Discussion: Sherrod Brown: Mulvaney Should Resign Over 'Pay To Play' Remark

Agreed 100% But doubt it will happen, any time soon. Trump doesn’t want to deal with/think about budgets - and $Mulvaney$ does the heartless shredding so easily, willingly and seemingly joyfully.

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Winning an election to the Senate is an expensive undertaking. Is Brown going to assert he gives of his time equally during his campaign to all, regardless of their financial largesse? How many gala dinners did his campaign committee organize where a disclaimer appeared on the invitation:

“No contribution required to attend, dine, and meet with Mr. Brown”

That’s some serious wrong assed “bothsiderism” bullshit you are tossing out here. Everyone note how steviedee doesn’t even bother to research and find specific incidents of the allegations he is leveling against Brown, he just asserts it. And, to make it even worse, he doesn’t even bother addressing Mulvaney’s comments at all. Just pure straight up attack the messenger.

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I think I get the point that you are making, but your analogy, I think, is not quite right. A fundraising gala dinner is one thing – everyone who accepts that invitation does so in order to make the donation. Of course, they do it for the access, but that’s “above board” in the sense that nobody is pretending it is anything other than what it is.

Refusing to make an appointment to meet someone in your official capacitiy in your congressional office unless that person has ponied up is a bit different, IMHO.

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Countdown until we hear: “But, but I was just joking. Don’t [insert insulting term for ‘liberals’ here] have any sense of humor?”

A Senator’s time is limited. Doubtless many or most of them instruct staff (implicitly or explicitly) to assign priority to those wanting to meet taking into account their past, ahem, “support” of the Senator’s efforts in winning a previous (or upcoming) election. And since that time is in fact scant for such meetings who’s to say your turn down was for lack of an open slot in the schedule, as opposed to your failure to contribute money?

More assassination by innuendo. Completely unsubstantiated innuendo, I should add.

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Brown is also a fan of Adam Sandler.

The swamp draining thing moves along as planned.

Well Mulvaney is to say, since that is what he admitted to. It can be hard to get someone for pay to play charges, but in this case he admitted to it out front in public.

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Mulvaney’s remarks clarify the corrupting role money plays in our polity.

We not only need campaign finance reform, we need it to take the form of public financing of campaigns and complete transparency of independent advocacy organizations.

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Yeah its a long shot, but we can at least do a lot better than we are now.

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You cannot conduct campaign operations from your congressional office.

In any case I didn’t read this as an interesting historical anecdote, but as a statement of regulatory practice. If you want favorable treatment pay up. From a government regulatory official this is venal corruption. He is not a politician.

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Again, I get the point you’re trying to make, but as the artice (and @musgrove) pointed out, Mulvaney came right out and blatantly said that this was how he operated.

Okay, you can praise him for “telling it like it is” rather pretending otherwise, which is what many of them do. As with so much in this (mal)administration, the optics of his statement are not good. Most people are smart enough to know this – Mulvaney obviously not.

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So Mulvaney actually did the things they accused Hillary of doing that she actually didn’t. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to say it again - if it wasn’t for projection and double standards, republicans wouldn’t have anything.

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Steviedee, I think your account was hacked by justamarine.

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If you don’t ask for it, you aren’t going to get it.

If you demand it, you might get some of it. We aren’t going to get what we need in redistricting here in Ohio (if Issue 1 passes), because politicians remain heavily involved in the process. What is really changing is that now the minority party has to buy-in to pass districts – the majority can’t just draw lines to suit themselves.

Issue 1 is a damned sight better than what we currently have. I’ll hold my nose and vote for it.

But we would not have Issue 1 had people not organized and threatened the Legislature with an initiative they really disliked.

If you don’t demand it, you aren’t going to get anything.

We got the ACA instead of what we needed (single payer) because the Obama Administration decided to play small ball. I understand why they did it – they wanted bipartisan buy-in. When it became apparent that there would be no bipartisan support and they were forced to pass it on a party-line vote they had no club (a single payer bill) to force some bipartisan support. We are harvesting the bitter fruit of that failure as the kakisto-kleptocrats of the malmisadministration are dismantling the ACA.

If you don’t demand it, you won’t get anything.

So scoff all you like, but figure out which side you’re on.

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I think Miss Kitty slipped some catnip into my morning smoothie.