News Snipet 'Blog

PREPARE!

Do Something!

Find Elected Officials

Enter ZIP Code:

or Search by State

See Issues & Action

Select An Issue Area:

Contact The Media

Enter ZIP Code:

or Search by State

Other things

Other things

THE STONING OF DELAY

Thursday, April 14, 2005

When I run for Congress to punish Bob Inglis for failing to renew his subscription to the Daily Dispatch, I promise I won't hire my wife or daughter to help run my campaign. But it won't be because I think nepotism is unethical. It will be because I'm not married, so I can't hire my wife, and my daughters have no interest or expertise in political campaigns. If I had a wife and daughter who had the requisite experience, I would not hesitate to hire them and pay them the going rate - whatever that is. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's political enemies are wringing their hands in glee these days over the discovery that his campaign and his political action committee have paid his wife and daughter $500 thousand dollars. Is that something that should cause ethical consternation? I don't know. Neither, I suspect, do you. Let's look at a few more facts. The wife and daughter have earned slightly more than $500,000 since 2001. They worked for DeLay's political action and campaign committees. Unfortunately, those are all the details I have. I don't know if they have both worked full-time since 2001, or whether they have worked part-time, off and on, since then. I don't know what kind of work they did or the going rate for the work they did. If the two of them have been paid $500-thousand since 2001, they have each received about $60 to $70-thousand a year. I don't know whether that's out of line, but I do know that the practice of hiring family members for campaign jobs is fairly routine and does not violate any established ethics rules. Congressman Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, employs his wife, Kathy, as his campaign manager. According to the USA Today, she was paid $21,791 over four months. Annualized, that would be in the same ballpark as Delay's wife and daughter. Laurie Stupak, wife of Congressman Bart Stupak, D-Mich., has earned about $36,000 annually during the past two years as the finance director for her husband's campaign. The wife of 14-term Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis of California serves as his chief of staff at a salary of nearly $111,000. Under House rules, lawmakers cannot hire their spouses to congressional jobs, but Mrs. Lewis is an exception because she worked for him before they were married. It's very common for politicians to hire relatives to work on their campaigns. The USA Today names about a dozen congressional and presidential candidates who have done so, including Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney. There should be very little mystery surrounding the question of whether DeLay's payments to his wife and daughter are scandalous. Since the practice is so common, investigators need only compare their work and compensation to that of others to see if their compensation is out of line. If we find the payments to be exorbitant, then we denounce DeLay for abusing his position to pad his family's bank accounts. If not, we expose his critics as typical partisan hacks. The more I follow politics and politicians, the more I find it to be a corrupting influence on otherwise honorable people. It would not shock me to find that DeLay has yielded to that influence. But, the accusations presented in the press so far have been all heat and very little light. The public stoning of Mr. DeLay is at best, a bit premature. Ralph Bristol

posted by Jack Mercer @ 4/14/2005 11:21:00 AM

1 Comments:

At 4/19/2005 08:42:00 PM, Bookworm said…

To blow my own horn, over at my blog I mentioned that billing for family services -- real services, properly performed -- is an old American tradition. See this post