What Are Corrupt Politicians Thankful for? Partisan Warfare

For voters, bribery, fraud and embezzlement are still bad, but increasingly tolerable — as long as their candidate can either stick it to Trump or “own the libs.”

By Justin Glawe
Mr. Glawe is an independent Dallas-based journalist.

Nov. 22, 2018

Under federal indictment, Republican Representatives Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California are both heading back to Congress. Rep. Collins has been charged with insider trading for using his concurrent position as a director of a pharmaceutical company to tip off associates, including his son, about negative stock news before it became public.

Representative Hunter is facing a federal trial on charges of wire fraud and misusing campaign funds for unrelated travel sprees and personal luxuries (falsely describing some expenses as donations to veterans). Fittingly, in the eyes of progressives, these men were also the first two members of Congress in 2016 to support President Trump, a paragon of sleaze. But the trend of corruption failing to dampen a candidate’s chances crossed party lines again this fall. Senator Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who holds the distinction among this year’s indicted Congressmen of having beaten the charges against him thanks to a mistrial on bribery, is heading back to Washington as well.

Once upon a time in American politics, when the other party wasn’t considered so toxic that voting for them was a sin, some base voters would have held their noses and voted those incumbents out of office — in the name of cleaning house.

Instead, during a year in which anticorruption sentiment was supposedly high, base voters re-elected those three high-profile grifters — all of whom, in one form or another, committed a constitutional “betrayal of public trust.” In an overlooked but similar situation, a hard-line Republican, Ken Paxton, was narrowly re-elected Attorney General of Texas despite facing two felony securities fraud charges. Ethical concerns appear no match for cultural and partisan loyalties this cycle.

Recognizing the electoral loophole created by Americans’ hardening allegiances, both Mr. Duncan and Mr. Collins decided to continue campaigning and distract voters from their indictments with what many considered outright racist tactics. Mr. Collins argued in a widely shared ad — featuring his opponent speaking Korean — that his opponent’s election would mean “fewer jobs” for Americans and “more jobs for China and Korea.” His opponent’s wife is a naturalized U.S. citizen from Korea.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/opinion/politics/collins-indict-duncan-corruption-trump-thanksgiving.html