First Things First for Congress 2023

Republican House Leader and probable new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has promised that he will deal harshly with three of the most deserving reprobates in Congress: Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Mr. Schiff has been called out as a consistent liar about all sorts of things but mostly surrounding the various failed attempts to impeach and convict former President Donald Trump. The saddest part of that saga is that even when it was demonstrated repeatedly that he just made up scandalous tidbits about Mr. Trump the mainstream media – particularly CNN and MSNBC – repeated his assertions verbatim. It’s unfortunate that the executives of those media outlets don’t have the courage to admit their mistakes and remove the reporters who never fact checked a single thing said by Mr. Schiff.

Ms. Omar is one of Congress’ most outspoken bigots and repeatedly spreads lies and hate directed at Jews in general and Israel in particular. Her hatred of Jews appears to stem from the historical hate of Muslim extremist given that Israel never had anything to do with the civil war in Somalia which caused her family to flee to Kenya initially. She is a hater and that is it pure and simple. Ms. Omar’s district includes one of the highest concentration of Somalis in the nation and is the base from which she derives her election successes. I don’t know whether her bigotry reflects that of her constituents or it just immunizes her from electoral defeat. Whichever, she is a hater and while her constituents have the right to elect whomever they want, the Speaker of the House has the right and, in fact, the duty to prevent her from any high profile positions that would permit her access to sensitive information, including those involving foreign relations, military intelligence and/or foreign intelligence.

Mr. Swalwell, like his colleague, Mr. Schiff, is a consistent liar. And apparently that extends to both his public and private life. Like Mr. Schiff, Mr. Swalwell made up all sort of salacious things about Mr. Trump and relied on his positions on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Homeland Security as if he was in possession of information that he could not produce but that he did leak to the mainstream media on a regular basis. And the mainstream media ate it up without a single fact check. Outrageous. But that isn’t only one of the reasons that Mr. Swalwell should be banished from any of these Committees. He also apparently lied to his wife and family. Yes, Mr. Swalwell is married and while his wife stayed at home in California to raise their two children, Mr. Swalwell struck up an affair with alleged Chinese spy, Fang Fang. Of course Mr. Swalwell has denied he knew of Fang Fang’s clandestine purposes or that he provided any information or intelligence from his three House committees, but Mr. Swalwell has lied so often and so regularly about so many things you might assume, to quote my father, “that the truth is not with him.”

Now you may assume that this is just a partisan rant about select Democrats and to a degree you would be right, but only if you stopped right here.

Multiple members of Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, have complained about these three members – some privately, and some publicly, and some directly to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). And Ms. Pelosi has declined to take any action – going so far as to see she didn’t see any problem with these members. That shouldn’t surprise you because Ms. Pelosi herself set the tone for a culture of corruption dating back to when she first became Speaker of the House. One will never know whether it was because Ms. Pelosi was too busy building a massive family fortune now pegged at nearly $200 Million* based on insider information that was required to be filed with Congress but denied to the general public, or because she feared blowing the whistle on others’ corruption would encourage an investigation of her in return. Regardless, Ms. Pelosi set the tone, or perhaps she and now President Joe Biden saw the ease with which you could become fabulously rich as a public servant with a deaf ear towards morality or corruption. In Ms. Pelosi’s case it may well have been that she inherited that culture of corruption from he father, Thomas Alejandro, the former Mayor of Baltimore.

But even at that, this column isn’t about Ms. Pelosi. It is about the public corruption that has been allowed to grow within the government of the United States. It includes congressional members, high ranking bureaucrats and even the President of the United States. And it is about what tone, what tolerance, what action Mr. McCarthy as presumptive Speaker of the House will take to change this culture. Let me suggest the following at least:

• Change the rules of the House to prohibit the use of insider information for purposes of trading in public stocks. Blind trusts which are monitored by a non-partisan “investigator general” are the best way of controlling this.

• Encourage whistle blowers in the congressional staff and provide protection when they act.

• Tighten the rules for the “honest services” in exchange for contributions

• Create a committee on “Building Maintenance” to which members such as Mr. Schiff, Mr. Swalwell and Ms. Omar can be banished is response to ethics violations, lying, disclosures and bigotry.

There probably are a hundred other things that can be done short of physical violence and the best should be seized upon at implemented immediately. The only way you can take back your country is to end the corruption that is endemic currently in Congress and federal bureaucracies.

___________________

* She thus raised the ante of the previous Queen of Corruption, Hillary Clinton who amassed a fortune estimated at $180 Million during her time as a United States Senator, Secretary of State and two-time presidential candidate.