Political Analyst Sees Reid Scandals as Bad PR for Congress
by Jim Brown
October 19, 2006
(AgapePress) - - While the Mark Foley scandal is still broiling on Capitol Hill, a cloud of suspicion has formed over the Democratic leader in the Senate and his questionable use of campaign cash. The Associated Press is reporting that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has been using campaign donations to pay Christmas bonuses for the staff at the Washington Ritz-Carlton, where he lives in an upscale condominium. Federal campaign laws strictly prohibit use of campaign funds for personal use.
Meanwhile, Reid has also been under scrutiny for a Las Vegas land deal that enabled him to collect more than a million dollars in 2004 for property he had not personally owned in three years. Massie Ritsch, Communications Director with the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics says Reid appears to have violated federal election law.
"Tipping the staff of your condo building at Christmastime, while it's a nice, kind gesture, comes pretty close to the line," Ritsch observes. "It seems really like an expense that's more appropriate to be paid for personally," he says.
The senator's actions may be creating an untimely public image problem for him, the Center's spokesman suggests. "When you see a senator using campaign money for what seems to the rest of us like a personal expense," he notes, "it just feeds the impression that I think a lot of Americans have that Congress is out of touch with the rest of the world."
This kind of incident could promote the idea that elected officials in the U.S. legislature "don't understand how their constituents live their lives and that Congress somehow behaves differently, Ritsch says. "And that's not a good perception for Congress to be perpetuating," he points out, "particularly with an election coming up."
Reid recently amended his ethics filings after the Associated Press revealed the information about his profits on the Nevada land deal in 2004. The Center for Responsive Politics official believes the Democratic senator, at the very least, exercised poor judgment.
Still, the unflattering allegations and suspicions plaguing the senator probably will not affect his political standing much, Ritsch predicts. Nor, he says, are they likely to have much effect on the upcoming national election.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
