While the ethical questions surrounding the behavior of Majority Leader Reid and Senator Dianne Feinstein have attracted little attention to date, it’s refreshing to see them warrant a mention in the mainstream media:
The shady improprieties of the current Senate majority leader are another story altogether. In 2004, Reid got $1.1 million – three times what he paid for it – for residential property on the outskirts of Las Vegas even though he had not owned the land for three years.
Brown’s scheme worked this way: Reid bought the land in 1998 from a developer and beneficiary of a federal land deal Reid supported. In 2001, Reid “transferred” the land at cost to a corporate entity established by Brown, not bothering to include it on his required yearly ethics report, and misleading Congress that he still owned the property. Brown then got local authorities to rezone the land for commercial use and sold it, slipping Reid a cool million and change…
But Reid’s take is small potatoes compared with the wheeling and dealing of another leading Senate Democrat, Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California. In her six years as ranking Democrat on the Senate Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies subcommittee, she “may have directed more than $1 billion to companies controlled by her husband,” according to American Conservative Union head David Keene, writing in the Hill, a Washington newspaper, on Monday.
URS and Perini Corp., under the control of Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, apparently got more than $1.5 billion in government business largely from Feinstein’s subcommittee.
The promises of Democrats to ‘drain the swamp,’ and clean up the ‘culture of corruption’ don’t mean anything if they fail to investigate ethical questions like these, and punish those who’ve broken laws or the rules of the House and Senate.
