More Pelosi Sleaze

House Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi apparently has an unprecedented two "leadership PACs", which allows her to skirt federal campaign laws. I wrote about her best known PAC, the wretchedly paleo-liberal "PAC to the Future" earlier this week. The second PAC, "Team Majority", is effectively a branch of the first PAC, sharing the same donors, recipients, and decision makers, differing only in legal form, not substance.

This is a blatant violation of the spirit, and possibly the letter, of campaign finance laws. Pelosi's bagman Leo McCarthy, who is treasurer of both PACs, admitted the ethical failure by saying: "We made a good faith effort to make sure we went about this in the correct way". [quote from an AP story, no longer available online -ed.] Which is a smarmy way of saying "We were careful to use the hidden loopholes in the laws that Pelosi helped craft so that we could subvert the intent of the law"

This is yet another example of Pelosi's habitual sleaze and hypocrisy. Pelosi likes to position herself as a champion of campaign finance reform, but behaves as if those rules apply to everybody else but her.

Nancy Pelosi aspires to be Speaker of the House. When you vote for your local Democrat House candidate, you are effectively voting for Nancy to be Speaker of the House some day. If that sounds like a good idea, then vote for the Democrat.

UPDATE (Nov. 8) Pelosi has secured the position of House Minority Leader, making her an even stronger candidate to become Speaker should the Democrats retake the House in 2004. A complete index of my blog entries devoted to Nancy Pelosi is here

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 25, 2002 12:45 PM