A House investigative panel has decided to charge Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California with ethics violations, raising the possibility of a second high-profile trial with political implications for Democrats this fall.
People familiar with the investigation, who were not authorized to be quoted about unannounced charges, say the allegations could be announced next week. The House ethics committee declined Friday to make any public statement on the matter.
Waters has been under investigation for a possible conflict of interest involving a bank that was seeking federal aid. Her husband owned stock in the bank.
New York Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel also faces an ethics trial this fall on separate charges that included failure to disclose assets and income, nonpayment of taxes and doing legislative favors for donors to a college center named after him.
Both Waters and Rangel are prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Dual ethics trials would be a major political liability for Democrats, forcing them to defend their party’s ethical conduct while trying to hold on to their House majority.
While Rangel is a former chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Waters is a prominent member of the Financial Services Committee.
Waters came under scrutiny after former Treasury Department officials said she helped arrange a meeting between regulators and executives at Boston-based OneUnited Bank without mentioning her husband’s financial ties to the institution.
So that’s two Democrats on trial for ethics violations. I wonder if we can get three before the mid-term elections?
During a 45-minute conference call with journalists from 40 major media outlets this morning, Jack Gerard shared some startling predictions about the future health of the nation’s oil and natural gas industry if the Obama Administration gets its way in adding more regulation and increasing taxes on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest one of all is enough to cause anyone to take pause:
“The administration’s moratorium, if continued indefinitely — or similar legislative proposals which would make the deep water unavailable or uneconomic — would cost this country 175,000 jobs every year between now and 2035, according to our latest analysis,” said Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, a group representing some 400 oil and natural gas companies.
The story has more scary effects of a complete shutdown of deepwater drilling. One of my friends who I am staying with during my vacation says that the real number is closer to 200,000 jobs per year.
Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.
I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America’s economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.
In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived.
Obviously, I don’t agree with Senator Webb’s naive redistributionist policies. But speaking as a colored man, let me just say that it’s about time that affirmative action quotas were dismantled. And for two reasons. The first reason is because affirmative action is racist and leads to more racial discord, as Webb noted. The second reason is that affirmative action doesn’t work – see below for articles from the famous economist Thomas Sowell.
WINTERY KNIGHT 