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Dem Congressman Impeached for Bribery Demands Larger Salary
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 19, 2015 @ 10:26 pm In The Point | 2 Comments
alcee [1]
The Democrats are notorious for crazy levels of corruption. Just consider Harry Reid. But when it comes to crazy levels of shamelessness, you’ve got to go with the [2] Congressional Black Caucus each and every horrible time [3].
Rep. Alcee L. Hastings made the politically tone-deaf case for raising salaries for members of Congress Monday, pointing to the high cost of living in the District of Columbia.
“Members deserve to be paid, staff deserves to be paid and the cost of living here is causing serious problems for people who are not wealthy to serve in this institution,” the Florida Democrat said at a Rules Committee meeting, referring to the average member’s $174,000 annual salary. “We aren’t being paid properly,” he later added.
“It’s kind of a sad state of affairs that we are entering the seventh year of Congress not receiving a raise,” Hastings said.
“In order for us to get a raise, we have to go to the public and prove that we deserve it. Well, I think we do.”
Congress’ current approval rating is 19 percent.
This would be bad enough on its own, but Alcee Hastings is one of the few members of Congress to have been impeached and removed from office for bribery and perjury. That was back when he was a judge and made him one of only eight Federal officials [4]to be impeached.
A former federal judge, Hastings was named to the bench for the Southern District of Florida by Jimmy Carter in 1979. But in 1981 Hastings found himself embroiled in a corruption scandal, indicted on charges of conspiracy to accept a bribe. The case involved two brothers, Frank and Thomas Romano, who had been convicted in 1980 on 21 counts of racketeering. Together with attorney William Borders Jr., Hastings, who presided over the Romanos’ case, allegedly hatched a plot to solicit a bribe from the brothers. In exchange for a $150,000 cash payment, Hastings would return some $845,000 of their $1.2 million in seized assets after they had served their three-year jail terms. Taped conversations between Hastings and Borders confirmed that the judge was a party to the plot, though he was acquitted by a jury in 1983.
Hastings did not evade justice for long. A report compiled by a special Investigating Committee in 1986 found clear evidence that Hasting’s had covered up his role in the bribery scheme. In 1988 the Democrat-led House voted 413 to 3 to impeach Hastings on numerous counts of conspiracy and perjury; a Democrat-controlled Senate subsequently removed him from his judgeship. The most withering criticism of Hastings came from a fellow black American, Michigan’s Democratic Congressman John Conyers. Admitting that he was sympathetic to Hastings’s politics, Conyers nonetheless condemned his role in “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and rendered a devastating verdict: “We did not wage the civil rights struggle in order to substitute one form of judicial corruption for another.”
Borders was pardoned by Bill Clinton because the Democratic Party is as crooked as the leaning tower of Pisa.
Back then Hastings was willing to settle for $150K. Today he turns up his nose at $174K.
Hastings asserted that the charges against him were a function of “institutional racism.”
Obviously. Also outlawing bribery is so euro-centric.
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