Tag: steve stockman
Five House Members Will Leave Congress With Open Ethics Review

Five House Members Will Leave Congress With Open Ethics Review

By Hannah Hess, CQ Roll Call (MCT)

WASHINGTON — One often-repeated sound bite of state Sen. Lee Zeldin’s successful campaign to unseat Rep. Timothy H. Bishop in New York’s 1st District was, “Just call me the … mailman” — a line that came straight from the pages of an Office of Congressional Ethics report on the Democrat.

Republicans said Bishop was bragging in the email, included in an OCE report that revealed the congressman helped a constituent get government clearance for a bar mitzvah fireworks display. According to the OCE, Bishop then asked for “5 large” in campaign contributions.

The House Ethics Committee has not launched a formal investigation into the matter, but it appears the allegations still helped sink Bishop’s bid for a seventh term.

In accordance with rules requiring disclosure,the Ethics Committee publicly released the OCE’s report and findings on Sept. 11, 2013. The panel announced it would continue a fact-finding pursuant to Rule 18A, putting the Bishop probe in limbo with no requirement that any result be made public. One year later, the National Republican Congressional Committee hit the airwaves with a 30-second ad reminding voters that congressional ethics investigators and the FBI had both looked into the incumbent’s actions.

Because the Ethics Committee only investigates sitting members of Congress, Bishop’s election night defeat means the case is effectively closed on Capitol Hill.Four other House lawmakers are in the same boat in the wake of the midterms, set to sail away from Washington with no rebuke from the bipartisan group of lawmakers who sit on the panel charged with policing their own.In some cases, merely sharing the investigation with the public was penalizing enough for the member.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announced her retirement from Congress on May 29, 2013, amid multiple probes into her 2012 presidential bid. Two days later, the OCE board voted to refer its report on alleged improper campaign spending to the Ethics Committee. It outlined the OCE’s evidence that Bachmann may have used campaign funds to promote her book and may have used funds from her leadership political action committee to supplement the salary of political campaign staff.

Like Bishop’s case, the panel announced a few months after the referral that it would continue to review Bachmann’s possible ethics violations. Republican Tom Emmer has been elected to succeed her.

Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) also leaves office with no rebuke from the House, weeks after an OCE report presenting evidence that suggests he used his position to help certain companies in which he was financially invested. After news reports about an investigation into Petri’s relationship with a defense contractor headquartered in his district, the 17-term lawmaker in February asked the Ethics Committee for a review in an attempt “to end any questions.” The OCE was simultaneously looking into his actions. Petri announced his retirement in April. Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman will fill the seat in next Congress.

House rules are designed to prevent OCE investigations from being used to score political points during an election year. The nonpartisan fact-finding board is barred from transmitting any referrals to the Ethics Committee within 60 days before a federal, state or local election in which the subject of the probe is a candidate. If an ongoing review ends during the suspension period, the board completes its referral and transmits the report on the first business day following the election.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) faced an ethics probe during his final months in Congress for paying GOP communications consultant Brett O’Donnell, the so-called Tea Party whisperer, more than $43,000 in taxpayer dollars. Broun allegedly paid out in exchange for advice on communications during his failed bid for a Senate seat. Those revelations came from an OCE report released on Oct. 29, shortly before Republican Jody Hice won the three-term congressman’s seat.

The case will also be closed on Rep. Steve Stockman, who told the Houston Chronicle he was the target of an ethics probe a few days before the panel went public with the news. According to a scathing report by the OCE, the Texas Republican accepted contributions to his own congressional campaign committee from two employees. Stockman refutes the report as inaccurate and biased, but he will not be around to see the results of the ongoing review of the matter. He took himself out of commission after losing a primary challenge to Texas Sen. John Cornyn, and congratulated Republican Brian Babin on winning his seat.

Stockman escaped rebuke from what appeared to be a violation of House rules in September. He tweeted a photo of Broun from the House floor, breaching a clause on “comportment.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

This Week In Crazy: Gay People Should Be Stoned To Death, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Gay People Should Be Stoned To Death, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Steve Stockman

Genuinely crazy Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) returns to the list at number five, for suggesting (again) that President Obama is a secret Muslim, and a terrorist sympathizer.

“This guy, the president, apparently has a grudge against the military and the American people,” Stockman said during an appearance on the Steve Malzberg show.

Obama has a “propensity to fall again and again on the side of terrorists,” Stockman later added. His explanation? “A lot of people say he’s not something…we can’t say it on the radio, but if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, I think it might be a duck.”

This duck, presumably.

Earlier in the interview, Stockman also took a moment to suggest that Obama should trade Susan Rice to the Mexican government in exchange for Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, who is being held in prison in Tecate on a gun charge. It’s understandable that Stockman may have jail on the brain; this week the House Ethics Committee reported that it has “substantial reason to believe” that Stockman violated federal laws and ethics rules.

4. Joni Ernst

Once it became apparent that state senator and hog castrator Joni Ernst was going to be Iowa’s GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, Republicans did everything possible to push back against the narrative that Ernst is a Tea Party extremist.

There’s only one problem: Joni Ernst.

On Thursday, the Iowa Democratic Party shared video of Ernst vowing that, if she is elected as senator, she will finally put a stop to the United Nations’ evil Agenda 21.

In reality, Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented UN resolution meant to promote sustainable development. In right-wing fever derams, Agenda 21 is actually a conspiracy through which the UN will abolish all property rights (and, according to Senator Ted Cruz, ban golf).

“The United Nations has imposed this upon us, and as a U.S. senator, I would say no more,” Ernst said. “No more Agenda 21.”

“One of the implications to Americans, again, going back to what does it do to an individual family here in the state of Iowa, and what I’ve seen, the implications that it has here is moving people off of their agricultural land and consolidating them into city sectors. And then telling them, ‘You don’t have property rights anymore,'” Ernst continued. “These are all things that the UN is behind, and it’s bad for the United States, it’s bad for families here in the state of Iowa.”

If this whole Senate thing doesn’t work out, maybe Ernst could have a future in Ron Paul’s think tank.

3. Gordon Klingenschmitt

Gordon Klingenschmitt, who recently exposed liberals’ devious plan to visually rape America’s daughters, took the logical next step on Tuesday: Mind rape!

While discussing the debate raging in Scotland over whether teachers and students should be able to opt out of classes that discuss gay marriage, Klingenschmitt got choked up over the children who will be “recruited into perversion.”

“So in other words, every child has a right to be raped,” Klingenschmitt said. “At least in their mind, by somebody who is going to pervert them and recruit them into sexual immorality. This is how liberals think.”

It’s not all bad for mind rape victims, though. At least George Will thinks they’re getting a pretty sweet deal.

2. Kevin Crow

Photo via GoWithCrow.com

Photo via GoWithCrow.com

Politicians often invoke the founding fathers to illustrate whatever political point they are trying to make at the time (with occasionally hilarious results). In these analogies, the founders are usually the heroes, paragons of virtue whose legacies we are failing to honor.

Dr. Kevin Crow, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, decided to go in a different direction. According to Dr. Crow, the founding fathers actually caused the Rwandan genocide.

Crow made his strange charge during a debate on Friday.

“The job of America is not to be the exporter of liberty. That’s not our job. Our job is to look after ourselves. Let me explain what happens when you become the exporter of liberty,” Crow said. “Jimmy Carter tried that in Iran, and remember the brutal Shah? You saw where that got us. The Belgians tried that when they pulled out of Rwanda.”

“‘Well, we need to teach them that all men are created equal,'” Crow continued sarcastically. “Then all the Hutus started saying, ‘The Tutsis, they don’t treat us equal, so let’s get back at them.’ And what we had was a slaughter.”

“Taking the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ to a culture that doesn’t have a heritage of constitutionalism — it leads to genocide,” he concluded.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Crow is barely registering in polls of the Republican primary. So if Oklahoma wants a senator who radically misunderstands foreign policy, they’ll have to keep settling for Jim Inhofe.

1. Scott Esk

Photo via AskForEsk.com

Photo via AskForEsk.com

It says a lot about Oklahoma that Dr. Crow is not the Sooner State’s craziest politician of the week. That honor goes to this week’s “winner,” state House candidate Scott Esk.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma magazine The Moore Daily reported that last summer, Esk endorsed stoning gay people to death.

“I think we would be totally in the right to do it,” the Tea Party candidate wrote on Facebook. “That goes against some parts of libertarianism, I realize, and I’m largely libertarian, but ignoring as a nation things that are worthy of death is very remiss.”

The Moore Daily reached out to Esk for clarification, and found that he really has no misgivings about the stoning plan.

“That was done in the Old Testament under a law that came directly from God and in that time there it was totally just. It came directly from God,” Esk said.

“I have no plans to reinstitute that in Oklahoma law,” he added. “I do have some very huge moral misgivings about those kinds of sins.”

As The Raw Storypoints out, Esk says that “if it helps any,” he believes that states should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to stone gay people to death.

“I would hope that libertarians who don’t think perversion should be punished in any way between consenting adults would be open-minded and look at the different results between a state that ignores it and [one] that punishes it severely,” he said. “And within a state, cities and communities may well have different policies, and I cheer that. That way, people can decide for themselves whether they want to live in a particular community based in part on how things like this are dealt with.”

Memo to Esk: That didn’t help any.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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A Farewell To Crazy: What Went Wrong For Steve Stockman

Stockman wave

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

One of the strangest, least effective campaigns in recent memory came to an ignominious end on Tuesday night, when U.S. Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) lost his primary challenge to Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) by a resounding 40 percent margin.

Stockman’s failure was not hard to predict; in fact, when Stockman launched his campaign in December, The National Memo declared that “the extreme-right-wing congressman may finally be a candidate who’s too far on the fringe for even the Tea Party,” and provided four reasons that Stockman had no chance to be the next senator from Texas. Our predictions were almost 100 percent accurate.

So as Senator Cornyn prepares for the possibility of facing another thoroughly unserious opponent — the Democratic nominee will be decided by a May 27 runoff between millionaire dental mogul David Alameel and Lyndon LaRouche-disciple Kesha Rogers, who recently compared the president to Hitler — take a look back at what went wrong for his last challenger.

Here’s how Steve Stockman’s absurd Senate bid fell apart:

He Has A Long History Of Legal Trouble

Steve Stockman 427x321

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

What we wrote in December: “A youthful run-in with the law does not automatically disqualify a candidate from higher office, but it could be a bigger issue for Stockman given that he hopes to run as a social conservative — and given that he is still having legal problems over three decades later.”

What happened: Stockman’s legal problems went on to dominate coverage of his campaign. Among other incidents, Stockman was accused of campaign finance violations, had one of his campaign offices condemned for failing numerous safety violations, and threatened media outlets that reported on his well-known brushes with law in the 1970s.

The controversies made an impact on at least one Tea Party group, which shortly before Election Day blasted Stockman as “unethical” and lacking integrity.

He Says Crazy Things

Steve Stockman3

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

We wrote: “Until he announced his challenge to Cornyn, Stockman was best known as the most outrageous, unstable member of a caucus that could be most charitably described as ‘eccentric.'”

What happened: Stockman didn’t disappoint in this regard. Throughout his campaign, the congressman:

    • Labeled “liberal tears” as “the best gun lubricant around”
    • Hawked “Obama barf bags” on his website to help “take back our country from the creeping advance of socialism”
    • Faked endorsements from at least seven conservatives, including one who died seven months before Stockman announced his campaign
    • Launched his campaign by warning that “you are in a foxhole fighting to save our constitutional Republic, and the last thing you need is a Republican bayonet in your back. But that’s what liberal John Cornyn has been doing to you every day”

And that’s just in the last three months.

Stockman’s outrageous rhetoric may not have been the deciding factor in his 40-point loss, but it certainly didn’t help him present himself as a plausible alternative to the Senate minority whip.

He Supports Crazy Policies

Steve Stockman2

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

We wrote:“Stockman’s actual policy positions are almost as far out as his rhetoric,” and are “far outside of the mainstream, even in Texas.”

What happened: Although he launched his campaign by bragging about his past support for legislation that would “automatically overturn Roe v. Wade” and “block and nullify all anti-gun UN treaties,” Stockman’s wacky platform actually didn’t turn out to be much of a problem for him.

Unfortunately, this is because he didn’t end up talking about policy, at all. In addition to doggedly avoiding the press throughout his time in the race, at one point he literally disappeared from public view for nearly two weeks, missing 17 votes in the House.

The disappearance — which was emblematic of Stockman’s broader refusal to debate the issues anywhere aside from Twitter — helped lead the aforementioned Tea Party group to label his Senate bid as “what might be the laziest statewide campaign to date.”

“The media salted your staff with questions, but these questions were sneered at and rebuffed,” the Tea Party activists wrote to Stockman in an open letter. “Based on your response to media inquiries, you apparently believe you don’t have to answer to anybody.”

He Doesn’t Have Any Money

Money 427x321

Photo: “kaje_yomama” via Flickr

We wrote: “Perhaps because the factors above make it hard for donors to take him seriously, Stockman is entering the campaign at a tremendous financial disadvantage. Stockman has just $32,000 in cash on hand, less than 5 percent of Cornyn’s $7 million war chest. Worse yet, Stockman also has $163,000 in debt.”

What happened: This turned out to be Stockman’s biggest impediment to pulling an upset (or at least forcing Cornyn into a runoff). Even if Stockman were running a serious campaign, it likely wouldn’t have mattered due to Cornyn’s massive spending advantage. Throughout the primary campaign, Cornyn raised nearly $13 million and spent more than $8 million. By contrast, Stockman raised just $250,033, and spent $221,685 — leaving him with just $32,027 to retire his debts.

Texas Republicans Choose Establishment Candidates Over Tea Partyers

Texas Republicans Choose Establishment Candidates Over Tea Partyers

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

HOUSTON — Republican incumbents threatened by tea party challengers emerged triumphant in Tuesday’s Texas primary, with longtime U.S. Senator John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions coasting to victory.

The primary also marked the electoral debut of the fourth generation of the Bush dynasty with George P. Bush’s candidacy. The son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, nephew and grandson of the former presidents and great-grandson of a U.S. senator, the 37-year-old won the Republican nomination for Texas land commissioner, a little-known but powerful post that has served as a launching pad for state politics.

The Associated Press projected all three as the winners shortly after polls closed.

The Texas election kicked off the 2014 campaign season with themes expected to play out among conservatives across the country this year. Cornyn was one of more than a dozen incumbent GOP senators facing tea party opponents, and Bush is among several candidates trying to parlay family ties into elective office.

Cornyn, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican, led in early returns Tuesday over U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, who represents a district to the south and east of Houston. Stockman waged a bizarre campaign, skipping public appearances and relying on gags such as rewarding donors with Obama barf bags. The victory makes Cornyn the odds-on favorite in November; Democrats have not won statewide office in Texas in 20 years.

Some experts consider Cornyn’s margin of victory, once all the ballots are counted, a bellwether of anti-incumbent sentiment.

“If Cornyn comes out below 60 percent, then the sense is that he looks relatively weak,” said Jim Henson, who directs the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. As early votes were counted, Cornyn was exceeding that level.

“It’s a protest vote,” said Stuart Rothenberg, who analyzes races for his nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report, adding that if Stockman were to get 20 percent to 25 percent of the vote, “it would tell you there’s a chunk of the Republican Party who will vote for anybody who challenges the Republican establishment.”

Mark Jones, chairman of the political science department at Houston’s Rice University, was tracking Cornyn’s margin of victory compared with that of Republican gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott.

Abbott, the state attorney general, had far more cash and name recognition than his three challengers and had already been facing off against the Democratic candidate for November, state Sen. Wendy Davis. Davis garnered national attention last year during her 11-hour filibuster of state legislation that eventually restricted access to abortion statewide.

“The closer Cornyn is to Abbott, the better we should gauge his performance,” Jones said.

In the governor’s race, the first without an incumbent since 1990, voters can expect continued “trench warfare” between Abbott and Davis on a statewide and national scale, Henson said.

The two have been attacking each other in recent months over everything from his alliance with shock rocker Ted Nugent to exaggerations in the onetime single mother’s hard-luck campaign trail biography.

“We’ll continue to see them battling it out from news cycle to news cycle,” Henson said.

Like Cornyn, Sessions beat back a tea party challenge, his by activist Katrina Pierson.

Bush’s primary opponent, east Texas businessman David Watts, raised a fraction of the millions Bush amassed. It’s been nearly five years since a Bush held elected office, the longest lapse in 32 years. Partisans hope that Bush, a Fort Worth lawyer and Navy veteran fluent in Spanish, will revive his family’s role in Republican politics while expanding the party’s appeal to Latino voters.

“Republicans around the country who remain loyal to former President George W. Bush and his father are going to see this George Bush as part of that legacy and somebody they can support. And other Republicans are going to see George P. as quite a profile: His mother’s Mexican, he can appeal to Latino voters, he’s young, articulate,” Rothenberg said. “The question is what kind of resume does he build in office.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr