“The people who make the rules are the political class in Washington. And they’ve conveniently written them in such a way that they don’t apply to themselves,” said Peter Schweizer, Hoover Institution scholar and author of congressional corruption expose “Throw Them All Out” in explaining how Congress created a secret insider trading gold mine for itself. Schweizer’s point goes much deeper than the insider trading scandal that has recently grabbed headlines. The current American political class has become so corrupt that they don’t believe any rules should apply to them.
Thus, the political class is free to violate the Constitution to intimidate opponents, to enrich themselves through insider trading, and most importantly, to use government power to ensure their own re-election and hold on power.
As Schweizer pointed out, if you are a member of Congress and you sit on the defense committee, you are free to trade defense stock as much as you want. If you’re on the Senate banking committee, you can trade bank stock as much as you want. And they do.
But the problem isn’t one of a mere oversight or an error in drafting the law. The problem is that those who are in power believe they are entitled to have benefits denied to other Americans – they are above the law.
The fact that that sort of conduct regularly goes on in all these committees, plus a few other examples culled from recent headlines, suggest that this is not a failure of government oversight, but a deeper cultural rot that will require major surgery to excise.
The rot of today’s political class is most on display by the fact that problems once solved or abuses once tamed always seem to come back, as with the practice of earmarks.
After the 2010 election, the new Republican House majority and the Senate Republican minority – prodded by newly elected Tea Partiers and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), temporarily banned earmarks. But the thirst to buy votes with projects has never died among the present generation of Capitol Hill insiders and their crony capitalist enablers.
Consequently, a permanent ban on the earmark process has proven elusive, with such powerful figures as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and Senate Appropriations ranking minority member Thad Cochran of Mississippi justifying the process of corruptly buying votes in Congress and votes back home with the currency of earmarks.
But this notion that individual legislators should have the power to dispense public money at their personal whim, and for their personal political benefit, isn’t limited to Congress.
As The Washington Examiner recently reported, members of the D.C. city council have long maintained slush funds, squeezed from private businesses and unions, to perform “constituent services,” such as indigent burials, and payments to prevent power, water or telephone shut-off for needy constituents.
Under the best of circumstances, these funds would be little more than legalized bribery, as a poor person who had their phone bill paid by a politician could most likely be counted on to vote for his benefactor.
But helping the needy isn’t even where most of the money went.
One of the largest categories of expenditure was for tickets to pro-sporting events – bottled water, fancy desserts, consultants’ fees, catering, advertising, parade expenses, office costs and undocumented “reimbursements” to council members and staff ate-up much more of the money than even buying votes did.
In other words, the money went to maintain the entitled lifestyle of corrupt politicians, not help the poor.
There was a time in America when elected officials were public servants and honesty and integrity were the first two bullet points on any candidate’s campaign flyer.
That America still exists, but its values are constantly under assault by “bringing home the bacon” and an ever expanding list of entitlements with which to bribe voters. The result of this assault is a government built on lies and the impending bankruptcy, financial and moral, of a great nation.
Fortunately, the rot of Washington’s political class and culture has not infected all Americans outside the Beltway. In 2009, a great middle-class rebellion against the rot of Washington’s corrupt political class began – it is called the Tea Party.
Every time the corruption of establishment politicians is exposed, every time an establishment politician tries to buy votes with an earmark or pulls-up in a taxpayer-funded limo, another American citizen says “enough is enough” and joins the Tea Party movement and with that we are one vote closer to sweeping away today’s corrupt Washington establishment.
