Most Corrupt Senators Of 2010

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

Senator Boxer is Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. But it appears she still needs an ethics lesson. Boxer presided over a year-long investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee into whether two of her Senate colleagues, Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Kent Conrad (D-ND), received preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial as part of the company’s “VIP” program. (Senate ethics rules prohibit members from receiving loan terms not available to the general public.) In fact, according to The Associated Press, during an Ethics Committee hearing Boxer asked “the bulk of the questions.”


However, Boxer failed to mention (or disclose on her official Senate Financial Disclosure documents) that she and her husband have signed no less than seven mortgages with Countrywide! At the time of the hearing, Boxer reportedly indicated she had paid off two Countrywide mortgages, but did not mention the others.


The evidence clearly showed that Dodd and Conrad knew they were receiving preferential treatment despite repeated denials. Yet Boxer’s Senate Ethics Committee allowed Dodd and Conrad to wriggle off the hook with a light admonition that suggested the two Senators should have exercised better judgment. The same, apparently, can be said of the Committee’s own chair, who either neglected to mention or outright lied about her own dealings with the corrupt mortgage company.


Senator Ensign: In a scandal that first broke in 2009, Senator Ensign publicly admitted to an affair with the wife of a long-time staffer. And the evidence indicates Ensign then tried to cover up his sexual shenanigans by bribing the couple with lucrative gifts and political favors.


According to The New York Times, after Ensign’s aide, Douglas Hampton, discovered the affair, “Mr. Ensign asked political backers to find a job for…Hampton. Payments of $96,000 to the Hamptons also were made by Senator Ensign’s parents, who insist this was a gift, not hush money. Once a lobbying job was secured, Senator Ensign and his chief of staff continued to help Mr. Hampton, advocating his clients’ cases directly with federal agencies.”


These lobbying activities were seemingly in violation of the Senate’s “cooling off” period for lobbyists. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Under Senate rules, former Senate aides cannot lobby their former colleagues for one year after leaving Capitol Hill.” Hampton began to lobby Mr. Ensign’s office immediately upon leaving his congressional job.


Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence about the affair. And despite the claims of Ensign and his parents, the $96,000 in “gifts” provided to the Hamptons were clearly hush payments.


Nonetheless, on December 1, 2010, the Obama Justice Department announced it will file no criminal charges against Ensign, while the Federal Election Commission has also dismissed a related ethics complaint. If there is to be justice for Ensign, it will have to be up to the corrupt (see Boxer entry above) Senate Ethics Committee, which is still considering the charges against the Nevada Republican.

Hat tip: Bytestyle TV

Can the UN Protect American Children Better?

Senator Boxer thinks so!

The U.N. adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child on Nov. 20, 1989. By Sept. 2, 1990, 20 nations signed on to enforce the treaty. Currently, with the exception of the United States and Somalia, 193 nations have signed on to enforce it.

Nations that ratify U.N. treaties are bound to adhere to them by international law.

The convention established an 18-member panel to oversee children’s rights in nations that are part of the treaty. If approved by the Senate, the United States would fall under the jurisdiction of this panel...

“It submits our federal laws, our national laws to this treaty,” [Senator] DeMint told CNSNews.com. “And the fact is that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to run, but we know how bureaucracy works. Once a precedent is established and we have yielded control, we know that it will continue to grow. So the precedent is almost worse than the immediate details.”

DeMint also said that the treaty is superfluous because there are laws already that safeguard abused children in the United States...

While DeMint is in the forefront of opposition to the convention, liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) is leading the charge for its adoption.

During the Senate confirmation hearing of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, held in January of 2009, Boxer told Rice the treaty would protect "the most vulnerable people of society."

"Children deserve basic human rights,” Boxer said at the time, “and the convention protects children's rights by setting some standards here so that the most vulnerable people of society will be protected."

Boxer also labeled the fact that only the United States and Somalia are non-participants to the treaty as a “shame.”

Boxer has urged the Obama administration to review the treaty for the purpose of adopting it. The United States is already a part of two optional provisions in the treaty, namely relating to child prostitution and child soldiers. Boxer, however, is pushing for full participation in the treaty.

Senator Boxer thinks that kids don't have basic human rights in America.

International treaties: yet another reason to repeal the 17th Amendment.

Sen. Boxer: CO2 Is National Security Threat

Via Hot Air:



Ed Morrissey adds "This hyperbole comes from a desperate attempt to get her colleagues to push her cap-and-tax bill forward in the Senate, and the ridiculous claim that CO2 will somehow outweigh a nuclear Iranian mullahcracy and a global Islamist network for national-security concerns shows just how desperate Boxer has become."

All indications are that global warming has lost its "crisis" epithet.

But the economic "crisis" is still picking up steam.

As Federalist 63 says,

As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next...

It is evident that the Senate must be first corrupted before it can attempt an establishment of tyranny. Without corrupting the State legislatures, it cannot prosecute the attempt, because the periodical change of members would otherwise regenerate the whole body. Without exerting the means of corruption with equal success on the House of Representatives, the opposition of that coequal branch of the government would inevitably defeat the attempt; and without corrupting the people themselves, a succession of new representatives would speedily restore all things to their pristine order.

The 17th Amendment corrupted the Senate. America moves from one crisis to another in order to prevent the people from uniting against their own corrupt government.