Louisiana's Democratic Rep. William Jefferson is video taped taking a $100,000 bribe. The FBI subpeona's him to release papers for their investigation. He stonewalls them for eight months. The FBI gets a warrant from a federal judge that allows them to search Jefferson's office for incriminating evidence, which they do. (They had already found $90,000 of cash at his home in his freezer.)
Seems like a slam dunk and a real opportunity for Republicans to say, "See! We arent the only crooks in D.C.!"
Instead Hastert and DeLay get out in front defending Jefferson?!!
After this administration secretly wiretapped hundreds of millions of Americans and suspended habeus corpus to imprison people in Gitmo for years, these guys say the FBI raid is an overreach of power by the Executive branch. On top of that, Attorney General Gonzales supports the raid and the Justice Department.
Holy smoke, is this not the strangest story you have every heard?
Vaitkadamas predicts that we are going to hear a lot more about this story in the future.
Im sure a lot of things could be going on here but I dont buy the story that Hastert and DeLay are protecting the tradition of the Senate... More likely I think is that they are protecting themselves. Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff were just the tip of the corruption iceberg in Washington and my guess is that the web of deals is totally bi-partisan.
Stay tuned for more. Sometimes real life is a lot more entertaining than anything screenwriters can come up with...
Congressmen Aren't Above the Law . . .
May 27, 2006
It is increasingly rare to find a spirit of bipartisanship in Congress these days. So a display of the spirit would have been a good thing to see -- especially in a time of war -- but for the fact that the issue now uniting Republican and Democratic leaders is an outrageous assertion that members of Congress are above the law, and that the Constitution immunizes legislators who betray their public trust in return for bribes from investigation by the executive branch.
In light of the attitudes held by so many of our legislators, it is no wonder three times as many Americans disapprove of Congress's job-performance as approve, according to last week's Gallup Poll. Those are Congress's lowest numbers since the Democrats were last in power a dozen years ago.
According to Gallup, 83% of Americans view congressional corruption as a serious problem. There is an election coming up in five months, and legislators who wish to survive it might wish to step back and permit the FBI to do its job.
