The Criminal Enterprise of Don Trump and Family

Tom Coburn: "Good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor"

Via Politico:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) ripped his colleagues during a tour of northeast Oklahoma, calling them “career elitists,” “cowards” and said, “It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor.”

Coburn’s gun-on-the-floor comment comes less than a month after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) made a triumphant return to the Capitol and the House floor following an assassination attempt in January outside a Tucson supermarket.

Gun-happy Coburn is both a doctor and a Southern Baptist deacon and, of course, is rabidly "pro-life." He may be best known for his involvement in the John Ensign scandal at the infamous C Street House where he helped in the cover up of the affair. Coburn claimed there was doctor/patient privilege involved. Coburn is an obstetrician. As far as is known, Ensign does not have a uterus.

As a congressman, he made news by protesting a televised airing of Schindler's List, saying it was "an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity" and that the airing of the movies was "irresponsible sexual behavior. I cringe when I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program." (As opposed to the children all across the country hearing a US Senator wanting to shoot his colleagues...)

Another day, another bit of elminationist rhetoric from a Republican.
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C Street Revisits (Some Things I Didn't Know) (Updated)

[Blogging from an undisclosed location.]

Peter Boyer has a piece in the New Yorker giving more details on the C Street residence and in the process gives us some more details on Congressman Mike Doyle's place there.

Boyer begins:

One midwinter night in 2008, Senator John Ensign, of Nevada, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was roused from bed when six men entered his room and ordered him to get up. Ensign knew the men intimately; a few hours earlier, he had eaten dinner with them, as he had nearly every Tuesday evening since he’d come to Washington. Now they were rebuking him for his recklessness. They told him he was endangering his career, ruining lives, and offending God.

Doyle was among the six and this was Ensign's first intervention.

UPDATE: This is incorrect. I misread the New Yorker piece. See this post.

At their instruction he wrote a letter to his mistress ending the affair, FedEx-ed it over to her and then called her telling her to disregard the letter. The affair continued.

There was a second intervention. Doyle was a part of that one, too.

I am not sure I knew this. If anything it puts Doyle far closer to the center of things at the C Street house than I thought.

Then there's this about the origins of C Street:

In 1984, Coe was introduced to a man named Michael Timmis, a wealthy recent convert, eager to do God’s work, who had heard that Doug Coe was the man to see. Timmis was a hard-charging overachiever from a working-class Irish Catholic family in Detroit, who had made a fortune in high-risk business transactions. Along the way, he had alienated his wife and two children, and his born-again experience had not helped matters at home.

Long story short, Timmins tragically lost his daughter to suicide, Coe helped Timmins' son. Boyer continues the story:

Timmis and his son reconciled, and Timmis offered Coe any sum he named. No need for that, Coe said, but he added that there was a ministry in Washington that could use some help. “Why don’t you help those guys?” Coe asked.

“Those guys” were Coe’s sons, David and Tim, and their friend Marty Sherman. The Coe brothers and Sherman had been schoolmates at James Madison University, where they were part of a fraternity for believers, and tried to model themselves after the early Christians described in the Book of Acts. After graduating, they apprenticed with the Fellowship, and saw a chance to branch out when the house on C Street became available.

And what does this have to do with anything?

Largent, Coburn, Wamp, and Doyle were the first to move in, and they were soon joined by Bart Stupak.

Now that I did not know, either.

Boyer sums up some of the issues surrounding the C Street residence:

Soon after the Pickering story broke, an exodus from the C Street house began. John Thune, the Republican from South Dakota, who is said to have Presidential aspirations, was the first to leave, in July of 2009. A group of congresswomen who used the house for a Wednesday-morning prayer session found a new venue, and a moderate Democrat who had been considering a move into the house pulled back. John Ensign asked his housemates’ forgiveness, and left, but the taint remained. Stupak and Doyle, pressured by constituents and the press, had moved out by the end of the year. That left only Coburn, DeMint, Wamp, Shuler, and Moran—conservatives who were in little danger of being punished by voters for staying. The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee were said to be scrutinizing Ensign’s dealings with Doug Hampton for possible impropriety. The House Office of Congressional Ethics, however, had decided that the residents’ rental rates were appropriate for the boarding-house arrangement, and did not recommend that any action be taken. District officials revised the house’s tax status, removing much of its exemption.

This spring, a group of core associates gathered at the Cedars and debated whether the time had come to alter the Fellowship’s rigid policy of secretiveness. Some in the group had long argued for greater transparency and accountability, if for no other reason than to counter the darker conjectures about the movement. By most accounts, this view prevailed, despite Coe’s reservations. Change will almost certainly be minor, and come slowly. A Web site has been designed, and is scheduled to be launched this month.

I have an email into Doyle's office for a comment.

[Returning to my undisclosed location.]

Following Up On C Street

I noticed this in the news yesterday.

You remember the C Street residence, right? I wrote about it back in July, 2009. The C Street residence was owned (and I guess it still is) by a shadowy religious group called "The Family."

Scandal plagued republicans like Mark Sanford and John Ensign lived there and there were questions regarding the cheap rent The Family reportedly charged.

Among its inhabitants at the time was our very own Congressman, Mike Doyle, though he denied any religious affiliation to the group:

The only religious organization I'm a member of is the Roman Catholic Church, of which I've been a member all my life. The only religious teachings I follow are those of the Roman Catholic Church.

My living arrangements comply with all House rules and are perfectly legal and ethical. I rent a room - not an apartment - and the rent I pay falls within the range of what anyone could rent a room for on Capitol Hill.

I'm confident the people I represent will judge me on my behavior and my performance as a Member of Congress - not anyone else's.

And, as of early April of this year, he no longer lives there.

TPM has a follow up:

The Office of Congressional Ethics has sent letters to several residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house informing them that there is no "probable cause" to believe legislators are getting improper gifts in the form of below-market rent, Roll Call reports.

Doyle was among those contacted. From Rollcall (via TPM - as Rollcall requires a subscription):

Aides to Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) said Friday that each lawmaker received a letter from the OCE informing him that it closed the investigation.

Just wanted to go on record with this. Doyle no longer lives at the C Street residence and the Office of Congressional Ethics said there's no probable cause to think the residents there were getting improper gifts when he did.

The OCE by the way is different from the House Ethics Committee. From the OCE website:

The OCE was created by House Resolution 895 of the 110th Congress in March 2008.

Governed by an eight-person Board of Directors, Members of the OCE Board are private citizens and cannot serve as members of Congress or work for the federal government

From the House Resolution creating the OCE:

The Office shall be governed by a board consisting of six individuals of whom three shall be nominated by the Speaker subject to the concurrence of the minority leader and three shall be nominated by the minority leader subject to the concurrence of the Speaker. The Speaker shall nominate at least one alternate board member subject to the concurrence of the minority leader and the minority leader shall nominate at least one alternate board member subject to the concurrence of the Speaker.

These are the folks who, as I understand it, make up the first layer of ethics investigations in the House. If they feel there's cause for an official investigation, they pass along the recommendation to the House Ethics Committee.

For the record.

All you need to know about Stupak

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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The Family's Local Connection

Last night on Rachel Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Here's the piece she mentions from the Chattanooga Times Free Press. It begins:

For a dozen years, a three-story, brick rowhouse near the U.S. Capitol has served as the Washington home and spiritual sanctuary for the likes of U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., along with a number of other Christian conservative politicians.

But the sex scandals of U.S. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford have thrust the home known as the C Street Center, its residents and the secretive Fellowship Foundation, a conservative Christian group with ties to the center, into the national limelight.

The story about The Family all stems from the reporting of Jeff Sharlet (indeed he's the one interviewed by Rachel in the clip) and his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Excerpts of the book have been published in Mother Jones.

Sharlet's been reporting on The Family for a few years - here's something from Harper's in 2003, for instance.

From Sharlet's piece in Harper's:

The Family's only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”

Sharlet spent some time at C Street and met Doug Coe, the group's leader (if that's the right word) and his son. Some insight into the theology of the group can be gain, perhaps, by this interaction between David Coe, Doug's son and some of the groups members:

“Hey,” David said, “let's talk about the Old Testament. Who would you say are its good guys?”

“David,” Beau volunteered.

“King David,” David Coe said. “That's a good one. David. Hey. What would you say made King David a good guy?” He was giggling, not from nervousness but from barely containable delight.

“Faith?” Beau said. “His faith was so strong?”

“Yeah.” David nodded as if he hadn't heard that before. “Hey, you know what's interesting about King David?” From the blank stares of the others I could see that they did not. Many didn't even carry a Hebrew Bible, preferring a slim volume of just the New Testament Gospels and Epistles and, from the Old, Psalms. Others had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the first two thirds remained undisturbed. “King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here's this guy who slept with another man's wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”

The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let's say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”

Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I'm pretty bad?”

“No, Beau. I wouldn't. Because I'm not here to judge you. That's not my job. I'm here for only one thing.”

“Jesus?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.

He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”

David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn't even hear the man's screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ's parable of the wineskins. “You can't pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”

He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn't that great?” David said. “That's the way everything in life happens. If you're a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that's who you guys are. When you leave here, you're not only going to know the value of Jesus, you're going to know the people who rule the world. It's about vision. 'Get your vision straight, then relate.' Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan's vast, reclaimable empire.

In this piece from the Washington Post, we learn that our own member of the House, Congressman Mike Doyle, resides in the C Street residence:

People familiar with the house say the downstairs is generally used for meals and prayer meetings. Volunteers help facilitate prayer meetings, they said. Residents include Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Ensign and Coburn. None of the congressmen agreed to be interviewed for this article. But associates of some of Ensign's housemates privately worried that the other residents would be tarred by the scandals.

So I wondered how connected was my Congressman to the group? Contacted for a comment (specifically asking if the Congressman was a member of The Family and how closely he subscribes to the theology of Doug Coe, if at all. I also asked about the amount he pays for rent - $600/month - a question Fester over at NewsHoggers raised a few days ago) Doyle responded:

The only religious organization I’m a member of is the Roman Catholic Church, of which I’ve been a member all my life. The only religious teachings I follow are those of the Roman Catholic Church.

My living arrangements comply with all House rules and are perfectly legal and ethical. I rent a room – not an apartment – and the rent I pay falls within the range of what anyone could rent a room for on Capitol Hill.

I’m confident the people I represent will judge me on my behavior and my performance as a Member of Congress – not anyone else’s.

Someone's religious identity is extremely personal and indeed should be respected. We live in a secular society - no religious tests for membership in the Congress or in Government. Just because he lives there does not mean he believes all the stuff Sharlet reports.