Posted on Mon, Oct. 13, 2008
Now that House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese (D., Greene) has been more clearly implicated in Harrisburg's bonus scandal, voters in his home district should have the good sense to do what his Democratic cronies are unwilling to do - toss him out.
DeWeese's former chief of staff, Mike Manzo, sang loudly at a criminal court hearing last week. Manzo said he believed DeWeese knew that Manzo and other Democratic officials were rewarding staffers with cash bonuses for political work, courtesy of taxpayers. It's illegal to use public funds to pay for political activities.
DeWeese has denied consistently that he knew bonuses were being paid for campaign work. He has cooperated with Attorney General Tom Corbett's investigation, and fired Manzo and others last year.
But there's more bad news emerging for DeWeese's tattered credibility in this scandal. For example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the probe had uncovered allegations that DeWeese employed a full-time campaign fund-raiser on the state payroll.
That aide, Kevin Sidella, received a bonus of $20,185 in 2006, one of the largest bonuses handed out among the $1.8 million given to hundreds of House Democratic staffers.
Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek decribed the scheme as a "years-long, carefully planned out, subtly planned out, discreetly planned out conspiracy to steal [from] the people of Pennsylvania."
If DeWeese truly was ignorant of the plot carried out by his closest lieutenants, it looks increasingly like a case of willful blindness. This scheme just so happened to take place in an election cycle in which House Democrats regained the majority, returning DeWeese to a more powerful post.
House Democratic legislators should have deposed DeWeese as their leader months ago. But too many of them are too weak-kneed to do what's right.
Instead, they're waiting to see whether voters in DeWeese's district in southwestern Pennsylvania will do the job for them by throwing DeWeese out of office on Nov. 4. They should. But that's an uncertain proposition, given DeWeese's record of bringing home the bacon for his district. The latest is a state prison planned for Fayette County, a project that DeWeese touts as bringing 1,200 jobs and millions in economic development. That's a very large bone that Gov. Rendell decided to throw to his embattled pal.
It's no accident that, under DeWeese's "leadership," key reform proposals died in the legislature this year. An effort to reform the state's embarassingly loose campaign-finance laws never even got a hearing in the House this year. A bill to ban bonuses likewise died in the House. A movement to end partisan redistricting got squelched.
It will always be thus, as long as DeWeese runs the show for House Democrats. The guiding principles remain protecting incumbents and feathering their own nests.
The rest of Pennsylvania must now wait and hope that good citizens in DeWeese's home district have more common sense than the elected Democrats in the House.
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