I take requests: Congressional criminals
I received this email today:
Rep. Renzi indicted on fraud, finance chargesI'm sure you know all about this, but since my knowledge of news is limited to what the editors at comcast deem important enough to make headlines out of, I have some blogfodder for you.
I'd be very interested to see a comparison of convicted congresspeople, their crimes, and their party. I'd even be interested those that have only been indited. It just feels like those holier than thou Republicans are always breakinng the law... when I see a headline involving "congress" and "crime" I always assume it's a republican. I think a chart that I could point to and say, "look, see, republicans are 10x more likely to break the law than democrats" could come in handy.
Get crackin'.
Corruption and Congress: let me count the ways in which our national legislature has been perverted by perfidy. Since chronicling the illegal activities of all 535 Congresscritters would be a full-time job, I often rely on others to summarize and compile this data; a primary source is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. I blogged about their 2006 report here (17 Republicans and 3 Democrats), but somehow neglected the 2007 report, which contains 18 Republicans and 4 Democrats (in addition to 2 "dishonorable mentions," both Republicans). Public Citizen's "Clean Up Washington" website has a "Hall of Shame" report featuring many of the usual suspects; its list contain 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.
Based on those numbers, "ten times as likely to break the law" is a high estimate; five times as likely is pretty close, nearly 16% of the corrupt figures are as Democrats. As the 2007 CREW report laments:
Sadly, despite an election in which Democrats ran on a platform of eradicating the "culture of corruption" and the fact that voters overwhelmingly turned against members with ethics problems, very little appears to have changed.
Perhaps this is because, even in the new Congress, the GOP controls 47% of the seats. (We do have an opportunity to improve the composition of Congress in just over eight months...) On the other side of the aisle, the right-wing Culture of Corruption website has a list of "Democrat [sic] scandals," but their list includes local and state officials, with some incidents dating back to the 1960s. Limiting the scandals to 1). Congress and 2). this century reduces their list from 77 to 4: Robert Torricelli, Gary Condit, John Murtha, and Frank Ballance. As such, the list of Democratic criminals pales in comparison to the epidemic of bribery, perjury, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and insider trading that marks the GOP's era of Congressional dominance.