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I’m actually with the Republicans on this one
Do you guys remember Representative William Jefferson? Sure you do - he’s the dude who had $90,000 stashed in his freezer, which the FBI found last year when they were investigating him for bribery charges. As you’ll recall, there was a federal bribery probe going on, amidst allegations that Jefferson took money in connection with an African telecommunications deal. As a result of this probe, Nancy Pelosi kicked Jefferson off of the Ways and Means Committee.
Well, Jefferson managed to win himself a re-election last fall, and now Pelosi has decided to put him on a Homeland Security panel. She’s purportedly doing this, because Jefferson, a Democrat from Louisiana, has been a loud critic of how homeland security handled the whole Katrina debacle. While the appointment still has to be approved by other House Democrats, some Republicans are already raging. The highest ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, asked:
“They couldn’t trust him to write tax policy, so why should he be given access to our nation’s top secrets or making policy for national defense?”
Uhm, yeah, that’s a pretty solid chain of logic to me. Jefferson’s chief of staff, meanwhile, says King’s comment is “ridiculous and just politics” because it just makes sense for Jefferson to be on the committee because of his concerns about what happened after Katrina. Of course, he conveniently sidesteps the question of whether someone accused of taking a bribe should be on a homeland security panel.
Here’s another notch on the wall in the “the Democrats are their own worst enemy” column.
