Day: November 19, 2010
Charles, the Ethically Challenged
Now the ethics committee’s left Rangel
At the end of his rope there to dangle.
It gets really complicated
When your conscience gets sublimated,
And your ethics get all in a tangle.
Originally published March 4, 2010
Dear Tea Party: If You Stand for Anything, You Must Demand That Your New Members of Congress Refuse Their Govt Health Coverage
What the tea party wants, the tea party gets — at least for now.
On Monday, the tea party spooked one of the Senate’s biggest old bulls, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, into doing a full 180 on earmarks. He has agreed to stop Republican senators from tapping funds for roads, hospitals and other projects in their states, despite the risk that comes with failing to bring home the bacon when the next elections roll around.
Why is it okay with the tea party that the politicians they voted for on Nov. 2 based on their opposition to socialist health coverage will, in February, become recipients of the same socialist coverage they were elected to oppose?
Also on Monday, tea party leaders resorted to bullying their own newly elected members of Congress — not over earmarks or anything related to policy — but rather to force them to attend a tea-party indoctrination seminar in Washington that a tea party group had inadvertently scheduled to conflict with a long-established freshman orientation session hosted by the Claremont Institute. The tea party leadership did this by publishing the members’ personal contact info in an email blast to their followers, urging the tea bagger rank and file to call the new members and browbeat them into skipping the Claremont event in favor of the tea party seminar.
(As a tactic, unleashing the mobs on your own members over a scheduling snafu smacks of political amateurism — especially when it would have been arguably easier to apologize for the mistake and reschedule the event. For one thing, bombarding members of Congress with crank calls over such a trivial matter not only risks alienating them, it uses up precious political capital. What will tea party leaders do get the members’ attention when something more important than a seminar comes up — kidnap their dogs, send letter bombs?)
