They don't even bother to disguise it any more:
The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection.And no, it's not normal, except in a swamp:
Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell — including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.
“Where a Cabinet secretary is doing things that are going to help her husband get reelected, that starts to rise to the level of feeling more like corruption to the average American. … I do think there are people who will see that as sort of ‘swamp behavior,’” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied political influence in federal grant-making.It's not the only example of the McConnell- Chao corruption nexus. There was this bit of influence peddling that was nipped in the bud. Then there's this from last May:
President Donald Trump has tapped the brother-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to lead the federal agency tasked with making sure workers get the benefits they are owed from private pension funds.Hartogensis was confirmed by the rotted out Republican Senate and sworn in a year later, on May 15. Score another one for the swamp!
Gordon Hartogensis is Trump's nominee to lead the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the independent agency created by Congress in 1974 to essentially pay out pension benefits to workers if their private pension funds fail. Hartogensis is married to Grace Chao, the younger sister of Elaine Chao, the current U.S. Transportation Secretary. The elder Chao is married to McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky.
The Republican Party is rotted from the head down. We knew it, we know it, and we can't do a damned thing about it.
ReplyDeleteMy loathing for McConnell exceeds my loathing for Trump because he's the true destroyer of democracy. Trump's his puppet, and McConnell has used him to do sustained damage to the country that might never be repaired. They are all despicable.
donnah -- every 6 years McConnell's political obituary is written. His approval rate this year in Kentucky is variously polled at as "high" 33% and as low as 18%. He deserves to be beaten like the cur that he is, but up until now he somehow manages to survive. Maybe if we're all lucky, this will be the election he finally gets his ass handed to him.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that what we decent human beings hate about the rotten Republicans is what Republicans love. They embrace the likes of McConnell and Trump because they are thumbing their noses at Democrats. The Republican believers want nothing more than to erase the progress made by a black President and to take race relations back a hundred years, with the benefit of installing all Rightwing judges across the map.
ReplyDeleteWhat we hate, they love. And they have the power now. But I hope we can take it back soon.