OPINION:
Elaine Chao, the secretary of Transportation, is one of the most accomplished members of President Trump’s administration. She has led two Cabinet agencies, been a sub-cabinet official, a leader of an influential think tank, and a vital force for the cheerful conservatism grounded in the hard work and traditional values that made Ronald Reagan so popular with so many Americans.
More than that, she’s the wife of Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, and that makes her a special target of the Democrats who have said just about everything they have to say about the president. They’re growing weary of listening to themselves repeating themselves in rants about Donald Trump. Most of them can’t afford to hire professional writers to furnish fresh gall and unsalted wormwood, so Miss Chao is elected to be her husband’s surrogate.
She stands accused of using her position as secretary of Transportation to help her husband’s re-election to the Senate next year by steering shipments of pork to his home state of Kentucky. She has been further accused of using her Cabinet position to help her family’s shipping business.
The press attacks on Secretary Chao and an accompanying whispering campaign to pass along rumors founded on not much has come to a low boil, and the Democrats will no doubt turn up the heat under the pot as the campaigns of 2020 draw near. All of it has little to do with her conduct, in office or out, but to bring down Mr. McConnell next year.
One of the more “serious” allegations is that she meets personally with delegations of citizens from Kentucky, seeking help from her department on economic development projects in the state. Horrors! Has anyone ever heard of such malfeasance (and misfeasance)? A Cabinet secretary making herself accessible to regular folk from Owensboro, Danville and Bowling Green? Who can tell where this might lead? There’s a suggestion that she assigned a staffer to deal with issues that might intersect with items on her husband’s agenda.
Trying to get at a man through his wife is a low blow, but gallantry was slain in Washington long ago. It was inevitable that “the politics of personal destruction” would go nuclear.
For his part, the senator concedes that he has indulged pillow talk with his wife, perhaps some of it at the breakfast table. “I was complaining just last night,” he says, “that of 169 projects [under her jurisdiction] Kentucky got only 5. I hope we’ll do better next year.” A spokesman for Miss Chao — that’s Mrs. McConnell in real life — said “no state receives special treatment from the Department of Transportation.” In fact, Kentucky ranks 26th in population among the several states, and 25th in money disbursed by the department.
There’s always squealing at the trough when Congress passes out the pork. It’s the nature of the game. The big states — New York, California, Texas and Florida — are fond of griping that they pay the taxes and the smaller states get the gravy. Senators from the founding are graded by their constituents on “not what have you done for us, but what have you done for us lately.” And it’s never enough.
It’s not that the senator and the missus have done anything illegal, or even unethical. They’ve been proven guilty only of practicing representative government. The projects steered to Kentucky have gone to the people of Kentucky, black and white, liberal and conservative, and others. Perhaps, in a perfect world, only virgins, orphans, widows, bachelors and others untouched by human hands would be elected to public office and would do their jobs in isolation. But that’s not how politics works.
Frustrated Democrats and others on the left know this, too. Their beef is not with Elaine Chao, but with the senator’s blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland, a liberal Democrat, to the U.S. Supreme Court, depriving the liberal Democrats of tipping the ideological balance on the court leftward. That, too, is politics, and playing the game well.
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