Still Worth It

The scandal involving Representative Marie Newman is metastasizing.  It appears that she paid off a potential primary challenger and his aide so that they would not run in the primary, which would have split the vote against the incumbent Dan Lipinski.

Lipinski was a horrible Rep, who literally inherited the seat through the machinations of his father, and he desperately needed to go, and anyone else in the race would have split the anti-Lipinski vote, and Newman won by only 2½%.

Lipinski is anti-abortion, anti-healthcare reform, anti-LGBT rights, refused to endorse Obama after won the primary, etc.

Taking out the worst Democrat in Congress was worth it:

Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL) is already under investigation for allegedly inking an improper contract with a rival to keep him from running against her. But it turns out that rival isn’t the only one who scored a sweet deal with the freshman Democrat; one of his top political allies got one, too.

In her deposition to the Office of Congressional Ethics late last year, Newman attested that not only did she sign documents as a 2020 candidate guaranteeing a six-figure job to would-be primary competitor Professor Iymen Chehade, but she also made a similar pact with her current chief of district affairs, Shadin Maali. What’s more, sources told The Daily Beast, Maali conducted outreach and introductions on behalf of Chehade’s never-official bid for what is now Newman’s Chicagoland seat.

Chehade, a Palestinian-American academic now running for a new Illinois House district created under reapportionment, sued Newman last year for failing to make good on the bargain. The two ultimately settled the case out of court in June. And two days after reaching an undisclosed agreement, Newman’s campaign began making payments to the professor, whom it has since called “an important member of our team.”

In the suit, Chehade reiterated that he dropped his own candidacy as part of trade that was supposed to yield him a plum job in Newman’s congressional office. But the civil complaint also appeared to connect the Newman campaign’s recruitment of Maali to this arrangement.

There is no hand wringing from me over this. I do not care what tactics were used to take down Lipinski, only that they succeeded.