MASON CONSERVATIVE

Very Serious People

Here is the list of the members of Terry McAuliffe's ethics refrom commission:

• Rick Boucher
• Bill Bolling
• Viola Baskerville
• Sharon Bulova
• John Casteen
• Susan Magill
• Courtney Malveaux
• Joe May
• John Sherman

Wow.  A committee of Very Serious People who are very non-conservative and thus are probably Very Serious.  No room for the rabble, I guess.

What a joke.

While am not familiar with every name on this list, I know enough to know that people on this commission are people who have made a lot of money and notoriety off of state and local government and I doubt are very interested in doing anything to actually fix what is really wrong.  The recommendations will no doubt ask for more government in order to manage government.

These are, after all, Very Serious People.

When we think of ethics reform, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is WWJLF.  What Was Johnnie Looking For?  He was looking for money from the Governor's Opportunity Fund, a slush fund of millions that the governor has at his disposel to throw at businesses to move to Virginia.  Every governor has used it, it is without General Assembly oversight, and it is something a certain co-chairman of this commission was counting on using to propel himself to the governorship.  See here.

What was the other scandal?  Phil Puckett, of course  This is a twofer!  Not only do we have a state senator with enough tenure to retire and get a pension, he was looking for that golden parachute that so many state lawmakers have used to end their careers rich since the pension is paid out on the last three years of your public service.  Get reelected in a safe district over and over, take a job as head of a state department nobody cares about, retire with a fat pension for doing very little.  Keep gettin' them checks.  On top of that, somehow a sitting member of the House of Delegates, Terry Kilgore, is also the chairman of a powerful state commission that doles out millions itself.  Its insane.  

I can only imagine what this Bolling-Boucher train-wreck will give us.  No doubt there will be much hand-wringing by these Very Serious People.  I can just see it.  A large lacquered table, perhaps with a skirt on it and the seal of Virginia.  There would be another table in front of them to listen to testimony from other Very Serious People, with notepads and nice nameplates in front of everyone.  They will be looking perhaps to set up another permanent commission to oversee ethics (with, no doubt, a nice salary that will tack on to your state pension), and various other laughable proposals that will look strong but won't be.  After all, these people no doubt believe in the openness of government.  Don't be fooled, Virginia.  Nearly all of these Very Serious People have served significant amount of time in elected office, I'm sure they aren't going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg they, and their friends, are feeding off of.

If you want ethics reform, Virginia can save some money on these Very Serious People and just do the following:

1. Legislative term limits:  Four terms for House of Delegates, two terms for the Virginia Senate.  This way, legislators cannot just take that golden parachute that led to things like what Phil Puckett did.  I'm not saying it was corrupt, because it was clearly legal, but seriously ... even Rs I know who love what he did know it wasn't entirely "ethical."  If your going to serve in state government and get a nice pension, you should actually be doing a job for some time in state government.  
2. Pay raise for state legislators:  So yes, this one is painful to write.  But seriously, I don't think delegates and senators are properly compensated for their service.  If we are going to insist that we maintain a part-time legislature that forces its members to actually have real jobs in the community like the rest of us, we must better compensate them for when they leave those jobs to serve.
3. Ban legislators from serving on state commissions concurrently:  It is really ridiculous that Terry Kilgore chairs the Virginia Tobacco Commission.  In this state, the House of Delegates is incredibly powerful.  Kilgore holds sway over judges, budgets, and nearly every thing the state touches.  To then give him the power over millions of dollars in tobacco money is scary.  
4. Lastly, abolish the Opportunity Fund!!!!: I cannot say this loud enough.  This is the money Johnnie wanted, this is the money Bolling used to run around the state and throw at businesses who would then, in turn, I'm sure send many a contribution his way for his race for governor.  What a joke.  This is complete crony capitalism at its worst.  The only difference between what Bolling was doing (to applause) and what McDonnell did (to a federal conviction) is a crazy wife.  Do we really want that to be the line in sand for this state?  The catalyst for corruption in this state is a roving fund of millions of dollars doled out at the discretion of one person and without any oversight.  Don't reform it, end it.  Any deal the state makes with a business must be approved by the General Assembly.

Does ANYONE think the Bill Bollings, Sharon Bulovas, and Viola Baskervilles of the world, these Very Serious People, would do any of this?  Come on, be honest.  Abolition of the Opportunity fund, legislative term limits, state legislative pay raise, and the elimination of elected officials serving on state commissions concurrently.  That is real ethics reform.  Getting rich off of state government has been a bipartisan shibboleth among the political elite and connected in this commonwealth.  In order to bring about real ethics reform, that axis needs to be broken.

Your move.

P.S.  Can a reform commission really be taken seriously by the Chief Jobs Creation Officer of a governor just convicted in federal court?

Can Jim Webb Save America?

From Republican hawks looking to re-escalate Mideast wars?  From Hilary Clinton, seeking to finally undo the anti-war populism that reinvigorated the party?  From itself?

I watched Jim Webb's address to the National Press Club and came away mightily imperssed.  Please take a look at it and ask yourself, who is asking these questions?  Can you imagine Hilary Clinton giving that speech?  Chris Christie?  Joe Biden?  Marco Rubio?  No.  Webb political doctrine seems not to fit either party perfectly, and he will certainly have a hard time running as a peace candidate in a party that has firmly turned its back on peace, particularly if they nominate Hilary Clinton.  

Jim Webb is an interesting guy.  Conventional politics can't really define what he talks about and what he is thinking about.  He sees the world from the eyes of a soldier, a son of rural Virginia, but one who deeply cares about the injustices he saw around him.  He's both a conservative and a liberal at the same time and his struggle may just be that conventional politics tends to define presidential candidates.  But its a voice that many, including myself, find intriguing.  When he talks about poverty in rural white Kentucky and urban black Baltimore, he doesn't talk about politics or using it to justify a precious program or attack a president to win elections.  There is a concern that someone like Hilary Clinton could ever show.

Back in my kool-aid drinking days of yore, I was involved in getting information from the Allen campaign to blog negative stories about Webb, about calling his books pornography, is not something I'm proud of.  And that speaks to Webb's essential problem.  When federal campaigns come around, most people revert to their base politics and ignore the curiosities that come with political downtime.  When push comes to shove, after all the work to elect and reelect Barack Obama, do Democrats want to turn their backs both on him and the Clintons to once again make a statement against American interventionism, one that their president started and former secretary of state supports?  I somehow doubt it.

Still, Webb could be one of the most consequential candidates to run for office in some time and could prove to be an interesting conscience hovering above the Democratic primary to remind the party what put them in the majority, what elected them to two terms in the White House, and what they have turned their backs on in Syria and Iraq.

What Was That Ben Franklin Quote?

I've Moved!

No, not the blog Mason Conservative, I'm still here.  My alter ego Chris Beer has moved from Herndon to Mansassas.  My wife and I finally cobbled together enough to purchase a nice townhouse in the Bull Run area of Manassas.  Best of all, I have signifigantly upgraded my political representation.

Congress:                       Old: Gerry Connolly, New:  Frank Wolf

State Senate:                  Old:  Jennifer Weston, New:  Chuck Colgan

House of Delegates:      Old:  Ken Plum, New:  Bob Marshall

Board of Supervisors:    Old:  Cathy Hudgens, New:  Peter Candland

The Plum-to-Marshall move is probably the most drastic you can have.

The Bob McDonnell Verdict And Hopefully The End Of Crony Capitalism In Virginia

Bob McDonnell has been found guilty of corruption.  I’m still trying to get my head around perhaps the closest thing the GOP has to Boy Scout troop leader being found guilty of any crime.  In fact, I’m still not prepared to say that McDonnell was guilty of corruption.  I just finished reading Rick Pearlstein’s The Invisible Bridge about the fall of Richard Nixon and the rise of Ronald Reagan.  When I read about the true crimes that President Nixon committed, that is corruption.  What Bob McDonnell did was make a massive, enormous mistake.  I’ve been around the state party long enough to know that Bob McDonnell is no criminal, this is not a man who spent years as a prosecutor, delegate, attorney general, and governor trying to enrich himself.  In fact, it seems clear now that McDonnell’s steady rise through the Virginia power structure was done at the expense of enriching himself.  My position on this is that McDonnell is guilty of something, it is clear that this snake-charmer Johnnie Williams played on both McDonnell’s weaknesses and plied him with gifts, loans, and a wedding In order to get McDonnell to make personal appeals on his behalf.  Should he be staring at a potential 30 year jail sentence for essentially pimping a dietary supplement?  No.  Flatly, no.  I consider McDonnell more guilty of a giant mistake rather than a crime.  Federal prosecutors get their rocks off taking the tiniest misdeeds of any politician to put them in jail.  I even think McDonnell truly did not realize what he was doing was wrong given the giant chasm between Virginia’s gift laws and federal corruption statutes.  I have never heard a Republican that I have ever met say a bad thing about McDonnell personally.  He just made a gigantic mistake, but I do think that he must pay a proper price.  He’s guilty, just not 30 years of jail time guilty.

What is going to interesting to watch is how this plays out.  I’ve found it fascinating that so many elected officials have been quiet.  I suspect that every single elected official in Virginia is looking through their campaign ledgers and perhaps realized that if someone looks too close to them the same thing could happen.  And if that is the case, then this trial was not all for naught.  Separating the sadness I feel for McDonnell, this trial could be a gigantic strike at the crony capitalist that has defined Virginia for generations.  For years Virginia has foot the bill to move businesses into the state, oftentimes at the detriment for the taxpayer.  The governor’s million dollar slush fund, the Opportunity Fund, is nothing but a way for the state government to buy off businesses and have them come here with deals that no organically grown local business could get.  There are the haves and have-nots in Virginia, and it has been decided for years based on who you know.  I put this up in a blog post the other day, but the question everyone is avoiding is why Johnnie Williams decided to ply McDonnell and his wife with loans, gifts, and travel?  What did they have?  What the Governor had at his disposal was oodles of tax dollars to throw around with no oversight.  Williams is a leach on society, and it’s a crime itself that he gets away scot-free with what he did. 

It’s nothing new for southern states to sell out to big business, it goes back to the Bourbon era back in the 1880s.  McDonnell told us from the beginning that he embraced this model with this Bobs for Jobs campaign.  He sent Bill Bolling scurrying around the country trying to throw that money in businesses faces to get them to come here.  What has happened, like I said before, was Virginia has set up a business structure not based on a free market but on a political market.  It’s who you know, not how strong your business is.  And if you know the right people, you can get a deal the rest of us cannot.  My hope is that with this McDonnell conviction, leaders in the General Assembly will step up not only to close some of these ethical loopholes, but do away with the Governor’s Opportunity Fund.  Businesses here should be able to stand up on equal footing with those who have friends in high places.  Parasites like Johnnie Williams need to be dealt with, in my opinion, more than fallible politicians like Bob McDonnell.

McDonnell Trial: We Have It All Backwards

UPDATE:  A. Barton Hinkle nails it even further at Reason.

Gifts and money.  Money and gifts.  It can all flow with no limit in Virginia and we have seen the hand-wringing by everyone about it.  Its a betrayal of the Virginia Way (whatever that is), the nattering nabobs of the press tell us.  Let's fix Virginia's ethics, demands Gov. McAuliffe as he vetoes ethics reform.  The dirty secret is nobody in Virginia actually wants ethics reform because they all love getting free shit.  McDonnell was just dumb enough to get caught.

The real reform that needs to be made must force us to ask a different question that everyone is asking now.  What is being asked now is "why is there no limits on gifts?"  What we really need to ask is why was Jonnie Williams trying to bribe Bob and/or Maureen McDonnell?  That is what nobody is really talking about and where the real corruption lies.

Bob McDonnell had at his disposal quite a bit of money in something called the Governor's Opportunity Fund, basically a state-sponsored slush fund that allows him to throw money at businesses.  Nobody is talking about that.  The difference between what Jonnie Wiliams did and what Bill Bolling was doing for four years as Jobs-Whatever-Fake-Title he had is a crazy and lonely wife.  The real reform isn't gifts, the real reform comes from the governor of Virginia having at his disposal millions of dollars to "convince" businesses to move here.  Virginia Republicans make a lot of hay, and at times rightfully so, about how this state is great for business.  But much of that comes from taxpayer money or sweetheart deals that exempt these businesses from a lot of the regulations local businesses have to endure.  

The real corruption is legal and state-sponsored crony capitalism that frankly southern states have used since after Reconstruction to lure businesses here.  Part of the governor's job should be to bring businesses here and foster an economic climate hospitable to business.  But what Virginia does goes beyond this and vests in one man (or women) the sole power to throw around millions of dollars that opens one up to the slick moves and winning smile of a dietary supplement shyster looking to pocket taxpayer dollars by lavishing gifts and attention on a man and his wife distracted by work, ambition, and loneliness.  

It's time to close this Fund and force the state and General Assembly to create a real business climate, not a one-man crony capitalism.