I don’t know much about Shadegg, but if the GOP cares at all about reform and/or limited government Blunt and Boehner shouldn’t even be in the running.

Dirt on Boehner here and here.

As for Blunt, I think this email exchange with Mike Krempasky at Red State tells us just about all we need to know:

Congressman, in 2003 you turned your Congressional office into a “war room” for lobbyists from Pharma and other companies to lobby for passage of the Medicare bill – legislation that included a prescription drug package which resulted in huge windfalls for these companies, increased the size of government and will cost the taxpayers trillions. You did this in the wake of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Pharma and other companies to you and your PAC.

As Majority Leader, do you plan on continuing the practice of allowing paid lobbyists to use your offices as their own on critical votes? If not, why not?

The response from Blunt’s office:

“We always welcome help from those who agree with a position that we have already staked out.

Mike, this is not what you’re making it out to be — the representatives of labor unions, corporations, or the farm bureau aren’t writing legislation. They’re signing up to help get the word out after a bill has been written, vetted in committee, and is slated for floor consideration.

It’s important for legislators in a representative democracy to hear from companies or schools or firefighters in their districts when deciding which way to vote.

Lobbyists like Jack Abramoff are bad news. But not all lobbyists who represent the interests of legitimate businesses, medical professionals, you name it, are bad. Sometimes they’re making sure the “right to petition the government” is upheld for all.”

–Burson Taylor, Office of the Majority Whip

Incredulous, these people.

Let’s review:

Blunt didn’t let lobbyists set up shop in his office to help kill off a cabinet agency, push through tax cuts, or roll back the regulatory state. He let them run a war room from his office in order to help push through the biggest new federal entitlement in forty years. The lobbyists working out of Blunt’s office weren’t the “good” kind. They were blatant rent seekers, looking to push through a bill that would have the government buy billions of dollars of drugs from their clients, at taxpayer expense. The condescending, dismissive tone from Blunt’s aide is so fucking typical of Capitol Hill Republicans these days.

Here’s a rememdial lesson in limited government principle for Mr. Taylor:

That your boss let lobbyists work out of his office is only half the problem. The other half is that those lobbyists were working on behalf of a massive, wasteful, socialist piece of legislation that the Republican Party had no damned business pushing through in the first place.

And don’t forget, Tom Delay’s attempt to bribe Rep. Nick Smith — which earned him a rebuke from the ethics committee — was also in an effort to push through the prescription drug entitlement.

That’s the twist of the knife to these GOP scandals. Not only have Republicans grown sleazy and corrupted by power, they’ve done so in pursuit of legislation that’s wholly inconsistent with everything the Republicans once claimed to stand for.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 5:48 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.