Dirty Reid, Done Dirt Cheap?

In an Associated Press article released February 9th, staff reporters John Solomon and Sharon Theimer reported a pair of incidents that linked Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The first incident was Reid's opposition to approval of a new casino here in Michigan that would have put it in direct competition with one owned by Indian clients of Abramoff. What the article failed to point out, according to an article on the Media Matters website, was that "Reid said at the time that he opposed the legislation because it would create a "very dangerous precedent" for the spread of off-reservation gambling -- something Reid had opposed for nearly a decade."

The second incident, which sounds much more ominous in the article, concerns legislation intended to raise the minimum wage in the United States, and would have affected the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that Abramoff represented. The article suggested that Reid worked with Abramoff to shoot down the legislation. However, according to Media Matters, "Reid was a co-sponsor of that legislation and spoke on the Senate floor in favor of its passage."

While both of these incidents have been highly publicized just about everywhere in the media, none appear to have mentioned that Reid's actions showed no proof that Reid did anything for Abramoff's clients.

Billing records from Abramoff's firm show that members of his staff met with Reid's staff on at least twenty different occasions in 2001 alone. A former colleague of Abramoff's, Ronald Platt, told the Associated Press that his contact with Reid's staff was "incidental, insofar as I simply bumped into Reid staffers at Democratic Party functions or occurred incidental to discussions regarding my clients, not Abramoff's." He added, "Any contacts that I may have had in regards to Abramoff's tribal clients would have been similarly incidental."

Moving to the other side of the aisle, the new House Majority Leader, John Boehner (R-OH) is renting an apartment from a Washington lobbyist with ties to legislation that Boehner has worked on in the past. The basement apartment, according to a Washington Post article, is owned by lobbyist John D. Milne, whose clients include restaurant chains and insurance companies - groups that are directly related to matters that Boehner works on in the House of Representative. Conflict of interest?

Not so, says Boehner spokesperson Don Seymour, who described the apartment, which Boehner pays $1600 per month, as a modest two-bedroom basement dwelling. A review of listings in the area show that the cost is close to that of similar apartments.

The question here, unlike the situation with Reid, is how much is too much? Boehner has already been criticized by both parties for handing out checks on the House floor from Big Tobacco lobbyists. As the person who is supposed to bring a bit of dignity back to his party after the DeLay and Abramoff scandals, he's not exactly working overtime to distance himself from the lobbyists.


All the best,
DCF