That’s why this ballot initiative needs not only to be placed on the ballot, but needs to pass by a large margin — so that we can convince legislators there is no political price to pay for rational drug policy.
Dirty deals
Congressional Democrats have been rightly criticized for failing to pass the kind of full-scale ethics reform that, in the wake of years of Republican-led corruption — ranging from Jack Abramoff to Tom DeLay’s K Street Project — the public has demanded.
But one measure the Dems did pass has now perfectly exposed the Republican Party’s continual problem with ethics, this time by forcing Mississippi senator Trent Lott to display his wanton scuttling for dirty lobbying lucre.
Under a new law, US senators must wait two years after leaving office, instead of one, before lobbying their former colleagues. Lott — who, now 66 years old, was just re-elected in November 2006 to another six-year term — will avoid that law by resigning prior to January, when the new rule takes effect.
Lott swears that the timing is coincidental, and that he is not abandoning his constituents so as to quickly sell to the highest bidder the 35 years’ worth of House and Senate experience those voters gave him. Lott even claims that he intended to retire in ’06, but ran again only because his state needed him after Hurricane Katrina. Now that Mississippi is on the road to recovery, he says, he can move on.
Sure, and Senator Larry Craig was only reaching down to pick toilet paper off the bathroom floor.
The timing of Lott’s departure is surely not meant to serve the party that has been so good for him — even elevating him to minority whip after temporarily demoting him from his Senate majority leader seat for saying the country would be better off had segregationist Strom Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. This is the worst of times for Republicans running for office, and a special election this winter could easily turn this otherwise solid red seat to the Democrats.
It would serve the GOP right if Lott’s greed does cost them the Senate seat. But it won’t really matter unless the Democrats make use of the power self-destructing Republicans have given them to pass serious reforms that end the Capital Hill culture of corruption.
