Pay to play, the Democrat way. Now it's Elijah Cummings

May 22, 2019
Pay to play, the Democrat way. Now it's Elijah Cummings
By Monica Showalter

Is there no end to Democrat corruption?

Here's what's going on with one of the most supposedly respectable of them, Rep. Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to the Washington Examiner:

A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband's committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.

Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. His wife, Maya Rockeymoore, 48, is the chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party and briefly ran in the state's gubernatorial race last year. The couple married in 2008. Cummings was once heavily in debt — in part due to hefty child support payments to his first wife and two other women he had children with — but his financial situation has improved considerably over the past decade.

So it's not just the crazy extremists among the Democratic Party elites, such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have ethics issues around the sale of office for favors. It's even more egregious with the more established Democrats in powerful positions.

Like Hillary Clinton before him, Cummings's game seems to be pay to play. Donate big to my charity foundation and get the legislation you want. A charity linked to Johnson & Johnson has been pouring cash in, and Cummings has been criticizing high pharmaceutical prices, something J&J would have an interest in stopping criticism about.

A second problem has been self-dealing. A big federal grant to stop childhood obesity went to Cummings's charity — and then to a consulting firm with the same name run by his wife. She pulls in an undisclosed-by-Cummings $152,000 salary. That contract sure helped.

Tom Anderson, director of the National Legal and Policy Center's Government Integrity Project, which has been investigating the nonprofit arrangement and provided research to the Washington Examiner, said the potential for corruption is "off the charts." He said Rockeymoore declined to let his organization view her nonprofit organization's most recent public financial records as required by the IRS.

What this shows is that for all their calls for President Trump's tax returns, and for all their claims to our tax money and regulatory enthusiasm, they're still in the same game they're famous for — using public office to get rich. The Examiner report (which is very well written, by the way) points out that political power has been good for Cummings's pocketbook.

Now he and his wife are yelling that the complaints are "politically motivated." Laws, see, have nothing to do with this lucrative gig.