March 27, 2006 6:52 AM

I am shocked- SHOCKED!- that people are making money off political connections....

Former DeLay Aide Enriched By Nonprofit: Bulk of Group’s Funds Tied to Abramoff

A top adviser to former House Whip Tom DeLay received more than a third of all the money collected by the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit organization the adviser created to promote a pro-family political agenda in Congress, according to the group’s accounting records. DeLay’s former chief of staff, Edwin A. Buckham, who helped create the group while still in DeLay’s employ, and his wife, Wendy, were the principal beneficiaries of the group’s $3.02 million in revenue, collecting payments totaling $1,022,729 during a five-year period ending in 2001, public and private records show.

It seems the natural order of Republican politics in Washington, particularly if you’re one of the fortunate few who get to work for Tom DeLay and then benefit from the largesse of his vast network of sycophants. Corruption? Hey, a man’s got to be able to feed his family, no? And those private schools in Washington ain’t cheap, either.

So a man’s got connections? What are friends for if not to help each other out. And so they have to fellate Tom DeLay (politically speaking) now and then…it’s a small price to pay for being allowed to shake the money tree.

To a certain degree, Washington will always be the captol of the revolving door effect, in which staffers trade their government salaries for jobs as K Street lobbyists with inflated annual incomes. This is simply the nature of the beast, and it’s a practice long engaged in by both Republicans and Democrats. While I think that in general this is a recipe for cronyism and corruption, the nature of government is that this will happen to a greater or lesser degree regardless of whether we like it or not. No, what upsets me is the degree to which Tom DeLay’s office seems to breed these rats.

In the late 1990s, when DeLay’s influence was growing, the lawmaker depicted the USFN in a promotional letter as a nationwide, grass-roots organization. In fact, it had a tiny staff that barely registered an impact on Capitol Hill. The group appears to have served mostly as a vehicle for funneling corporate funds to DeLay’s advisers and financing ads that attacked Democrats.

The group’s payments to the Buckhams — in the form of a monthly retainer as well as commissions on donations by Abramoff’s clients — overlapped briefly with Edwin Buckham’s service as chief of staff to DeLay and continued during his subsequent role as DeLay’s chief political adviser.

During this latter period, Buckham and his wife, Wendy, acting through their consulting firm, made monthly payments averaging $3,200-$3,400 apiece to DeLay’s wife, Christine, for three of the years in which he collected money from the USFN and some other clients.

Even though Buckham left DeLay’s staff at the end of 1997, he still coordinated much of the congressional office’s work and ran DeLay’s principal fundraising committee from a building bought with USFN money, according to three former DeLay staff members who said they had firsthand knowledge of his role then.

Corruption and sleazy government? Not if you’re a Republican. It seems that spreading the wealth is an unwritten party platform, and NO ONE adheres to that plank of the platform more than Tom DeLay.

Is it any wonder that DeLay is under indictment? Did he not think that this sort of naked, thinly-veiled corruption would escape notice indefinitely? Not that the voters here in District 22 actually care….

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on March 27, 2006 6:52 AM.

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