Slushies

As part of the settlement of President Donald Trump's successful lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for having publicly released his family's tax returns, the Attorney General, last May, created a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund." Critics called it a "slush fund," because the President wants to use the windfall to defray the legal costs, at his discretion, of his accused political allies and activists, such as the prosecuted Jan. 6 protesters/insurrectionists.

They crave a bailing-out and seek to tap the taxpayers as their go-to collective sugar daddy.

Trump's "self-executing" notice of voluntary dismissal of his $10 billion lawsuit, against which 93 members of Congress had filed a brief calling it unconstitutional "collusive" action, has had the questionable, though legal, effect of permanently forbidding the Treasury Department from ever again reviewing Trump's prior tax filings. The formal wording is "forever barred and precluded," and it refers to examinations and pursuit of injunctive relief against Trump, his family members, trusts, companies and subsidiaries.

Slush funds are a bipartisan phenomenon. There's enough slush to cover a melted polar icecap.

The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR), pursuant to Section 415 of the Congressional Accountability Act, is a devious mechanism of paradox that allows members of Congress a privileged escape from accountability. When there are accusations, often of a lewd and lascivious nature, against members, it's the taxpayers who pony up the secret compensation to silence the claimant and make their allegations vanish.

There are no monopolies on slush funds. Corruption is an equal opportunity beguilement.

The wage of sin is variable, depending upon one's level of privilege. But sometimes "slush funds" can have benevolent intentions, but a virtuous spin would have to be put on an expanded definition of "slush fund."

 An example of this is New Jersey Governor Mikey Sherrill's $20.2 million Detention Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI) and Rapid Legal Response Initiative (RLRI), to be levied upon taxpayers for services for immigrants, regardless of their legal status, and resistance to federal law enforcement.

Generally, slush funds are surreptitious financial institutions with a restricted private clientele. Opposing ideologues condemn it when their adversaries resort to them, but are very protective of their own prerogative to do so.

In the cinematic masterpiece "Casablanca," Claude Rains' character says, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here," as he is handed and quickly pockets his own winnings. That shock is replicated in politicians' simulated indignation when there's news of a colleague from "across the aisle" needing to tap into the slush fund.

When the accused is one of their own kind, they usually rush to defend them with the ferocity of a mommy polar bear.

Many of the same politicians who vociferously decry President Trump's "slush fund," avail themselves of their own "hail mary" emergency reserves. They have made allegations of sexual abuse go away faster than the deletion of a message on your laptop.

Equating the cynicism of the President and that of Congress is not like "comparing apples and oranges." They both literally bank on the eclipse of sunlight and transparency.

Congress has never applied Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to itself, noted Citizens Against Government Waste almost a decade ago. Like there are specialists in interpreting Beethoven, and aces at swatting curve balls, members of Congress are the supreme mavens of slush funds.

They are geniuses at securing preferential treatment via the bribery hush. When it comes to susceptibility and surrendering to the enhanced charms of temptation to depravity, members of Congress are royalty. They are, as a rule, not answerable for being at fault.

They luxuriate in tainted amnesty. That's true of every shade of every color on the rainbow of ideology: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Socialist, ad nauseum.  No matter how fiendish, members of Congress are denounced or championed by their peers completely along party lines.

"Slush fund" originally referred to the fat that seamen scraped from their cooking pots and sold to candlestick makers, "off the books." 

Who are the modern candlestick makers?

"One size fits all" may apply to twill caps, but not to the unofficially sanctioned standards of integrity.  It resembles the phrase "my country, right or wrong," a brainlessly chauvinistic affirmation of one's homeland, even when it violates international law. 

A variant of this viral doctrine is "My party, right or wrong."

Discipleship spans and consumes both parties. There are many sordid illustrations of this truth. 

A congressmember's propensity for finding credible sexual abuse allegations against another member, regardless of the availability of evidence, hinges almost entirely upon their respective caucuses.

In late May, House Committee on the Judiciary Ranking Member Jamie Raskin introduced legislation to "block fraudulent abuse of federal settlement funds." He was referring strictly to President Trump's plunderous settlement with the IRS.  Whether his position is "on the money" is correct is beyond debate, but it would he and his caucus apply equal rigor and justice in cases when their own loyalists have been delinquent?

The Senate race in Maine may be key to the answer to the duel between moral integrity and party fidelity. Graham Platner is the heavy favorite to win the seat in November.

Whether he does or not, his pre-primary candidacy did catastrophic damage to the trust of legacy Democrats.

He flaunted a large Death's Head "Totenkopf" tattoo on his chest. That unit of volunteers from the "SS" consisted of the most fanatical and sadistic Nazi responsible for the torture and incineration of Jews in the German extermination camps across Europe. 

Unmoved by this, some Jewish members of Congress remain passive and unruffled. Had the tattoo been of Christopher Columbus instead, all hell would have broken loose.

He is also the subject of multiple accusations of violent sexual misconduct. Yet many of the same women who wanted Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh disqualified, removed and prosecuted, are seemingly not piqued by Platner's alleged smuttiness, or else they would take a stand against it.

Platner has refused to apologize to a disabled Purple Heart-winning war veteran after saying he "didn't deserve to live." There are more screamingly red flags.

It should have taken no more than a nanosecond for his supporters and party to abandon Platner's candidacy, yet he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and many other prominent Democrats. Very few of whom unequivocally rebuked him.

Some went through the motions of meeting with the candidate and opted to cover their cowardice by taking a "wait and see attitude." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, weighing the potential political fallout from any position he might take, chose to daintily demur, apparently cowed by the challenge of showing judgment against the charge of being judgmental, said that he hadn't followed the allegations closely and that Platner would speak for himself.

Jeffries ain't no Bonhoeffer!

Is the achievement of a majority in Congress worth the sacrifice of our moral fiber? If Platner is a marginal candidate, then Maureen Galindo is off the page completely.

She finished first in the Democratic primary for Texas' 35th Congressional District, lost a runoff election. Her party honorably distanced itself from her, after she vowed to author a bill that would turn an "ICE Detention Center into a prison for human trafficking," which "will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists."

Maybe this creature deems this simply normal oppositional research. She also said that Jews run "the synagogue of Satan."

Is such depravity the consequence of demographic shifts and the neglect of civic education or something else?

The Republicans are, of course, well-represented and heavily implicated in the annals of bigotry, so it's a bit more surprising to witness such illiberal sectarianism among Democrats. In recent years, the Democrats have remained the kinder party, but only by a razor's edge.

If elected officials from both parties cannot resoundingly and outright condemn the on-the-record racist, sexist and antisemitic frothing of the likes of Platner and Galindo and numerous maniacs already seated in Congress, then perhaps we, and our nation are beyond rehabilitation.

There's no slush fund to bail out the eternal shame of cowards. And no currency legal tender in hell.