Another Senate Ethics Complaint Against Harry Reid

by Ben Bullard 
Claiming that Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) floor attacks on the conservative Koch brothers represent a historic abuse of office, Tea Party Patriots has filed a formal ethics complaint against the Senate Majority Leader Monday before the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.
Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin called Reid’s nearly obsessive, hyperbolic public remarks about the Koch brothers, whose political spending trends conservative, an example of “thuggish intimidation” campaigning tactics that improperly use Reid’s elected office as a catbird seat for partisan warfare.
“It’s been generations since a member of the Senate has abused the power of his office to attack private citizens the way Harry Reid has sought to vilify Charles and David Koch,” Martin explained, adding that Reid’s efforts amount to “nothing more than a continuation of the thuggish intimidation campaign mounted by the Obama Administration to target and silence people and organizations Democrats disagree with.”

Martin also pointed out that Reid knows he’s acting out of line when he uses his Senate floor time to steer the day’s topic toward brutal criticism of the Kansas oil billionaires, whom he has repeatedly called “un-American.”
“Reid’s repeated and mean-spirited attacks violate federal laws and Senate rules against using taxpayer-funded resources for partisan politics and he knows it, yet he repeatedly takes to the floor of the Senate and the media to attack those with whom he disagrees — and then turns around and devotes the Senate floor to a ‘talk-a-thon’ on a major donor’s key issue of climate change,” Martin said.
The filing asks the Committee to investigate whether Reid “violated Senate rules by unlawfully and unethically targeting private citizens, Charles and David Koch, whose philosophical and political views are in opposition to Senator Reid’s philosophy and to misuse Senate resources to reward Tom Steyer, a mega-donor to Democrats in the Senate.”
Steyer, a progressive donor driven primarily by environmental concerns, has received increasing scrutiny from Reid’s conservative critics, who counter Reid’s Koch attacks by pointing out the hypocrisy in lambasting the exercise of political free speech through the acceptance of major donations.
Monday’s complaint comes a month after the Roger Villere, who chairs the Louisiana Republican Party, filed a similar complaint — complete with screen captures of anti-Koch campaigning from Reid’s official Senate Twitter account and website — with the Select Committee on Ethics.