Shockingly Sleazy GOP Governors

With the Bob and Maureen McDonnell criminal corruption trial underway, Virginia is learning first hand about sleazy governors - and a greed driven first lady.  But Virginia does not have a monopoly on sleazy Republicans.  Rick Scott, Chris Christie, Scott Walker are certainly in the running to give the McDonnell's a run for their money in the race for the title as "sleaziest governor."  But they aren't the only GOP sleaze bags out there.  A lengthy piece in Salon looks at the dubious group that some inside the Beltway depict as contenders in 2016.  The piece deserves a full read to fully understand the nastiness of these GOP governors.  One can only fear for the country if this is the best the country can offer.  Here are a few highlights:

There is nothing in U.S. politics more powerful than Beltway conventional wisdom. No mountain of facts can put the slightest dent in it. It’s the ocean in which all of Washington swims. Which is why Chris Christie still thinks he can be president—just resurrect his “tough-talking” “truth-telling” persona, and violà! It doesn’t matter how many lies he’s told, so long as the media buys—and sells—his “truth-telling” spin, reframing the facts as just what “critics say.” And if not Chris Christie, then some other GOP governor, because it’s 1999 all over again, and national disgust with Beltway Republicans can only mean one thing: Americans must be clamoring for a GOP governor to be “a uniter, not a divider.”

There’s just one problem with this narrative: The entire current crop of GOP governors is a passel of knaves, scoundrels, extremists and panderers, whose monumental collective failures aren’t even a blip on the D.C. media’s radar screen—though they should be. Because out in the states, their failures are killing people—literally by the thousands when it comes to denying Medicaid expansion (over 13,000 in eight Southern states this year)—and may even contribute to killing the GOP’s chances of a strong showing in Congressional elections come November. Take Georgia, for example. It’s still a safe red state that Romney won by almost 8 percent in 2012, but Democrat Michelle Nunn has a decent shot at winning the Senate seat her father held for decades this November—and that would greatly complicate GOP hopes of retaking the Senate. A fair number of Beltway folks are starting to notice this, but less noticed are the possible spillover effects between Georgia’s Senate and gubernatorial races, as scandal-plagued Nathan Deal is struggling to stay afloat against Democratic challenger Jason Carter, President Carter’s grandson.

What’s Nathan Deal done, exactly? Enough to warrant the No. 1 spot in “The Worst Governors in America,” a 2013 report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The report explains the list as follows:

His inclusion stems from: (1) using his gubernatorial campaign to benefit his daughter-in-law [she was paid $40,725.03, despite having have no previous campaign experience]; (2) using his office to benefit a business partner; (3) using his office to benefit a top donor; (4) arranging a taxpayer-funded job for a political foe; and (5) obstructing ethics investigations into his business dealings.

Indeed, CREW’s report includes 18 governors, of whom 16 are Republicans, 11 of them elected in 2010, one in 2009 and one in 2012, for a total of 13 from the Tea Party wave era. They are, if anything dramatically more corrupt as a group than the governors elected before them.

[I]t would not be surprising if Deal ended up like the #3 governor on CREW’s list, Robert McDonnell, once touted as a top prospect for being Mitt Romney’s running mate, now former governor of Virginia, standing trial on 14 counts of felony corruption, obstruction and making false statements in federal court. CREW’s list was divided into three tiers—six “ringmasters,” six “clowns” and six “sideshows.” Joining Deal and McDonnell in the top tier are two men who’ve been touted as possible presidential candidates—Texas Governor Rick Perry (despite his laughingstock performance in 2012: “Oh look! His new glasses make him look so policy-wonk serious! Like Jerry Lewis in “The Nutty Professor”!”) and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (If Christie stays dead, Walker wins re-election and nobody else with a pulse shows up)—as well as Maine Governor Paul LePage and Florida Governor Rick Scott.

GOP policy collapsed in ruin under George W. Bush, and the only way to defend it now is blame-shifting, denial and outright hallucination. Jindal—elected in 2007—is a perfect bridge figure, making the underlying continuity perfectly clear. “He also has refused the expansion of Medicaid, that’s something you obviously have in common with many conservative governors around the country, and the result of course is that more than 250,000 low-income adults don’t have access to health coverage,” Moller added—yet another aspect of how post-Bush ideology has crystallized around being anti-other, with “other” being a catch-all category in which “atheist,” “Muslim,” “fascist,” “socialist,” “RINO,” “Beyoncé voter” and more all merge together in one big towering cloud of Sharknado menace.

There are many more GOP governors I could write about. There’s Florida Governor Rick Scott, who I’ve alluded to in passing. There’s North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who worked for Duke Energy for 29 years, received massive financial support from Duke’s PAC and executives, and appointed regulators who reached a sweetheart settlement protecting Duke from citizen lawsuits over coal ash groundwater contamination, which was only withdrawn after a staggering February 2014 spill. There’s the pugnacious Paul LePage of Maine, and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, a pale shadow of prominent endorser Sarah Palin, who’s never lived up to her national-level hype. LePage is #2 on CREW’s list, Haley, #10. But reading CREW’s summaries of each, one gets the distinct impression that the differences are more a matter of temperament and degree than of substance or kind.