Latest Doc Hastings News!!
The House ethics committee, the panel responsible for upholding the chamber’s ethics code, has been virtually moribund for the past year, handling only routine business despite a wave of federal investigations into close and potentially illegal relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists.
With a California congressman headed to prison for accepting bribes and several others under investigation for accepting lavish gifts and money from former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, one might expect the House committee to have a lot of work to do.
To critics, the long delay is unforgivable. Government watchdog groups say they are appalled that ethics overseers in both the House and Senate have done nothing in the face of a growing number of ethics inquiries against members of Congress. The vacuum, they say, has tacitly encouraged lawmakers to behave improperly and has helped produce the long slide in public trust of Congress.
So far this year, at least seven lawmakers have been indicted, have pleaded guilty or are under investigation for improper conduct such as conspiracy, securities fraud and improper campaign donations. In the past two weeks alone, Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) resigned from Congress and pleaded guilty to tax evasion and conspiracy, and public relations executive Michael Scanlon admitted his role in a conspiracy to try to bribe a congressman.
There’s your latest Doc Hastings news. It’s the same news as my last bit of Doc Hastings news… such that it was, and is a recurring news-editorial feature in the national press. Nothing new is happening with the committee that Tom DeLay put him in charge of the committee so that nothing new can come out of the ethics committee. STOP THE PRESSES!
Richard “Doc” Hastings woke up this morning. He rubbed his eyeballs of the dark Insomnia-looking bags around his eyes. Then he went back to sleep.
Now There’s your latest Doc Hastings news.
I have no clue whether someone can win more than 40% in the fourth Congressional District of Washington in 2006… (which, I’ve joked, everyone’s best suggestion for every “red” district in America is to bus in Paul Hackett or Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, or preferrably both, and run him/them). I do know that this should be Issue #1, #2, and #3 of whoever is running against him, and I don’t even really care if it polls well. In 2004, there was a short spurt of advertisements in the middle of the summer designed to attach the Democratic candidate to Hanford — ineffectively since I had no idea what I was watching and it didn’t mention what exactly she was running for.
December 13th, 2005 at 8:06 am
Funny Hastings Post. It seems like a dead horse… but I swear I saw his eyes move.
December 14th, 2005 at 8:11 am
The thing about Doc Hastings is that for the past decade it’s been easy to simply dismiss him as being one generic Republican hack out of over 200 in the House of Representatives, and thus not worth much of a murmur. The turning point was when the Republican Leadership rewarded his hackery by sitting him at a spot where his role is to, quite simply and quite plainly, to keep the light off of politicians’ malfeasance and corruption, and thus Richard “Doc” Hastings moved from being a standard party hack to being a key peg in the corrupt Republican political machine. I say flog that dead horse repeatedly and frequently.