LA-02: Corrupt Representative Jefferson is re-elected in Democratic district
The Democratic Culture of Corruption Continues
By Adam C Posted in 2006 — Comments (30) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Residents of Louisiana's second district (New Orleans) do not seem to believe they need a non-corrupt representative to represent them. Much of the post-Katrina problems stemmed for local governments messing up which in turn had a lot to do with accepted corruption in appointments and government in Louisiana. Re-electing a man who was caught taking a bribe with $90,000 of marked bills in his freezer is a great example of how much corruption is tolerated in old New Orleans. Results right now show Jefferson ahead 57-43 with 59% of the precincts reporting.
Fortunately, at the state level the generations of Democratic corruption are likely to end in 2007. Republicans have made major gains in the state and now control 5 of the 7 congressional districts. They still have a chance at the sixth one (LA-03) leaving only LA-02 as a solid Democratic district. A series of party switchers in the 1990s helped solidify the gains. Pro-life Gov. Blanco (D) edged out Rep. Jindal (R) for the Governorship in 2003 thanks to a few former David Duke voters who may have had a problem with Jindal's Indian heritage. However, in 2007 Rep. Jindal will try again for the Governor seat. And after the failure of Gov. Blanco in handling the Katrina disaster, Jindal will have no problem against her. In fact, it is possible that Blanco will not win her party's nomination. Either way, Republicans are likely to do quite well in 2007 and 2008 in Louisiana. Hopefully they can change the political tolerance of corruption there so that New Jersey can take their rightful place as "Most Corrupt State" which they have coveted for quite a while now.
« When Negative Ads Backfire — Comments (4) | And on this, Kos and I agree... — Comments (39) »
LA-02: Corrupt Representative Jefferson is re-elected in Democratic district 30 Comments (0 topical, 30 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
If the Democrats seat Jefferson but not Buchanan, then we know where the Democratic ethics are: in the freezer.
--
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. -- Calvin Coolidge
that's clearly worse than what Bill Jefferson has done. Ya know.
EWR = elected while Republican
Expect him to get his committee seat and Seniority too.
Democrats couldn't find a good opponent for Jefferson. His opponent was some nutjob who voted for cloning and was 100% with NARAL and with other out of the mainstream groups.
When the choices are between a corrupt Democrat who will vote the will of his district (Jefferson voted for the FMA) and a psychotic Democrat. Jefferson will win every time.
Especially when Nancy Pelosi doesn't lift a finger to defeat him.
If you forced me to vote in this election, I would vote for Bill Jefferson. Because while Jefferson is a crook who is worthy of jail, he's still better than a Pelosibot San Francisco Democrat. That's not an endorsement of Jefferson, but a criticism of the current Democrat party.
This is the last open primary election for Congress in Louisiana.
So if Dollar Bill makes it to 2008, just wait to see all those Democrats pick him over a Republican.
I'm not even surprised. If the Dems ever fail to re-elect a known crook, that will be the upset.
The media loves a scandal. A Republican scandal, that is. How many voters in Alan Mollohan's district in West Virginia heard about how many times he voted on matters where he had a clear and unethical conflict of interest?
How many voters heard about new Majority Leader Harry Reid's taking of bribes, his connection to Jack Abramoff, and his giving of jobs to family members?
Compare that to how many voters nationwide heard about Foleygate, and how it was part of a "pattern" that somehow involved only Republicans.
Democrats and the media don't hate corruption. They love it. As long as it is Democratic corruption it's "white corruption" like you see on "The Sopranos" and in gangster movies.
Republican corruption is the odious kind.
Apparently.
Too bad the Republicans and their political strategists did such a poor job of communicating to the public how corrupt the Democrats were.
If Bill Frist had even half of the "corruption baggage" that Harry Reid did, the media would have demanded that the Republican Party be blamed. We would've lost even more seats.
Agggh. We can't even scamper off to Canada like disgruntled dems do. There's nowhere on earth to go when the dems sink this ship.
I'm amazed Democrats can (justly) bash the GOP on corruption charges while letting a guy like Jefferson get re-elected. Will Howard Dean demand he not be seated? I doubt it.
I know I shouldn't be amazed, but I never can comprehend cognitive dissonance. I'm too logical a think.
After all, the Democrats won most of the seats. We are being beaten down from within...
Political correctness screws up everything in the world!
Don't worry, New Jersey, the most corrupt state will probably be Massachusetts very soon. The "very far left" Democratic Party of Massachusetts will be taking over everything now that the Republican Party doesn't even control the Governor's/Lt. Governor's seats in Massachusetts anymore. Many people are already predicting that Governor-elect Deval Patrick will end up being even worse than Michael Dukakis!
what they voted for.
The sad thing is the GOP has pretty much given up on Mass, they don't even try to win elections-Kennedy and Kerry have both run unopposed for their senate seats, because the GOP couldn't recruit anyone (and probably didn't want to waste much money on an sure loss given that the people of Mass are under the impression that senate and house seats are supposed to be life time appointments).
I suspect New Jersey isn't quite there yet-the GOP does seem to at least try to recruit candidates, something you don't much see in Mass.
Have to admit, news of this did bring a little smile to my face.
Guess he found the extra votes he needed in his freezer.
Man, that just never gets old. And it's not even January yet!
-------------
"I don't know." -- Helen Thomas, when asked by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "Are we at war, Helen?"
that "Most ethical congress ever" together.
She has such shining stars of ethics to build on.
Let’s see; Jefferson was;
- Caught on tape taking a bride (albeit for someone else)
- Was caught with cold hard cash, without an explanation
- Took a “personal loan” from an Ethiopian business man he “failed to report”
- Tried to hide evidence from the FBI in his house
- Now his brother and sister are being investigated in connection with $7.0 million in state funds going to “charities”
And Tom Delay did what? Culture of corruption? No wonder that term was so easy to coin.
Since Mr. Jefferson has said he will resign if indicted, I only have one question; who will be the next Congressman from that LA-02?
This whole affair has been tied up in the legal system over the raid of his office. Once that hurdle is clear, the facts are against Mr. Jefferson.
In a strange way, I feel bad for him. On the surface, Mr. Jefferson is one of the guys you would like to do see well. He overcomes a fairly destitute background, graduates Harvard Law and becomes Louisiana’s first black Congressman since Reconstruction and now this. Unfortunately it looks like his legacy will end in a cell next to Duke Cunningham. Talk about bipartisanship….
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
to this. From a political perspective, when would you prefer him to be led away in handcuffs? After he has already been repudiated by his constituents, or after he has been sworn in?
Even from a non-political perspective, just the viewpoint that when corruption is outed, it ought to be a very public shaming, this will be a better outcome.
That said, SHAME on voters anywhere who return corrupt politicians to office.
Joe
The narrative being presented isn't as simple as that. As you can see the election results yourselves here http://www.nola.com/elections/1209_returns.ssf, the majority-black Orleans parish was more than ready to throw Bill Jefferson out. The problem was the majority-white Jefferson parish. Karen Carter angered them by accusations of racism when Jefferson Parish sherriffs and deputies blocked access into their area from a bridge during the flooding of Hurricane Katrina.
The parishe's Asian-American but highly popular sheriff spent $12,000 of his own money telling people to stay home for the election, and was on TV this past Tuesday and Wednesday saying "Bill Jefferson has these accusations following him, which is terrible in my mind, but the fact that he hasn't been indicted tells me something. Again, I'm not endorsing him, but let's remember that he hasn't been indicted."
On top of that, everyone's been wondering when the heck a indictment was going to be handed down. When news of the money and the videotape came out, everyone thought it would come shortly. Without charges, it just looked like the Feds were picking on him, ala Tom Delay.
Black juries convict blacks down here everyday, and again, Orleans Parish was ready to toss him. But the quirkiness that is Louisiana said otherwise.
Jefferson won Orleans Parish by 1169 votes.
And I'm not going to fret over Carter's lunacy costing her the Jefferson Parish vote. She tried to pull the Katrina card and she lost a lot of votes because she did.
^That's exactly the point. It was a difference so small that if the considerably more conservative Jefferson Parish could have stomached Carter's racism charges, Dollar Bill would have been given the cold shoulder.
but to believe that changing a state from a D state to an R state will eliminate corruption requires one to believe D's are corrupt and R's are not. I frankly don't believe that distinction exists in the real world.
There are corrupt politicians of both stripes and I would venture a guess that most of them didn't go into politics to be corrupted, but power and access to the fruits of power turned them to the 'dark side'. But this happens in both parties.
It is duly noted in this example because the D's have been in power in LA that corruption in LA is a D problem at the moment. But even if the R's turn the state red, that just means that down the road we will be talking about an R corruption problem in LA. Because whatever party is in power has access to the fruits of that power, the party in power has more opportunities to be corrupted than the party out of power.
So while I agree with you that Jefferson is a slime and shouldn't have been re-elected, I don't harbor any hope that corruption will be eliminated by turning the state red. It will just change the color of koolaid being served by the lobbyists and special interests. Corruption will merely turn into an R problem in LA. Everyone may be on their best behavior for a while, but it most certainly won't be end of corruption.
I know the first reply will probably be that R's kick their scum out instead of re-electing them. I know a few examples will be brought up, but I don't see enough of them to call it a 'rule' and if I were to persue more research than I'm willing to do, I could probably find examples of R's staying on after potential corruption has been exposed. But I don't have the time, so I'll just apologize up front for having an opinion without the appropriate links.
All in all Adam C brings up good points and I have the utmost respect for his opinions and posts. I just don't believe for a minute that either D's or R's are uncorruptible. The only thing that matters is which party has their hands on the levers of power. Regardless of political stripe, those hands can be bought.
collective corruption. At the stick your hand in the till level, Rs have no monopoly on virtue and are certainly more brazen and hamfisted about their corruption and, thus, much more likely to get caught. D politics though is an exercise in collective corruption; the whole method of the Party is to take money and power from some group and give it to another in order to enhance the money and power of its operatives. That vast web of non-profits and "public interest" groups they have spun may not be dedicated to increasing shareholder wealth and income like some evil, greedy Republican corporation, but the people that run them certainly live well and have great power without producing a thing of value; they are functionally no more than pimps.
In Vino Veritas
corruption that the democrat party machines have at the local and state levels in the GOP.
Sure the GOP does have its corrupt politicians, but other than the recent GOP Ohio corruption (where the bums got thrown out) I can't think of any GOP examples of systemic corruption.
But almost every major metropolitan area that is known for corrupt politics is run by the democrats, and then you have states like New Jersey and LA where it almost seems like corruption is the expectation rather than the exception, and there isn't any will or desire to actually vote these people out.
I think in general that too much power does in fact lead to corruption-and at the local level, in areas where the GOP doesn't have a chance, it has become expected and accepted by local democrats that corruption is better than the GOP. You can't even win as a GOP candidate in some local areas, and to a T those local areas are known for their corruption.
that the K-street project can be perceived as perfectly legitimate, but to an independent it was a precursor to and an enabler of corruption to come, and it certainly appeared systemic to me. If the R's had held Congress, I have no doubt that it would only have gotten worse.
Now, I understand that as an independent I am a guest here and certainly don't want to offend anyone here because I think this is a good forum for opinions and I read Redstate daily because of the quality of the commentary. I also certainly respect those who think I'm just missing it.
But from the vantage point of an independent, a contention that the Republican party is anything other that the opposite side of the looking glass doesn't hold up. Any doubts I had about that were removed by the last 12 years that the R's have held Congress. At first they came in with noble ideas and the I's were with them. At the end, they were a parody of themselves and as lazy and corrupt as I have seen.
That being said, I look forward to the R's sorting out what they believe in, throwing out the bums, and getting back to what they used to stand for. I don't really know what that will be though. It seems the libertarian faction and the religious conservative faction are incompatible long-term.
the reason for the K Street Project is the fact that K Street was the sovereign territory of the Democrat Party for fifty years. A Congressman or staffer on leaving Congress went to K Street. The key to lobbying is access; if you know people, you can get to them, it really is that simple. There was little need to know Republicans as long as they were powerlessly in the minority and seemingly destined to be there forever. When the R took control in '94, the lobby firms had a bunch of Ds with which they tried to do business with Rs in the majority. The "Project" was nothing more than insisting that if the firms were going to call on them, those very lucrative lobbying doors were going to open to Republican former Congressmen and staffers. As an "Independent," you may not like this system, but that is the way it is with every City Hall and State Capital in the Country. As long as government giveth and taketh away, somebody is going to try to influence how it does it and somebody going to get paid to do that influencing.
To the other point; over seventy years the Democrat Party evolved into simply a client collecting, client-serving enterprise: take power and money away from the rich and give it to the "working class," take power and money away from the company and give it to the union, take power and money away from the Whites and give it to the Blacks, take power and money away from the men and give it to the women, and on, and on. That has been the whole of their policy until fairly recently when they have begun to embrace more openly utopian socialist and humanist ideas. Along the way they have developed a vast network of interest groups and non-profits which share in and distribute the proceeds of the Democrat political process.
Republicans have no such network and no person who subscibes to any ideology within the realm of that embraced by the Party could subscribe to producing one. Which is not to say that Rs won't send a contract to a favored company over one not favored and sometimes do it beyond the bounds of prudence or even legality. But Rs tend to spend money on things and on companies that produce things. These companies, outside defense and some aerospace, would exist without the government, since they are market players. Almost none of the Democrat client base would exist were it not for Democrat redistributionist schemes.
What I found most amazing about twelve years of Republican control is that the Rs continued to feed the hand that bit them and largely left the D infrastructure in place and in some areas even increased it, e.g., education and health care. The world would be a better place and they'd probably still be in power if they'd gone after it with a meataxe.
In Vino Veritas
The GOP had power and control for 12 years-the corruption that they engaged in turned the voter against them, because it wasn't considered acceptable or expected.
Now take a good look again at the Democrats-especially, at the local level and state level-they are the epitome of institutionalized corruption, and nobody cares, they just keep right on voting the same corrupt individuals into office.
In general not to many GOP candidates last long, once they are caught in corruption or a large scandal. But if we went back for about 40 years or so, listed all the big scandals, which party they were associated with, and whether or not the members that were involved are still serving-you would find far more democrats still in office verses the GOP.
The way I see it is when one party dominates thoroughly, then it is likely to get corrupt. It will not stop being corrupt on its own, so it takes changes parties for there to be any chance at ending the corruption. Thus, this is an opportunity, not a foregone conclusion.
Secondly, you should really take a bit to google Bobby Jindal and learn about him. He is an amazingly smart and competent leader. He will be a great Governor and will be on the 2012 and 2016 Presidential and VP shortlists. He's a Rhodes scholar who has already run the state HHS and state university system. Oh and that was before he was 30 years old. He is one of the few politicians who I think could personally change a state. And it is rather likely he will be GOV in 2007.
news anymore. Both parties (more Dem then Rep though) have serious ethical problems and borderline if not out-right criminal behavior. Plenty of folks feel that most if not all politicians are at least a little corrupt. I don't know why anyone would be surprised that this crook was reelected.
I'm not sure the RNC wants to make this an issue in '08, but if they do, they need to do a deep hard scrub and get rid of everyone who even shows the mere appearance of impropriety. That would be painful.
Again, I'm not sure we can use this issue since "Sure we're crooks but the Dems are worse" is not a compelling message.
====
"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
let me say this in no surprise. Race politics, the Democrat machine, and a long standing love for the "good crook" are all hallmarks of the ignorance that pervades that states politics.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
AP spinned it as "Republicans lose another Congressional seat". Can you imagine that???
Anyway, anyone here no anything about my old friend Scott Schneider in Kenner/Metairie? He was State Chairman for the Young Republicans 2000 to 2002. Last I talked with Scott he was planning a run for the State House for 2007. But I also learned that Quentin Dastuge is running for that seat.
Great! (I say that sarcastically) We'll have two libertarian Republicans opposing each other in a GOP Primary. Just flip a coin cause they're both outstanding.
Eric Dondero
www.mainstreamlibertarian.com
And why are we in this handbasket?
Evil men hide from the truth, but good men stand upon it.