Republicans Criminalizing Politics over Sestak Affair
Republicans Criminalizing Politics over Sestak Affair
While Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has deemed the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal an “illegal quid pro quo” and “Obama’s Watergate,” the overwhelming consensus of legal opinion had concluded otherwise. While Bush White House ethics officer Richard Painter told his fellow Republicans to “move on,” Steve Bunnell of the firm O’Melveny & Myers announced, “There is nothing inherently bad about it unless you think politics and democracy are bad.”
But for over a generation, it has been the Republicans and their conservative amen corner who have tried to brush off charges of their own corruption and lawlessness as “criminalizing politics.” And from Iran-Contra, Plamegate and Tom Delay to the U.S. attorneys purge to detainee torture, Republicans survived their endless scandals by instead successfully politicizing crime.
Ironically, it was President Bush’s father who introduced the criminalization of politics defense into the Republican strategic lexicon. In justifying his Iran-Contra pardons, President George H.W. Bush used the talking point that would come to define the discourse of his son’s 21st century water carriers. Much like his son’s defenders, Bush 41 sought to recast rampant Republican White House criminality as mere political disagreement:
Mr. Bush said today that the Walsh prosecution reflected “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.”
The “criminalizing politics” canard has been part of the Republican scandal survival kit ever since.