Randy DeLay caught red handed breaking the law?

[bushmeister0]

Has anyone heard about this yet? Marketplace is doing a series of reports on lobbyists and Congress. On today's program they did a piece on Congressional staffers.

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/staffers/a1.html

They report:

"Lawmakers get the airtime, but much of the real work on Capitol Hill gets done late at night, far from C-Span's cameras. It's done by high-ranking congressional staff. They are more than gatekeepers. They shape policy, write their bosses' letters, speeches, even write bills. Lobbyists in Washington court staff passionately.

Staff travel has received little scrutiny until our team spent more than a year sorting through 25,000 disclosure forms. We found special interests spending tens of millions of dollars buying face-time with congressional aides, with almost no oversight.

Take the case of Randy Delay - a lobbyist. Randy is the younger brother of Tom Delay, the former majority leader of the House of Representatives. On Capitol Hill, Randy was wired.

In 2002, he set out to influence a $300 billion highway bill, so he invited two key congressional staffers to a celebrated resort in Hot Springs Virginia - the Homestead. One important staff member, Ruth Van Mark, was in the midst of coordinating the Senate's highway bill. The other was Raga Elim, a top House Transportation Committee lawyer.

The staffers spent the weekend with Randy Delay's client - a group of firms seeking $1.6 billion in federal money to build a privately operated toll road in western Virginia. The trip was blatantly against congressional ethics rules. Sponsored travel is allowed for official business, but lobbyists are not allowed to pick up the tab. Randy Delay did not respond to repeated requests for comment."

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. Heh heh - I thought it was gonna be a Tom Delay sex scandal

with "randy" being an adjective. I didn't realize he had a brother. :7

Still, it doesn't surprise me that this crap goes on, adn that republicans seem to enjoy the largess of it more than democrats.

[bluedeminredstate]

3. Me too!

I couldn't click on here fast enough. Oh well, it's all good when DeLay and lawbreaking appear together in an article.

[bushmeister0]

4. Dems are duds at dishonesty.

Really, what's wrong with the Democrats? They can't even be crooks and not screw it up.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. Ahhh, The Homestead.

My parents used to live in Warm Springs, VA, just a few miles away. The Homestead has a storied history of all sorts of interesting activities that seem to revolve around Congress.

Back in the 80s, Congress built themselves one of those special congressional airports on top of the mountains overlooking The Homestead. You know, so they could fly their jets in and out at will. The really interesting part is this guy who moved into the area, ostensibly to work on the Lake Mumaw dam project. His name was Glenn. Glenn didn't last long on the dam, but his lifestyle really started on an upward arc. Seems Glenn found something that was even better than construction money: drugs. Cocaine, specifically. He was moving serious weight. Serious weight.

He got a lot of the locals involved in the business as well. Ran it like a real drug baron, too. What was really interesting is that Glenn was flying his drugs into that self-same congressional airport. With impunity, I might add. Made much of bragging that he had everyone wired, all the way into DC, and that he was protected. Planes were flying in day and night.

Finally, as all good things must come to an end, the feds finally stepped in. A few locals did some time, Glenn ended up in the Witness Protection Program(funny how that works...) and the airport became a public airport.

And a lot of the locals who didn't go to jail remain shit scared, to this day. They were told to shut up, you see. By the government.

Yup. Hot Springs, The Homestead and Bath County got them quite the history.