Exactly what values are the “Values Voters” promoting?
For those of you who are voting Republican because you are a “Values Voter” consider the following:
Dennis Hastert
Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the “Prairie Parkway” — a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land — soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision — for a profit of $2 million.
“Here’s a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it,” says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “Most of us aren’t speaker of the House, and most of us don’t have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it.”
The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson’s offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat’s behalf.
Hastert is especially good at turning a blind eye to scandal: An aide says the speaker’s office knew about Rep. Mark Foley’s penchant for page boys three years ago, yet Hastert took no action to protect minors working for Congress.
In another secret budget deal, Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist joined forces last December to give the pharmaceutical industry a Christmas gift worth billions. After the “final” version of the defense budget emerged from conference, the duo added a provision that gives drug makers immunity from liability lawsuits — shielding them from claims that their mercury-laden vaccines sparked the current autism epidemic.
Jerry Lewis (R Cal)
As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Lewis oversees nearly $900 billion a year in federal spending — but anyone looking for a slice of that money has to deal with his best friend, lobbyist Bill Lowery. “If you want an earmark from Lewis, you have to hire Lowery,” says Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “There’s a direct exchange.” In return for the business, Lowery and his clients made more than $480,000 in contributions to Lewis — more than a third of the congressman’s total campaign money since 2000. Lowery’s firm, in turn, tripled its revenue to $5 million — and his clients pocketed hundreds of millions in federal pork projects from Lewis.
The revolving door spins so fast between Lewis and Lowery that their offices operate almost as a single machine to swap taxpayer dollars for corporate donations. Jeffrey Shockey, who worked as a staffer for Lewis, left to join Lowery’s firm — and then returned to work for Lewis as deputy chief of staff of appropriations. As a parting gift, Lowery hired Shockey’s wife as a lobbyist and gave him nearly $2 million — a down payment on the firm’s future earnings. Another Lewis staffer, now a Lowery partner, does such brisk business with her old boss that she’s known as “K Street’s Queen of Earmarks.” Even Brent Wilkes — the defense contractor whose payoffs sent Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham to prison earlier this year — has complained about the shakedown operation. “If you don’t want to make the contributions,” Wilkes recalls Lowery telling him, “you will get left behind.” Wilkes also claimed that Lowery threatened to cut him off from Lewis and his lucrative earmarks unless he forked over $25,000 a month in lobbying fees.
Lewis, a former insurance salesman elected to Congress in 1978, has long tapped corporate interests for campaign cash: In one of his early races, all of his money came from just forty-three donors — and twenty-two of them were lobbyists.
The FBI has issued ten subpoenas involving Lewis’ current operation, and Lowery’s firm has scurried to report more than $2 million in undisclosed income. The lobbyist, in fact, is an old hand at the abuse of public trust: A former congressman himself, Lowery lost his House seat in 1992 thanks to an ethics scandal. The man who beat him? None other than Duke Cunningham.
Tom Tancredo (R Col)
The House Immigration Reform Caucus certainly has its share of hard-core xenophobes: One member, Rep. Steve King of Iowa, calls illegal immigration a “terrorist attack on the United States” and wants to erect an electrified fence to control Mexicans like livestock. But the founder of the caucus — and the undisputed king of Republican bigotry — is Tancredo, a dark-horse presidential contender for 2008. “He’s got the best track record in Congress,” raves Gordon Baum, head of the Council for Conservative Citizens, a “pro-white” group that lauds Tancredo for protecting America from a “full-scale invasion” of Latin immigrants.
Elected to the House in 1998, Tancredo has not only led the fight to deport every undocumented worker in America — a proposal that would cost at least $200 billion — but has called for halting all immigration, legal and otherwise. In one unforgettable move, Tancredo wanted to deport the family of an undocumented high school boy who was profiled in The Denver Post for his perfect grades.
The grandson of Italian immigrants, Tancredo traces his interest in politics to the eighth grade, when he played Fidel Castro in a class assignment. He urges America to reject “the siren song of multiculturalism” and depicts Islam as “a civilization bent on destroying ours.” In September, when Pope Benedict XVI sparked riots by condemning Islam as “evil,” Tancredo urged him not to apologize. Even the right has noted his unbridled looniness on the subject: In July, when Tancredo proposed that America respond to any future terrorist attack by bombing Mecca and other holy sites, the National Review came to an unavoidable conclusion: “Tom Tancredo is an idiot.”
Dick Pombo (R Cal)
No member of Congress has worked harder to savage America’s natural resources than Pombo, a Stetson-wearing cattleman who ran for office after a nature trail was slated to run through his family’s 500-acre ranch. As chairman of the House Resources Committee, Pombo has waged a career-long campaign to abolish the Endangered Species Act, which he accuses of putting “rats and shellfish” before people. Last year he almost succeeded: His comically titled “Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act” would have phased out all protection for threatened wildlife by 2015. Pombo has also won passage of bills to eliminate habitat protections on 150 million acres of wilderness and to lift a quarter-century moratorium on offshore oil drilling.
“Dick Pombo is the most dangerous member of the House,” says Carl Pope of the Sierra Club. “There’s no one who represents the threat to our public lands that he does.”
But Pombo doesn’t let his environmental attacks get in the way of his own profit: He raked in $35,000 from clients of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and paid his own wife and brother $357,000 for dubious campaign services. That’s a quarter of every dollar raised by his political action committee — known, aptly enough, as Rich PAC.
Here’s a list of the 25 most corrupt members of congress from the Center For Responsibility And Ethics In Washington:
Members of the Senate:
Conrad Burns (R-MT)
Bill Frist (R-TN)
Rick Santorum (R-PA)
Members of the House:
Alan Mollohan (D-WV)
Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Richard Pombo (R-CA)
John Doolittle (R-CA)
Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Pete Sessions (R-TX)
Katherine Harris (R-FL)
John Sweeney (R-NY)
William Jefferson (D-LA)
Charles Taylor (R-NC)
Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
Maxine Waters (D-CA)
Gary Miller (R-CA)
Curt Weldon (R-PA)
Five Members to Watch:
Chris Cannon (R-UT)
J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ)
Dennis Hastert (R-IL)
John Murtha (D-PA)
Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA)
Summary:
-The three most corrupt Senate members are the infamous Conrad Burns (R-MT), Bill Frist (R-TN), and Rick Santorum (R-PA) all Republicans
-Seventeen of the twenty “Most Corrupt” politicians are Republicans
-Four of the “Five Members To Watch” are Republicans
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