoke personally with Trump and solicited a political contribution from him. These facts are all explained in strong detail in an Associated Press report from June of this year.

On Sept. 17, three days after a spokesman for Bondi told the Orlando Sentinel that her office was, indeed, considering joining the Trump U. investigation, a $25,000 check was cut by Trump’s foundation and sent to a committee associated with Bondi’s campaign.

According to a Sentinel report from the time, it was one of the biggest contributions the campaign committee had received. We’ve since learned, thanks to The Washington Post, that the Trump Foundation is a small organization with “no paid staff and relatively little money for a superwealthy man’s personal charity.”

And after the check arrived, Bondi’s office decide not to pursue a case against Trump U., saying there were insufficient grounds to join the New York state probe.

There’s more. Were there no appearance of bribery, tax-exempt charitable foundations can’t legally contribute to political campaigns – and if they do so by mistake they shoudn’t try to cover it up which seems to have happened in this case (Trump paid a $2,500 fine to the IRS). But there’s still more. Over the past few days, Trump has attempted to make light of this story and claimed that he never talked to Florida AG Pam Bondi. That is, as TPM reports, until today:

We’ve been talking over the last couple days about the apparent contradiction between Donald Trump’s statement that he never talked to Pam Bondi about his contribution or Trump University. Now Politico has gone to Trump for clarification. And Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks says there’s no contradiction. “His comments were in reference to any discussion about Trump University — not the donation,” Hicks told Politico.

Yeah, sure. And I want to sell you some beach front property in South Dakota. This is, after all, the guy who, as Hill consultant Jim Roberts observes, “has made it clear he expects favors for his political donations. ‘When I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.'”

Yet little Mikey, the so-called “happy warrior” (wasn’t that label also applied to Al Smith, a presidential candidate who lost badly?) has the chutzpah to get up before a Missouri audience and feed them blather about how he and his fellow-candidate are going to stand up for integrity? And will Missourian GOPers fall for it? You can bet that they want to.

Of course, I may have gotten it wrong. Maybe Pence didn’t really mean to say that he and Trump were going to campaign on the promise of preserving the integrity of the presidency, but perhaps he was talking about the “aesthetics” of the presidency, as in physically “looking presidential,” an issue that seems to preoccupy The Donald.

*I’ll update with a reference when one becomes available.

UPDATE: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that “Pence summed up a Trump presidency as one devoted to security and American integrity and not beholden to special interests.”

UPDATE 2: It looks like Bondi wasn’t the only politician who likely made big bucks off efforts to investigate – or not- the Trump U. scam. Officials in Texas, including Governor Abbott may be implicated in a similar bribery scandal.

Update 3: The Bondi scandal is even worse than it originally appeared. And these degenerates want us to believe they even know what integrity means?