We're two days away from having Republican control of both houses of Congress, but the GOP didn't manage to get there without two important House members running into some serious trouble - and one of them has run out of time, apparently at the urging of House Speaker John Boehner.
Rep. Michael Grimm, who is the only Republican House member from New York City, is resigning in the aftermath of a guilty plea in a felony tax evasion case. Grimm's offense was to underreport compensationn of his employees at a restaurant he owned, and this snowballed into as many as 20 criminal counts against him. This is also the guy who once threatened to break a reporter in half, which may or may not have been justified, and who reportedly once waved a gun around in a Queens nightclub.
A former FBI agent, Grimm's political career could survive his eccentricities, but apparently not a felony conviction. It's possible the GOP will lose this seat in a special election, which would be a shame, but there is margin for error given the massive majority they won in November.
A sticker situation is the one involving Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. He is the House Majority Whip, and it's now come out that he spoke in 2002 to a white supremacist organization with ties to David Duke. The question is whether Scalise understood the racist nature of the group or just showed up in response to an invitation:
Louisiana political blogger Lamar White Jr. reported Sunday that Scalise, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House, spoke before the European-American Unity and Rights Organization founded by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
An aide told NBC News that Scalise had only one staffer at the time and "was running across the state speaking to anyone who would listen to him" talk about cutting state taxes. The aide also said Scalise would not have spoken to the organization had he known it was a white supremacy group.
The group is characterized as "extremists" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the conference that year was flagged in a list compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. "Beyond hosting a website, whitecivilrights.com, and staging an occasional conference, EURO is a paper tiger, serving primarily as a vehicle to publicize Duke's writing and sell his books," according to SPLC.
"Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of viewpoints. In every case, he was building support for his policies, not the other way around," Scalise spokesperson Moira Smith said in a statement.
The media, of course, will gleefully jump all over this situation to imply that Scalise is a white supremacist. But Boehner shouldn't do the same and neither should grassroots conservatives, until we know more. If Scalise is really a racist, there should be further evidence of it that his accusers can turn up, especially now when I'm sure they're combing through every piece of information they can find.
If you look at it strictly in a political sense, you might conclude that Scalise has already become a weight around his party's neck just because this "looks bad," but we need to stop bum-rushing people out of public life for reasons like that.
If Scalise really does sympathize with white supremacists like EURO, he should not be in Congress. This not because it "looks bad for the Republican Party" or any of that nonsense. It's because it's bad for the country to have white supremacists in Congress. Screw the politics.
But pending the discovery of more information, I think his explanation might be plausible. Especially when they're operating at the state level, politicians do get lots of invitations to speak in front of groups, especially when they're touting a particular proposal like Scalise was at the time, and they're looking around for people to support it. You get an invitation from the Optimists. You go. You get an invitation from the Lions Club. You go.
EURO? Who are they? Hey, we need signatures. Let's do it.
You can argue that it's politically careless, and maybe it is, but that's not the same thing as being a white supremacist.
Generally speaking, it's a good thing for the GOP to clean up its problems before taking the majority, which is why it's a good thing that Grimm is moving on. But in the case of Scalise, he should be pushed out the door only if it's shown he really does sympathize with this group. If he just made a mistake and showed up to tout tax cuts to people who turned out to be wild-eyed racists - 12 years ago, no less - then there's nothing to see here. I realize Democrats and their media allies will continue trying to paint him as a racist throughout his tenure in Congress, but if it's a lie, then Republicans can't be in the habit of throwing over good people in the service of lies.
