{"id":6729,"date":"2006-02-28T12:37:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-28T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6729"},"modified":"2006-02-28T12:37:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-28T17:37:00","slug":"apparently-its-corrupt-to-highlight-corruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/apparently-its-corrupt-to-highlight-corruption\/","title":{"rendered":"Apparently, it’s corrupt to highlight corruption"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and the Dem staff of the House Rules Committee released a pretty damning report<\/a>, “America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption.” Over 103 pages, Slaughter explored — in considerable detail — all the examples of GOP shenanigans we’ve come to love: the surge in the number of registered lobbyists, the K Street Project, the dysfunctional House Ethics Committee, and outside-the-beltway controversies like the Medicare prescription-drug bill, energy prices, the environment, homeland security, Hurricane Katrina, and defense contractors.<\/p>\n

“The culture of corruption has thrived in Republican-controlled Washington because the Republican Congress has intentionally allowed the processes that normally hold our politicians accountable to the American people to completely collapse,” the report said.<\/p>\n

House Republicans have responded — by arguing that Slaughter’s report on their corruption is itself corrupt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The House Republicans’ campaign operation is charging that a recently released Democratic report on Republican corruption violated ethics rules. […]<\/p>\n

“It’s a political document through and through. The headline is all you need to know it’s a political document,” said Ed Patru, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). “It’s nothing more than Democrats using official resources to promote political talking points.”<\/p>\n

House ethics rules prohibit members of Congress from using official resources to fund campaign activities. Democrats, however, counter that chronicling Republican ethical abuses is well within the rules.<\/p>\n

“It is … deeply ironic that the NRCC would have the audacity to suggest that a detailed, fact-based report documenting the collapse of our legislative system would constitute unethical behavior,” Slaughter said in a statement, “while at the same time, top Republican officials … have willingly undermined ethical behavior in our House.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The irony is rich. Substantively, the House GOP isn’t on firm ground — the rules limit lawmakers from using House resources for documents including specific campaigns, calls for fundraising, etc. Slaughter’s report didn’t include any of these “red flags”; it merely documents what the House Republicans have been up to.<\/p>\n

For that matter, by the NRCC’s logic, a member of Congress could hardly use their office to criticize the other party at all. Do Republicans really want to go there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and the Dem staff of the House Rules Committee released a pretty damning report, “America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption.” Over 103 pages, Slaughter explored — in considerable detail — all the examples of GOP shenanigans we’ve come to love: the surge in the number of registered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}