On Washington's new culture of impunity
By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds, OpEd Contributor
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February 5, 2009
In the run-up to the 2006 elections, Democrats promised to end the "culture of corruption" in Washington. In the runup to the 2008 elections, Barack Obama promised "a new kind of politics."
But what we're seeing today seems like a very old kind indeed. If there's anything new about it, it's mostly that in this new Washington, even the people who get caught misbehaving don't face any consequences.
Despite all the faux-outrage about Wall Street bonuses on Capitol Hill, it seems to be the members of the political class who are getting away with things.
Obama's appointee as Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, turns out not to have paid all of his taxes, though experts agree that anyone in his position -- and certainly anyone who's supposed to be smart enough to solve our current financial crisis -- should have known that he owed them.
Even when an audit should have informed him of past problems, he kept mum, didn't amend his returns, and let the statute of limitations protect him. When the issue came up during his nomination to Treasury, he offered little more than the classic Steve Martin defense for not paying taxes: "I forgot!" followed by "Well, excuuuse me!"
Now former senator Tom Daschle is facing a similar problem. It's not enough that he left the Senate a millionaire, and then entered suspiciously lucrative employment with industries he had legislated about, and that he would have regulated if confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
And Daschle, too, had a tax problem, which caused him to pay $100,000 in back taxes once his nomination brought the issue to the forefront; Daschle had failed to report over $300,000 in taxable income. He prudently withdrew his nomination for HHS secretary.
Daschle never minded hiking taxes on the rest of us, but he seems to have a problem paying them himself. Will the Obama Administration take Leona "taxes are for the little people" Helmsley as its mascot?
Of course, it's not just the Obama Administration. On Capitol Hill, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, faces too many scandals to count, from tax problems, to real estate questions, to an interest-group-funded Caribbean junket that violated House ethics rules.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-CT, whose sweetheart loans from Countrywide Mortgage -- a subprime lender under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs -- became public over six months ago, has still not gotten around to releasing the documentation on that mortgage, despite a promise to do so.
Dodd and Rangel are allegedly under investigation by the House and Senate ethics committees, but no one expects much in the way of actual punishment to result.
So in a way we have found a new kind of politics. We've gone from a "culture of corruption" in which people who figured in scandals (can you say "Duke Cunningham"?) faced actual consequences, to a culture of impunity, in which it's taken for granted that the rules for big shots are different.
Don't pay your taxes? If you run a dry cleaning shop in Cincinnati, the IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But if you're a congressman or a former senator or a Treasury nominee, you can just sheepishly pay up, perhaps even , as in Daschle's case, without being assessed any penalties.
For that matter, an IRS field agent with these tax problems would have been cashiered, but Geithner, who will have the IRS under his supervision, gets the job anyway.
Ordinary Americans can be excused for thinking that there are two sets of rules: One for the bigshots, the connected, the Made Men of Washington D.C., and another for everyone else.
The Obama Administration may well ride out these particular scandals, and get its chosen nominees into office. Republicans may even let them, on the theory that an admitted tax-evader will probably find it harder to back tax increases on the rest of us.
And, besides, the Republicans in Congress who would be asking the questions are Made Men themselves. But the damage to the polity will remain.
Why shouldn't Americans cheat on their taxes if they think they can get away with it? Why should they treat the law with the same contempt the law's custodians do? Those questions will be harder to answer, and there's worse news even than the likelihood of this kind of slow social rot.
By all accounts, we're heading into a rough period, with the economy spiraling downward, the federal government near bankruptcy, and many state and local governments actually broke.
Europe is already seeing wildcat strikes and outbreaks of violence and civil disobedience. America may face those soon. As things get worse, will U.S. taxpayers look at the Made Men of Washington and conclude that there's no point in listening to calls for sacrifice and unity? And what will happen, then?
I don't know, but I fear we may find out. And the fault will lie with our political class, which has done so much to forfeit the trust that, ultimately, makes a nation possible.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds blogs at Instapundit.com, and hosts "Washington Watch" on PJTV.com.
