Rep. Tom Davis may well be the most baldly power-hungry member of Congress. Davis, you may remember, was the fella’ who shamelessly grandstanded his way through the baseball steroid hearings, clucking his tongue and wagging his finger all the way. When baseball questioned the jurisdiction of Davis’s committee, he sent a reply stating that his committee had jurisdiction on “any matter” at “any time.” Later, Davis threatened to revoke baseball’s anti-trust exemption if the league allowed Democrat supporter George Soros to buy a minority interest in the Washington Nationals, an act for which he should have at least been censored, if not stripped of his chairmanship.

Well, Davis is at it again. Tucked into the $1.5 billion Congressional funding for the Washington area’s Metro system was a Davis-authored provision that would ban the development of a housing complex at the Vienna, Virginia Metro station.

That station happens to be in Davis’s district. And Davis is worried that too much development in that area might tilt the poltical landscape to his disadvantage. On the record, he told the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher last April that he was concerned about “urban” people moving into the area. That’s bad enough. According to Fisher, what Davis told supporters behind closed doors was even worse:

Three Fairfax elected officials told me that Davis explained his opposition to the MetroWest development to them as a matter of party politics: The congressman believes that the people most likely to move into condos and townhouses near a Metro station are — oh, the horror! — Democrats.

One politician who spoke to Davis says the congressman told him straight-out that he opposes Pulte Homes’ MetroWest project because “all it does is produce Democrats.”

That’s about par for the course for Davis. In this case, it’s using federal purse strings to bully local government into ensuring Davis’s reelection. With baseball, it was about using the blunt force of the state to intimidate a private organization away from doing business with a political opponent.

What both show is that for Tom Davis, no principle is too sacred to be sacrificed for raw political gain.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 5:47 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.