As you may have heard, the Republican National Committee is under fire again. Although... is that really news? At some point, won't a Google search for "under fire again" simply yield the RNC homepage as its top result? But I digress: this week, the RNC was caught out once more for sending out fundraising mailers that were deceptively packaged to look like the census -- despite the fact that Congress enacted a law with the specific intent of stopping this nonsense.
Of course, this is all the specific fault of somebody, and in the opinion of RNC spokesman Doug Heye, that somebody is the Democrats. Which is a pretty neat trick, actually! But here's how Heye explained this to Talking Points Memo:
We were well within the new statute, as the committee will be of any further legislation on this issue. Any confusion is the result of vague or unclear legislative language. If the Democrats have this much trouble writing a relatively simple bill, how can they credibly write a coherent bill on health care, financial regulatory reform or jobs creation that run hundreds of pages?
Of course, this neatly glosses over the fact that said legislation had two Republican co-sponsors -- Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who were and continue to be angry at the RNC for these census mailers.
Also, the House passed the legislation unanimously, so one would imagine that the enactors of the law thought its intent was pretty clear. And when you look at what the RNC did to skirt the letter of the legislation, it's pretty sure that they weren't "confused" at all.
That claim appears to hang on the fact that the law applies to mailers that says "census" on the envelope. In the RNC's mailer, that word appears through the window rather than on the envelope. New legislation introduced today by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) aims to close that loophole.
Yeah, so, it's not that the RNC were totally undone with confusion as to how to proceed with mailers that no Congressional Republicans would support. Rather, the RNC sized up the law and came up with a specific way to flout it so that they could keep on doing what they had been doing. Now, their own lawmakers are going to have to expend additional effort to fix something that would have never been necessary to address if the RNC was capable of exerting some self-control and simply choose, of their own volition, to not be a passel of juvenile dickwads.
But sure: HOW CAN ANYONE TRUST THE JOBS BILL, NOW? The logic is indelible!
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