Pete McCloskey released a letter yesterday saying that it is time to
Clean House and the only way he sees is for the Democrats to take over the House. Other diaries have been reporting on how McCloskey has endorsed Pombo's Democratic opponent,
Jerry McNerney, but this letter goes further. Pete McCloskey is out spoken and a refreshing voice to hear compared to the GOP organized Talking Point Machine. Here are some excerpts from this incredible letter:
The observation of Mr. Pombo's political consultant, Wayne Johnson, that I have been mired in the obsolete values of the 1970s, honesty, good ethics and balanced budgets, all rejected by today's modern Republicans, is only too accurate.
It has been difficult, nevertheless, to conclude as I have, that the Republican House leadership has been so unalterably corrupted by power and money that reasonable Republicans should support Democrats against Delay-type Republican incumbents in 2006. Let me try to explain why.
Some 18 months ago, my former law partner, Lewis Butler, an Assistant Secretary of HEW in the Nixon Administration and subsequently the distinguished Chair of California Tomorrow and the Plowshares Foundation, and I initiated an effort we called The Revolt of the Elders. All of us were retired and in the latter years of Social Security entitlement. Most of us were Republicans who had served in the Congress or in former Republican administrations with men like Gerry Ford, John Rhodes, Bob Michel, Elliot Richardson, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and the president's father, George H. W. Bush, all men of impeccable integrity and ethics.
We had become appalled at the House Republican leadership's decision in early 2005 to effectively emasculate the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct by changing the rules to protect Majority Leader Tom Delay. Delay had been admonished three times by the Committee for abuse of power and unethical conduct. It was our hope to persuade Speaker Hastert and the Republican leadership, of which Northern California Congressman Richard Pombo and John Doolittle were prominent members, to rescind the rules changes and to act in accord with the promise of high ethical standards contained in Speaker Gingrich's Contract With America which brought the Republicans majority control in 1994. We failed. Letters to the Speaker from an increasing number of former Republican Members were ignored and remained unanswered.
I have therefore reluctantly concluded that party loyalty should be set aside, and that it is in the best interests of the nation, and indeed the future of the Republican Party itself, to return control of the House to temporary Democrat control, if only to return the House for a time to the kind of ethics standards practiced by Republicans in former years. I say reluctantly, having no great illusion that Democrats or any other kind of politician will long resist the allure of campaign funds and benefits offered by the richest and most profitable of the Halliburtons, oil companies, tobacco companies, developers and Indian gaming tribes whose contributions so heavily dominate the contributions to Congressmen Pombo and Doolittle.
There is so much more, go read the whole letter. He talks about needing a congress that will be a check to the Executive Branch, discusses lobbying reform, having a publicly funded campaigns and doing away with those large corporate donations and the chunks of money that only the wealthy can give. Makes you wish that some of the Dems could have this much courage.
Here's to Pete McCloskey and The Revolt of the Elders.