How to tie Republicans to corruption

By Brian Hurt | Published: February 23, 2006

I’m reading this interview with MN Senate DFL Canidate Amy Klobuchar, which is a must read. But I had just had to comment one particular quote. He competitor for this seat, MN Congresman Mark Kennedy, hasn’t been connected with Abramoff. And, to be brutally frank about it, I don’t think he will, not in any big way. He simply wasn’t a big enough wheel in the House to be worth Abramoff’s money. So how can Klobuchar use Abramoff as an advantage in the campaign?

In my role as a prosecutor, you draw the line every day. We see white collar cases come into our office. It usually starts with someone maybe stealing a little money from the petty cash, and then they end up taking millions of dollars from the workers’ 401k accounts. And I believe it’s our job to draw the line and say there’s a difference between what’s right and what’s wrong.

Well, in 2006, it’s going to be the job of the American people, the voters. Because what’s happened here is really the responsibility of everyone in leadership in Washington, DC, because this started with them bringing… I always say, “You dance with the one that brung ya,” that that’s what’s going on out there. They would give tax loopholes to their friends and give companies the ability to send jobs overseas that brought them into office, and then the next thing you know, they’re taking PAC contributions and funneling them into other PACs, trying to hide them, and the next thing you know they’re lying before a grand jury. That’s what this culture of corruption is.

And if you asked how does my opponent, Congressman Kennedy… what does he have to do with it? I’ll just look at the prescription drug bill. This was a bill pushed by the Republican leadership. Congressman Kennedy did support this bill. And it basically insulated the prescription drug companies from competition.

Way to go, Amy! That’s how you connect even “clean” Republicans to the corruption. They’re following corrupt leaders- so the fact that they themselves may not have taken a bribe doesn’t protect you from the consequences of the corruption.

And I don’t think the Republicans get to bitch about this either (doesn’t mean they won’t). Mark Kennedy is responsible for his own voting record. He’s a grown boy now. The fact is that Kennedy, and McCain, choose to follow this leadership, and vote for these bills. “I was just following orders” wasn’t a defense in 1945, and isn’t a defense now. Especially because if they say that, the response is “who do you want in office- someone who blindly follows the orders of corrupt leaders, or someone who is willing to do what is right for Minnesota and the United States, and blindly follows no one?”

Reading this interview further, if she isn’t reading dKos and the blogsphere on a daily basis, she sure sounds like it. The paragraph on how we’re losing the middle class sounds like it was ripped right out of a Jerome a’ Paris diary (he won’t mind- he’d be ecstatic that the word is getting out). And the deficit? Notice how she’s pinning all of this on the Republicans- a job made easier by the fact that they’re actually to blame.

She has my vote.

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  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    “who do you want in office- someone who blindly follows the orders of corrupt leaders, or someone who is willing to do what is right for Minnesota and the United States, and blindly follows no one?”

    Assuming, of course, that party line Democrats wouldn’t be corrupt if they were in power, are willing to do what is right for Minnesota and the United States, and blindly follow no one.

    It’s always the purview of the minority party that they’re the clean, nice ones concerned about misspending/overspending, and the majority party is the stinking dirty ones who are drowning in their own champagne. The Republicans did it during Clinton’s reign, and now the Democrats are doing it during Bush’s reign.

    I fully expect that the Democrats will win big in 2006. I expect them to then “clean house”, although mostly in form and not in substance. I expect them to blame the Republicans for not being able to make the changes necessary to fix the system (c.f.: 2004~2005 social security reform push), and I expect them to proceed to be just as corrupt and pandering statists as the Neocons have managed, albeit much more honest statists.

  • bhurt-aw

    Cynicism is the ultimate moral supine position- if there is no hope of changing things for the better, there is no need to change things at all. Why bother to throw the current bunch of corrupt bums out of power if the people who replace them become instantly corrupt as well?

    The answer is- it doesn’t have to work like that. The vast majority of Democrats who have served have not been corrupt. And I comment that “corrupt” means more than just “imperfect”. Imperfect, yes- explicitly taking bribes for specific votes (like the Republicans have been doing), no. Compromising to get something done (even when compromising may not have been the best tactic), or not taking the best possible position, doesn’t qualify as corrupt.

    Note that not following leaders blindly actually helps to prevent corruption. One of the reasons that is was so profitable to bribe Delay was that Mark Kennedy voted whichever way Delay told him to- by bribing Delay, you were getting Kennedy for free. If Kennedy thought for himself, and didn’t just blindly follow Delay, you’d have to bribe both (and lots of other people as well)- a much more expensive proposition. This is less pressure to corrupt Democrats because it’s less valuable to do so.

    This is the advantage of a big-tent, flexible ideology party with anti-authoritarian leanings- internal checks and balances. A few bad apples can’t corrupt the whole system. With the Keating five scandal, several Democrats did take bribes (effectively). They did not, however, manage to signifigantly alter the party as a whole, because everyone who wasn’t bribed went their own way (I also note that they weren’t the party leadership either, but the Democratic party has a demonstrated history of not following it’s own leaders, corrupt or not). Also note that they were held accountable by members of their own party.

    The current Republican party, by contrast, has a rigid ideology, is a tiny tent (ideologically), and demands complete subservience from it’s members. Which is why the Republicans are finding it so hard to hold their own members accountable, when it’s the leadership itself that needs to be held to account. The cult of the leader is so strong that the Republicans are even willing to follow Bush over a cliff.

    Without any checks and balances (internal or otherwise), and with the rewards for corrupting the Republicans so high and the cost (relatively) low, of course the Republicans got corrupt. Looked at this way, it was damned near inevitable. With checks and balances (both internal and otherwise) in place, the rewards low and the cost high, the probablity of major Democratic corrupting is much, much lower.

    It is possible to change things for the better.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com Candide

    The problem is that while the Democrats might currently be big-tent, anti-authority, I don’t expect that to last once they get into power. Even you and Analog have been calling for stricter control on who gets to be a Democrat and who doesn’t — “cleaning house” and “party loyalty” are terms already being kicked around by the Democrats, and they’re not even in power yet. Given that, you’ll excuse me if I consider both parties to basically be self-serving machinery.

    Think of it this way — what cost are the Democrats going to have to pay for corruption that the Republicans aren’t? You assert that the rewards are low and the costs are high for Democratic corruption, but that’s basically only true because they’re the minority party with weak loyalty, so nobody is bothering to bribe them. That’s not exactly a morally superior position to be in, and it reveals the major issue with expecting the Democrats to be our saviors.

    I believe that it is possible to change things for the better. Switching masters, however, doesn’t make us any less of a slave. We’ve got to change the way politics work and bring it closer to the people, which involves making systemic changes — first and foremost, breaking down the party system so that we can have real accountability to the people.

  • bhurt-aw

    The fallacy in your logic is assuming that the only reason that two elected politicians would vote the same way is because they’re both taking bribes from the same source. This is why party loyalty always turns to corruption.

    Here’s the question about party loyalty: who (or what) is the party loyal to? In the Republican party as it’s currently constituted, loyalty to the party means loyalty to the leaders of the party (Bush, Frist, Delay, etc.)- who are in turn not loyal to anyone or anything except money and power. The Republican leadership isn’t even loyal to the Republican party (consider the current Dubai ports deal- the Republican leadership is demanding loyalty to a position that hurts the party as a whole, but benefits the leadership personally in money and power). It’s no wonder they became corrupt almost immediately upon gaining power.

    When Dave and I use the term “enforcing party loyalty” to the Democrats, who are what are we demanding they be loyal to? First, and foremost, we’re demanding they be loyal to the people. This is anti-corruption. This means doing what’s good for large groups of people if not the whole country. Notice what we get pissed off at Lieberman about- undercutting Democrats as a whole- and supporting the corrupt Republicans. Lieberman is doing what’s good for Lieberman, and incidently helping out the Republian leadership (not Republicans a whole, mind you- just the leadership). Note that even by limiting the field to “Democrats” we’re still talking about 40%+ of the population, or about 120 million people or so.

    When the people you’re giving loyalty to and following are a sufficiently large fraction of the population, corruption becomes impossible by definition. If two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, how well can a hundred million keep a secret? Openess is a natural consequence of this. This is why I oppose the tendency of the Democrats to try and do backroom deals (why did Paul Hackett drop out of the race?). The corruption comes from the decision making being done in secret- when your loyalties are to large groups of people, secrecy doesn’t work anymore.

    Note that the Republican blogs tend to have the same problem- loyalty to individual leaders. That’s the fundamental question here- who’s in charge here? On the liberal side, the blogsphere is making a play to be in control. On the conservative side, even the blogsphere is subservient to corrupt leaders.

    This is why I don’t fear Democratic corruption as much as Republican corruption, especially were the Blogsphere to become a power in the Democratic party.

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