Blinken: Before Trump Takes Office, 'Every Dollar We Have at Our Disposal Will...
Pocahontas Way Off Reservation on Hegseth Attack
UR Investigating After 'Wanted' Posters Featuring Jewish Faculty, Staff Plastered Around C...
Connecticut Teacher Resigns After Video of Her Threatening to Kill Trump Voters Goes...
Feds Raid Home of Polymarket CEO After Betting Site Predicted Trump Win
After Trump Win, Owner of LA Times Makes Major Change at the Paper
Israel Reportedly Planning Foreign Policy 'Gift' for Trump
Egregious: A Wisconsin School District Received Over $1 Million to Promote Woke Initiative...
Revealed: How Bob Casey and His Lawyers Are Trying to Steal an Election...
Hundreds of Explicit Books Have Been Expunged From Schools in This State
George Clooney Whines About Being Used As a 'Scapegoat' Following Harris' Loss
'God-tier Kind of Trolling': John Fetterman Shares His Thoughts on Trump’s Cabinet Picks
This NYT Post-Election Focus Group of Young Voters Is Brutal for the Media...and...
There's Been an Update About 'Peanut the Squirrel'
FEMA Director to Be Brutally Grilled in Back-to-Back House Hearings
OPINION

Daschle's Hypocrisy

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Tom Daschle wants us believe it when he says his failure to pay $128,000 in taxes was an honest mistake. He wants us to believe that not reporting $250,000 in compensation involving a limousine and driver over three years was just an accident, and his decision to pay those taxes after he was nominated to head the Health and Human Services Department was merely a coincidence. He can explain why he wasn’t at fault when he failed to pay an additional $88,000 in work as a consultant—earnings he still has not paid taxes on—and can explain how he accidentally overstated his charitable giving by $15,000 in tax deductible donations.

Advertisement

The former Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota, who once declared on the Senate floor “tax-cheaters cheat us all,” has been doing a lot explaining this week. In a letter to leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, who will decide his fate, Daschle urged his former colleagues in the Senate to believe his “mistakes were unintentional.”

And yet, when he was on the other side of the Senate confirmation process, Daschle didn’t extend the same courtesy to another cabinet nominee whose nomination hit a bump in the road.

Shortly after my mother Linda Chavez was nominated by President Bush to be Secretary of Labor in January of 2001, ABC News reported that she had given room and board to an undocumented woman from Guatemala. As Chavez stated at the time, she had provided the battered woman with emergency assistance due to the domestic abuse she was facing at the time, got her enrolled in English classes, and helped her find work with a neighbor. In her own defense, Chavez pointed to her long history of taking in those in need, and a long history of paying taxes on household help from legal citizens, as tax records confirmed.

But Chavez’s honest explanation was completely disregarded by Daschle. Less than a week after Bush announced the nomination, the then-Minority Leader declared he had “serious problems” with the illegal alien revelations and threatened to filibuster her nomination, a move that would have been the first in our nation’s history against a cabinet nominee.

Advertisement

Daschle told CBS’ Face the Nation at the time that a cabinet secretary “ought to set the example, ought to be able to enforce all of the laws. If she hasn’t been able to do that in the past, one would have serious questions about whether she’d be able to do it in her capacity as secretary of labor.” But Chavez broke no laws. Shamefully, Daschle was turning what was an act of charity by Chavez into irresponsible accusations.

Though Chavez and her immigrant houseguest—now a U.S. citizen—both insisted that their relationship hadn’t been that of employer/employee, Daschle refused to entertain the explanation. And yet now, hoping to be confirmed by the Senate after much more serious allegations, Daschle wants to be taken at his word that his were honest mistakes.

Chavez eventually withdrew her nomination as Secretary of Labor, expressing regret that her controversy was becoming a distraction for the incoming Bush administration. Daschle applauded the withdrawal, stating without irony that “Ms. Chavez made the right decision…There should be no question that the person who is in charge of enforcing America's labor laws respects those laws.”

Daschle ought to make the right decision now as well, and withdraw his nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. After all, there should be no question that someone who is in charge of enforcing America’s laws be able to respect those laws.

Advertisement

But in all likelihood, that won’t happen. In the end, Senators must decide for themselves whether to apply the same standards to Daschle that he applied to others.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Recommended

Trending on Townhall Videos