Trey Gowdy And Paul Ryan-- What A Team!

Yesterday it was Trey Gowdy-- South Carolina's walking advertisement for extreme botox malpractice-- who nominated Paul Ryan to be speaker. For those who have short memories, Michigan Democratic congressional candidate, Paul Clements, reminded his supporters that Ryan, more than anything else, represents "an extremist vision of American domestic policy. The Path to Prosperity outlined by his budget proposal seeks to do many things, like...

• Dismantling Medicare
• Repealing the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act
• Dramatic cuts to food aid for the impoverished (remember his comment about the "culture of dependency?")
• Cut education funding by $145 billion
• Charge students interest on their student loans while still in college

Yesterday when Ryan said "our party has lost its vision and we’re going to replace that vision," that's what he was talking about. The guy is no moderate-- nor even mainstream. He got 200 votes to be the Republican Party nominee for Speaker; Taliban Dan only 43. Today the full House elected him Speaker. Gowdy will need powerful friends, like Speaker Ryan, as his ethics case-- using taxpayer money to unfairly try to influence the presidential election-- wends through the system. This week, Alan Grayson the Florida congressman who issued the formal complaint against Gowdy and Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy-- Ryan's not going to hold him over, is he?-- sent supplemental information, new evidence, to the Chief Counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The basis of Grayson's charges against Gowdy and McCarthy are that they violated "federal law and House rules by using official funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi to pay political or campaign related expenses."

On October 10, 2015, the New York Times reported that a former investigator for the Republican staff of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Bradley F. Podliska, planned to file a lawsuitt in federal court challenging his termination on the basis that he was fired in retaliation for refusing to abandon his efforts to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack and instead focus primarily on investigating Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The following day, the New York Times reported that, according to senior Republican officials, Speaker Boehner had a longstanding interest in the Benghazi attack and that the Select Committee's focus on "Mrs. Clinton's emails gave him a way to keep the issue alive and cause political problems for her campaign." In addition, on October 14, 2015, Representative Richard Hanna told Utica radio station WIBX (950 AM) in a live interview that, "I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people, and an individual, Hillary Clinton."

Accordingly, it now appears to be virtually beyond dispute that funds appropriated to the Select Committee on Benghazi have been diverted, in violation of federal law and House rules, to the purpose of opposing the presidential campaign Hillary Clinton. The House Ethics Manual has long proscribed specifically such a gross misuse of appropriated funds.

I trust that the Office of Congressional Ethics will conduct a thorough and diligent investigation of this egregious violation of federal law and House rules, including interviewing all those named in this letter who have knowledge of the extent to which appropriated funds were misused for political purposes.

Someone's got to hold these extremists' feet to the fire. Thank goodness we have someone like Alan Grayson in Congress. No one else has done this.