Tales From The Crypt-- The Republican Grassroots

Just as John Boehner's handpicked candidate for RNC Chair, sleazy K Street lobbyist Maria Cino, was going down to a resounding defeat yesterday, he was busy sending out the above tweet announcing the NRCC leadership team under the tutelage of crooked Texas miscreant Pete Sessions. Maybe someone has a better sense of irony than anyone gives the GOP credit for, but there is definitely something spooky about choosing demented Illinois religious fanatic John Shimkus as the Vice Chair for Mentoring. After all, Shimkus was the head of the page board who allowed Mark Foley access to the underage male pages even after everyone in DC knew the Florida Republican closet case was boinking them.

Wonderers sometimes wonder what made Shimkus so god-fearin'? Obviously I don't know. There was no twitter back when I first started paying attention to Congressman Shimkus years after he managed to win the House seat, by the narrowest of margins (50.3-49.7%) given up by Dick Durbin when Durbin ran for the U.S. Senate. What brought the colorless Shimkus to my attention in 2006 weren't any of his small town shenanigans on the Commerce Committee-- like getting B-20, the soybean-diesel fuel blend, qualified for the alternative fuels program or persuading Bush to scuttle the EPA rules that controlled mercury emissions from coal-fired generators. It was his role in the Mark Foley scandal. No, don't worry; Shimkus isn't gay. What he is, is a slouch and a partisan sneak who abandoned his duty and allowed god-only-knows-how-many underage boys to fall into Foley's predatory grasp.

It all started when Shimkus was the head of a less lucrative committee than Energy and Commerce, the 3-member Page Board, a small unheralded one whose one task was to look after the well-being of the congressional pages, all of whom are high school students. Denny Hastert appointed Shimkus to head it and the 2 other members were Republican Shelley Moore Capito and Democrat Dale Kildee, who had served on it for two decades. In 2005 Shimkus claims he first became aware of Foley's uncontrollable lust for underage boys. Shimkus and Capito carefully kept Kildee out of the discussions about the unfolding Foley scandal they were trying to keep contained. After the scandal broke, Hastert ineptly presided over an attempted GOP cover-up. It backfired and helped guarantee that the Republicans would lose the midterm elections. He asked Shimkus, who had already had the wool pulled over his eyes by Foley regarding inappropriate e-mails and pictures of sixteen year old pages. The Republicans were desperate to cover-up the fact that Foley was actually having sex with the boys and the whole Capitol Hill system circled the wagons on that one. "We want to make sure that all our pages are safe and the page system is safe," Hastert said.

...Shimkus got Foley to promise he would cease all contact with the 16 year old. Capitol, who called the e-mails "disgusting," did nothing to alert Kildee or in any way rock the cover-up boat Hastert and Shimkus were launching. "I became aware of it this afternoon [September 29th] when [Shimkus] came by my office. I think we should have had a page meeting right away," Kildee said, referring to the 2005 discovery of Foley's e-mails. When asked if he was upset about being excluded, Kildee said yes, adding, "I've been on the page board for 20 years." Shimkus is a little defensive about his shameful role in the episode. "I'm the chairman of the page board," Shimkus said when asked why he didn't include Kildee. "The Clerk and I addressed this issue." A week later he said "I think, based on the information I had, what I did was fine. If I regret something, maybe I should have had Dale [Kildee] with me because now it’s going to be a political football."

At first he lawyered up and lied about knowledge of the e-mails but it eventually leaked out that he had read them and had done his best to cover-up the whole mess at Hastert's direction. His disingenuous testimony in front of the House Ethics Committee goes a long way towards indicating what kind of a committee chairman he will make.

So what kind of a Vice Chairman of Mentoring do you think he's going to b?. And he's isn't even the most ridiculous-- or horrendous-- Vice-Chair selection. That honor goes to North Carolina bigot Virginia Foxx, who the GOP feels is the most in tune with their severely fractured grassroots. Yep, Virginia Foxx-- in a possible signal to gays and other minorities about Republican outreach-- is the new NRCC Vice Chairwoman of Grassroots Development! I'll leave it to you to figure out what that says about the Republican grassroots-- or at least how the GOP House leadership sees its grassroots. But it does seem to be a grassroots that finds it easy enough to shrug off not just Foxx's hysterical homophobia but even the extremist ravings of Utah's new teabaggy senator, Mike Lee, who-- although still not calling explicitly for a return to the slavery system-- is now publicly claiming child labor laws are unconstitutional. You think I'm exaggerating? Watch this Mormon fanatic lecturing against Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and other progressive presidents.

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law-- no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting-- that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned-- that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

...Moreover, Lee is simply wrong to claim that child labor magically disappeared after the Supreme Court rendered Congress powerless to prevent it. The reason why exploitative child labor has largely disappeared is because Congress placed very strict limits on child labor when it enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and the constitutional cloud over this law was removed three years later when the Court overruled Lee’s pet decision.

Child labor laws are also only one of many essential protections that would evaporate in Mike Lee’s America. The same legal theory Lee uses to impugn child labor laws applies equally to the federal minimum wage and the ban on whites-only lunch counters. And Lee doesn’t even stop there. In a subsequent section of the lecture, Lee attacks President Franklin Roosevelt for calling for the federal government to provide “a decent retirement plan” and “health care” because “the Constitution doesn’t give Congress any of those powers.”

Keep in mind when Lee talks about the Bill of Rights, conservatives like himself bitterly opposed them and fought them every step of the way, threatening to break up the young nation over them! The litany of things in Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights he spews out is something most normal Americans would aspire to. To Lee and his fellow conservatives-- and to the rightist grassroots over which Virginia Foxx will be presiding-- this is all blasphemy.