As Schock falls from grace, some say his scandal was overblown

Schock announced his resignation Tuesday and will leave office at the end of the month. The announcement came after more than a month of intense media scrutiny of his expense reports and financial deals.

“This was treated as a big deal in the media! But a day later, one unasked question seems to loom: So what?” Huffington Post media reporter Jason Linkis asked in an article titled “It’s Sad That The Best The Media Can Do To Fight Government Corruption Is Scalp Aaron Schock.”

Linkins’ article does not argue that Shock’s alleged misuse of public funds and violation of House regulations should have been downplayed, but he says the soon-to-be-former congressman’s reported abuses pale in comparison to some of the lesser-known back room deals brokered in the nation’s capital.

“Like the man himself, Schock’s crimes are trivial, and the fact that he ended up getting snared really only underscores how much corruption goes on elsewhere without anyone ever being held accountable for it,” the report read, characterizing the congressman’s reported habit of using public cash to fund his lifestyle as a “nickel-and-dime” operation.

From Congress’ ties to the financial industry to the type of “cronyism” regularly decried by the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, Linkins argues, there are far worse things going on in the nation’s capital than Schock’s renovating his office to look like a set from “Downton Abbey.”

Schock’s real mistake, the Huffington Post reporter claimed, is that he didn’t “play [the] system correctly and parlay several decades of favor-trading into a big cash-out at the end of his political career.”

Critics have noted that unlike lawmakers and lobbyists who exercise the utmost discretion, Schock called attention to his alleged wrongdoing with his flashy lifestyle, as the Associated Press may have discovered when it reviewed the congressman’s busy Instagram account and correlated uploaded photos with “flight records showing airport stopovers and expenses later billed for air travel against Schock’s office and campaign records.”

Schock’s flights are now under review.

The outgoing congressman’s trouble started in early February, when the Washington Post’s Ben Terris began working on an apparently innocuous Style piece about his flamboyantly decorated Capitol Hill office. In the middle of his reporting, Terris was told by one of the congressman’s staffers that he had “created a bit of a crisis” by asking about the office’s interior design: It turned out that the “Euro Trash” interior design firm had done the work for free, putting Schock on the wrong side of rules limiting gifts to lawmakers.

More dominoes fell as additional news organizations started asking questions about Schock’s finances, and discovered more substantial irregularities. Since the Post piece in early February, the congressman has been the subject of dozens of reports — none of them flattering.

From Politico raising questions about Schock’s mileage expenses to the Post revealing a company tied to the congressman had paid a donor $300,000 in 2014 for a property in Illinois, the scandal grew out of control.

But for some critics, the congressman’s downfall isn’t about what he did. It’s about how he did it.

“So what, in the end, did Schock do wrong? Simply put, he failed to be corrupt in a way that could supersede the media’s default position, in which ‘good government’ types are taken less seriously than the veteran government hacks and crooks who succeed within a broken system, forever spinning through well-greased revolving doors, selling out and falling upward,” Linkins wrote.

“Schock got laid low because, ultimately, he lacked ambition — he was scrabbling after nickel-and-dime benefits instead of setting his sights on a bigger payout. He was, compared to those who’ve mastered the art of institutional corruption, a joke,” he wrote.