That is if they are Republicans. Unlike their position on Bill Clinotn’s allege perjury charges, the Democrats are convinced Tom Delay is guilty simply based on indictments…not convictions. The South Dakota Democrat exemplifies this as they go after John Thune yet again:
The South Dakota Democratic Party is asking Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to return $6,000 in donations he received from Texas Rep. Tom DeLay's political fund-raising organization.
DeLay's federal PAC, Americans for a Republican Majority, donated to Thune in the 1996 and 2002 election cycles. A Texas grand jury has indicted DeLay, a Republican, on charges of violating state law with a scheme to launder illegal corporate donations to state candidates. He has stepped down temporarily as House Majority Leader.
Thune was elected to the U.S. House in 1996 and lost a bid to defeat Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson in 2002. Two years later, he defeated Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, who was Senate Minority Leader.
Republican Rep. Kenny Hulshof of Missouri said earlier this week that he sent a check for $14,500 - the amount he had received from DeLay's PAC since 1996 - to Hurricane Katrina relief. Republican Reps. Jeb Bradley of New Hampshire and Heather Wilson of New Mexico have also returned funds from the PAC.
"Sen. Thune should follow his colleagues' lead and donate DeLay's dirty money to the hurricane relief effort," Nick Nemec, the South Dakota Democratic Party Democratic National Committeeman, said in a release.
Kyle Downey, a spokesman for Thune, said the Democrats' request is "a partisan attempt to link contributions from past campaigns to current political witch hunts."
"A small group of partisans are ignoring Sen. Thune's accomplishments for South Dakota, such as saving Ellsworth Air Force Base, delivering record highway funding and getting a long-stalled energy bill passed," Downey said.
Nick Nemec’s reference to "Delay’s dirty money" is based on Delay’s guilt by indictment. Yesterday Rush Limbaugh provided some insight on just how little evidence there is to support the indictments that substantiate Downey’s use of ‘partisan’ to characterize those indictments:
So today, on our Austin, Texas, affiliate, Travis County, Texas, KLBJ, 590 AM, the host, Mark Caesar, is interviewing William Gibson who was the jury foreman on the first DeLay indictment case. And we now know this jury would not indict for money laundering or anything other than conspiracy. Now, the funny thing about this interview is that the host, Mark Caesar, pretty much thinks it's over. He's ready to close out the interview, and then Gibson decides to launch in and say something else. Gibson apparently finished with the interview, but then he says, "Wait, wait. Those ads, the Texas Association of Business, remember those ads?" And then Gibson says this.
GIBSON: I just looked at that before I was ever on the Grand Jury. They were telling people how to vote, this is before I ever got on the Grand Jury. Being a citizen of this town, I looked at those things and felt that, "Hey those are telling people how to vote."
Gibson then states that his decision to indict was not based on actual evidence presented by the Democrat prosecutor:
GIBSON: And all this came out way before I was ever on the grand jury, these mailers were in your paper, in the Austin papers, everybody else's paper. They were flooding the market around here. That those were way before I ever went on the grand jury, my decision was based upon those, not based upon what might have happened in the grand jury room.
Of course Rush Limbaugh jumped all over this:
Did you hear him say that? Well, that's all you need to say. The foreman of the Ronnie Earle grand jury admits in a radio interview today that none of the evidence that Ronnie Earle presented had anything to do with his decision to agree to a conspiracy indictment against Tom DeLay. It was all about these television ads that he thinks are illegal because they suggested voting for somebody, these Texas Association of Business ads.
Now, what does this mean? It means that the basis for the charges, folks, is in doubt. The juror did not make a decision based on the evidence. Look at how sleazy all of this is. The original indictment based on a statute that wasn't even in existence, the facts set forth in that indictment don't even allege that DeLay violated the nonexistent statute, now you've got a grand jury foreman saying that nothing went on in the grand jury room helped make up his mind anyway because he walked into the room with his mind already made up. So Earle empanels the jury at noon on Monday which brings new charges five hours later. How could that jury have possibly taken the time to review any evidence in that period of time? And now, one of the original grand jurors said that none of the evidence mattered anyway. I have a transcript so I understood what the man said. He was talking about these Texas Association for Business ads and they were telling people how to vote and he thought that was not right and he somehow linked DeLay to those ads. He resented TV ads that were telling people to go vote for somebody. Now, my instinctive reaction is to this, when's the last time I saw an ad that didn't tell me that? But I'm getting confused with the timeline here on campaign finance reform and when you couldn't do what and say what, but freedom of speech my rear end. There isn't any freedom of speech if you can't run an ad that says that. The bottom line, thank you McCain-Finegold. I mean, hell's bells here, folks, this is a tantamount admission that this grand jury was nothing more than a rubber stamp and the evidence that went on in there that was presented in there, who knows what evidence it was? Nobody can tell us except -- well, it's secret, we can't know. All we know is that the foreman of the grand jury wanted to let everybody know on the radio today down in Austin, Texas, that he didn't need any evidence. His mind was made up before he even became a member of the grand jury because of those TV ads and those newspaper ads.
Remember, this is the first indictment which was baseless and Ronnie Earle found out it was baseless and he had to go get something else at noon on Monday because he indicted DeLay on a statute that didn't even exist. The question still remains, "What do you do about out-of-control prosecutors like this?" To whom are they accountable? They're accountable to the Bar Association. You know, that can take years. And then even if you want to go that route, the only hope you've got is some judge slaps them down somewhere along the way. But that's unlikely. Law enforcement doesn't work that way. The presumption of truth, innocence, and justice, and the American way is always with the prosecutor.
So we have a partisan Democrat prosecutor using the 'convict a ham sandwich' grand jury system to indict DeLay. Then we have the South Dakota Democrats assumimg that DeLay is not innocent until proven guilty and publicly demand John Thune give back "DeLay’s dirty money". The Democrats cannot win on the issues, so now they have resorted to dirty politics by abusing power that have been granted to partisan Democrat prosecutors.
Is the South Dakota Republican leadership going to go weak kneed and do nothing? Or are we going to have a crusade to expose the Democrat’s dirty tricks? And how about Tom Daschle turning his campaign funds into a new PAC fund? Has that tactic been questioned?
