Ted Stevens, Republican Icon http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/tedsteven...

8/21/2008 13:03

Topic: Government & Politics

Ted Stevens, Republican Icon

(8/2/2008)

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was just indicted, and it is pretty hard to see how he’s going to avoid jail time.
Stevens is accused of getting a new first floor on his home, a new garage, a deck, and lots of other home
improvements from a political supporter and supplicant, Veco, which is an oil services company. Stevens never
reported these as gifts, and in fact actively concealed them, according to the grand jury. Given that Veco was
asking for and receiving special favors, grants, contracts and other considerations from Stevens while he was
getting all these things “for free,” it seems clear that Stevens could fairly be charged with bribery.

If this surprises you even a little, you don’t know the career of Senator Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in
the Senate, and a Machiavellian to the core. He is famous on Capitol Hill for his vendetta against any Senator
who dares to try to block the pork barrel spending he regularly ships off to the 49th State. Cozy relationships with
lobbyists are his calling card; mutual back-scratching with political donors is his creed. He never saw an ethics
reform that he didn’t try to block. To him, politics means the old school, bare-knuckles politics of the 1880s.
Ethics? What the hell are they, and who cares?

Of course his colleagues, both Republican and Democrat, knew Ted Stevens, and must have known that he was
to ethics like a slug is to salt: they don’t mix well at all. The Democrats were a little afraid of him, it seems, and the
Republicans, who similarly ignored the obvious ethical misconduct of others like Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham,
Bob Ney and Mark Foley until they were exposed and disgraced, just looked the other way, During the entire
Bush Administration, the party has built a culture that is antithetical to ethical values, responsible government,
fairness, honesty, and conflicts of interest, choosing instead to emphasize cynicism, influence and the pursuit of
power. Well, to paraphrase the book that so many of the party’s true-believers purport to worship, you reap what
you sow. In an unethical culture, political bullies with greed in their souls run amuck, until they get careless and
arrogant, and inevitably go down. The Republicans will try to make this story about Ted Stevens, an old lion who
stayed too long, but it is really about the distain for ethics in government encouraged by the party’s leaders and
willfully ignored by conservative cheerleaders in the media.

The Democrats gouged the ethical fabric of the our government when they marched in lock-step to deny the
seriousness of Bill Clinton’s cover-up of his juvenile sexual escapades. But no party in a the 20th Century so
thoroughly established a culture of greed, disrespect, and dishonesty in the legislature as the GOP has in the
21st. It is fitting and predictable that Stevens is so far refusing to resign, making it likely that the Democratic
sweep on the horizon will include a new senator in Alaska. He doesn’t get ethics. He never did. And instead of
becoming an anomaly in his party, he came to typify it.

We need to be grateful for Stevens’ fall. Not because it gives joy to see a powerful old man sent to jail, but
because it is conclusive proof that the Republican experiment in unethical government has failed. Imagine if the
culture of power, influence and greed had succeeded! But it couldn’t succeed…in the long run, it never does.
That’s how, in the final analysis, we know what is ethical.

Because ethics works.

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