Know your most-recently-investigated Republican
This could be a really frequent series of posts.
Ted Stevens, as E pointed out a bit earlier, is the latest GOPer to come under the microscope. The senior Senator from Alaska had his house raided by the IRS and the FBI the other day because of accusations that his remodeling project had been in part paid for by Veco, an oil-field service company, who has recently had a couple top executives plead guilty to federal conspiracy, bribery and tax charges. We’ll just let this investigation run its course before we jump to any conclusions about innocence or guilt, but we’ll also take this moment to educate people about some of his prior highlights/lowlights.
Stevens, 83, is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, having held office there continuously since 1968. He served in the Army Air Corps, flying transport planes in the China-Burma-India theatre during WWII. He returned to go to college and law school and moved to Alaska in the early 1950’s to work as a lawyer.
He admits to having lobbied illegally for Alaskan statehood during his time in the Interior Department . He chaired the Senate Appropriations committee from 1997 to 2005, during which time he became notorious for various pork-barrel projects such as the Bridge to Nowhere. Due to GOP rules on committee chairmanships, he had to give up the Appropriations committee in 2005 and he became chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. It was there that he became infamous among internet bloggers and others concerned with net neutrality. In a speech he gave on June 28, 2006, he referred to the internet as a “series of tubes”. Jon Stewart has had a heyday with the comments on The Daily Show, bringing it up on at least half a dozen different shows since then.
He’s not been a totally predictable caveman, though. He had long been a skeptic of global warming, but has come around to actively support legislation to combat climate change. He supports human stem-cell research. While being generally pro-life, he’s voted pro-choice on some issues. But on the whole, he is still pretty much a cranky old man who wants to drill for oil in ANWAR and who threatened to resign from the Senate if the federal earmark for the Alaskan bridges was sent to help repair Louisiana in the wake of Hurricane Katrina damage.
We should have let him.
