Jack Abramoff

The center of the corruption and hubris in the modern Republican party is not an elected official it is Jack Abramoff and his tentacles reach deep. Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi give us a good history of the rise and fall of Mr Abramoff today in the Washington Post. It is a story of greed, a lust for power and an overinflated ego. Jack Abramoff is going down hard and he will take a lot of elected officials with him. I'm not going to do a lot of quotes from the story go read it but here are a couple of observations from others who know the workings of Washington past and present.

Alan K. Simpson (R), the former Wyoming senator who was in Washington during the last big congressional scandal -- the Abscam FBI sting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which six House members and one senator were convicted -- said the Abramoff case looks bigger. Simpson said he recently rode in a plane with one of Abramoff's attorneys, who told him: "There are going to be guys in your former line of work who are going to be taken down."

......

Former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards (Okla.), usually a defender of lobbying and Congress, said there have always been members who get caught "stuffing money in their pants." But he said this is different -- a "disgusting" and disturbingly broad scandal driven by lobbyists whose attitude seemed to be "government to the highest bidder."

"This is at a scale that is really shocking," said Edwards, who teaches public and international affairs at Princeton. "There is a certain kind of arrogance that in the past you might not have had. They were so supremely confident that there didn't seem to be any kind of moral compass here."

We now see lawmakers who were the beneficiaries of Abramoff's favors trying to distance themselves from him but for most it is too late. One of the first casualties may be Senator Conrad Burns of Montana. A few weeks ago we reported that The Missoula Missoulian told Senator Conrad Burns that he's damaged goods and for the good of the Republican Party he should call it quits.