Harry The Hypocrite Speaks Out

Hypocrite Harry is at it again, or should I say still at it, excoriating the Koch brothers for their political contributions while at the same time ignoring the contributions of the labor unions and multi-billionaire George Soros. What's worse, the Koch's have contributed a small fraction of what the unions or Soros have, yet they are the 'bad guys'. Or is it that the latter have helped enrich Harry Reid while he's been in office, meaning he's been bought and paid for? To listen to him speak on the Senate floor, you'd have to think so.

Mr. Reid was quite agitated on the Senate floor about "unlimited money," by which he must have been referring to the $4.4 billion that unions had spent on politics from 2005 to 2011 alone, according to this newspaper. The Center for Responsive Politics' list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million). Even factoring in undisclosed personal donations by the Koch brothers, they are a rounding error in union spending.

So the piddling amount the Koch's have given to political causes amounts to “buy elections” and “rigging the system”, yet the hundreds of millions labor unions have spent can be safely ignored? Talk about a double standard, and one that has been eroding our system of government for a long time.

If Reid wants to get Big Money out of politics, maybe he can start by sponsoring legislation that will outlaw unions from making political contributions of any kind. The unions have long been a corrupting influence on the political process. That's not surprising considering many of the larger ones are corrupt, bordering on being criminal organizations. (Some were fronts for organized crime, and many unions leaders went to prison for their criminal activities.) They have influenced far too many elections, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that some of them helped rigged elections on behalf of the Democrat Party. (How else can you explain Al Franken's election to the Senate?)

Unions, as 501(c)(5) organizations, are technically held to the same standards against coordination with political parties. Yet no Democrat or union official today even troubles to maintain that fiction. Hundreds upon hundreds of the delegates to the 2012 Democratic convention were union members. They were in the same room as party officials, plotting campaign strategies. The question therefore is how much of that $4.4 billion in union spending was at the disposal of the Democratic Party—potentially in violation of a bajillion campaign-finance rules?

One set of rules for the Left and another set for everyone else. Gee, it sounds just like the Old Soviet Union, doesn't it?

Once Harry Reid decides he will work to rein in political spending by all organizations and individuals of means I will believe he really wants to reform campaign spending. Otherwise he's showing himself for the two-faced ideologue he is.