Ethics Charges Filed Against Harry Reid For His War On Koch Brothers

Tea Party Patriots filed an ethics complaint against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday, for “abuse of political power,"citing his war against the Koch Brothers.

“It’s been generations since a member of the Senate has abused the power of his office to attack private citizens the way Harry Reid has sought to vilify Charles and David Koch,” said Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin.

(...)Ms. Martin accused Mr. Reid of “abusing his office in pursuit of naked political purposes.”

Ms. Martin is being too nice. Lets face it, in the 1950s Joe McCarthy stood on the Senate floor accusing people of somehow being un-American. He was famous for his attacks on the State Department:

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

Sixty years later the Majority Leader, echoing McCarthy stood on the Senate floor and spoke about the Koch Brothers:

“It's too bad that they're trying to buy America, and it's time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine."

The crime of these brothers, according to Reid, is they legally donate a lot of money to conservative political causes, the same way George Soros donates to progressive causes and something the U.S. Supreme Court has called a legal expression of freedom of speech.

The Koch brothers also donate to non-political causes, almost $300 million dollars to hospitals across the country, at least $80 million to educational charities, and at least $165 million to the arts.

Nevertheless Reid continues to pound these brothers. Against the Senate’s own rules, he dedicated an entire webpage on his Senate.gov site to his partisan campaign against the Koch Brothers. The page boldly labeled "THE FACTS ABOUT THE KOCH BROTHERS," features a list of political articles representing misleading political attacks against the conservative donors, such as "The Kochs want to put insurance companies back in charge of your health care" (they want to repeal Obamacare), "The Kochs are trying to dismantle our public education system" (they support school vouchers), and "The Kochs spent $400 million on misleading attack ads in the last election cycle" (because Senator Reid believes any conservative political ad is misleading).

Yet the leader of the United States Senate Harry Reid has made slandering the Koch Brothers his strategy for the 2014 election and Tea Party Patriots are not standing for these slanderous tactics. He even partnered with Nancy Pelosi to use the Capital building to feature an anti-Koch Brothers film.

Ms. Martin’s complaint, filed with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, requests that the committee “investigate whether Senator Harry Reid violated Senate rules by unlawfully and unethically targeting private citizens, Charles and David Koch, whose philosophical and political views are in opposition to Senator Reid’s philosophy and to misuse Senate resources to reward Tom Steyer, a mega-donor to Democrats in the Senate.”

Ms. Martin also questions whether Mr. Reid “misused Senate staff or resources to engage in partisan campaign activity in violation of federal law and Senate rules,” according to the complaint.