Did you see all the news coverage about the radical animal rights group being mentioned hundreds of times in a lengthy official report about slip-shod lobbying practices in Washington, DC and infractions of Congressional rules?
If you blinked you missed it.
Two weeks ago a retiring congressman from Kentucky, Representative Edward Whitfield, was rebuked by the House Committee on Ethics for several rules and ethical lapses. While the committee did not refer the matter to the entire House, the report was nonetheless scathing and direct in its findings.
Included in the report, available online here, were 743 references to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the Humane Society Legislative Fund (HSLD). The committee reviewed more than 140,000 pages of documents. HSUS is well known for its anti-sportsmen, anti-hunting agenda in addition to its collaboration with other fanatical, far-left causes.
Rep. Whitfield’s wife, a registered HSUS lobbyist, received special access to Congress due to her husband. The employment of a Congressional spouse to lobby the Members’ staff is, at face value, completely unseemly. And it is unacceptable for a DC lobbying interest to show such disregard for House rules and ethical norms.
The report’s release generated a mere dozen or so online media or print stories, despite the report’s detailing of a fact pattern clearly showing HSUS officials at ease and comfortable with unethical lobbying practices. But with so few stories in the media and so little attention paid, HSUS is getting off with a minor slap on the wrist.
Now just imagine if the group in question had been a pro-Second Amendment organization. One could envision the uproar. Twitter’s servers would have melted. And CNN would have composed special “breaking news” music scores to push the emerging scandal.
Consider this quote taken from the Ethics Committee report: “HSLF understood that Ms. Harriman’s connection to the Republican Party, a constituency not traditionally aligned with the Humane Society, was an advantage it intended to use to its benefit.”
What if, instead of HSLF, the sentence above applied to a hunting rights group? It’s reasonable to expect the Department of Justice would have mobilized, taking its cue from the Congressional investigation. At a minimum, this quote would have sent the media and liberal Washingtonians into a tizzy.
But not in this case. Not when one of the Left’s chosen causes is under glare of public accountability. A radical group uses unethical lobbying practices in the Nation’s capital? Nothing to see here … move along.
So if you get bored while Congress is on summer recess do a search of the paltry number of stories and media hits generated by this rebuke by the Ethics Committee.
I count less than 20. But I could be off a little. Or maybe I’m just imagining things.