Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is no stranger to ethics violations. Last summer, in response to the Obama administration's decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, which was discriminatory towards many people, Speaker Boehner hired outside counsel to defend the act. The problem is, while he does technically have the authority to do that, he authorized the payment of $500,000 to the firm he hired to defend 10 cases that were currently before courts. This amount makes up over 35% of the total money appropriated for the Office of General Counsel meaning he has over obligated the office's available funds, encroaching on operating expenses and even salaries. Due to the Antideficiency Act, this is very illegal, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Fast forward to the past month or so and all the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline owned by TransCanada. Ignoring the fact that the company is also facing charges for misleading on how many jobs it would create by 10s of thousands, ignoring the potential dangers to the environment and ignoring the the fact that we are ceding United States of America property so that a foreign company can transport it's product to our ports for export to other foreign countries because they can't get approval to transport it across their own land. Ignoring ALL of that and you still have something that reeks of corruption. There are 7 companies here in the good ole USA that stand to benefit from this pipeline going through. That isn't bad, that is actually quite awesome. During all of this commotion congressional Republicans are banging the job creation drum about how good this will be for the economy and that President Obama is Satan if he doesn't approve it. Well President Obama didn't approve it, not on any of the environmental grounds I have mentioned but because in order to pass the extension of the payroll tax cut the republicans slipped in a provision that forced Obama to approve of deny the pipeline in a relatively short period of time. The time stipulated was well before multiple studies, currently still underway, were due to finish so President Obama did what he was forced to do, deny it due to lack of information. The GOP came out en masse, calling President Obama a job killer and some people threatened to bring up charges on him for violating the Constitution and not doing what they saw as in the best interest of the country. Now the stage is set, all parties are in place, it isn't hard to guess who both sides are working for in the issue, the President for environmentalist and the GOP for Big Oil. Now comes the juicy part. Someone went and did some digging and as it has been shown countless times before, when you dig into the guts of congress you come up with a fistful of crap. It turns out that Speaker Boehner has done some investing, which is good, a portion of the U.S. economy relies on it, it is part of what makes the USA great and is a very sensible way of saving for retirement in some cases and making money for doing nothing in other cases (Romney/Gingrich). This is where the real dirty laundry exists. Speaker Boehner owns stock in all seven of the companies set to profit from the creation of this pipeline. Speaker Boehner is one of the most influential people in Washngton D.C. and in turn has great pull in being able to secure the creation of this pipeline. Ethics 101 teaches us that when there is even the perception of a conflict of interest in an issue, you need to recuse yourself from the situation and let others handle it. Well, I'd say owning stock in companies who's profits will skyrocket because of this pipeline's creation is a pretty damn big conflict of interest. I wonder how much he would have made if the pipeline had been approved? Probably more than the salary he makes as Speaker of the House.
Also, throughout this whole post my spellchecker kept demanding I correct "Boehner" to "Boner." I couldn't help but throw that in at the end.
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