Donna Edwards will make a great member of Congress. She's smart, savvy and has a commitment to the issues that matter to her constituents. Her very strong challenge to the incumbent, Al Wynn, seems to have caught a lot of the politicos, including Wynn, off guard.
Matt Stoller at MyDD spent some time examining Al Wynn's disclosure statements and is able to expose Wynn's financial shenanigans:
This Congressman has a strange and disturbing pattern of breaking campaign finance laws to hide the identities of the people funneling money into his campaigns. It's not that he makes mistakes, or misreports a donor here or there. Al Wynn simply choose not to follow campaign finance laws. There's obviously sloppiness here, but the pattern of flouting the rules goes so far back and is so extensive that it's hard to conclude that it isn't intentionally done to hide his funding sources.Read the post and you'll be even more convinced that Wynn has to go. Wynn shows the same contempt and disregard for the campaign finance laws that he showed to his constituents when he voted for the bankruptcy bill:
It's not just that Wynn is awash in contributions from Walmart, right-wing corporate sources, and developers, it's that he systematically hides the workings of his cash machine from the public, violating campaign finance laws consistently over a pattern of many years.If there's anyway you can help Donna between now and Tuesday, please do it.
This is fascinating and disturbing stuff, and it's a good argument for why we need lots more primaries. Had Donna Edwards not challenged Al Wynn, we would never know the workings of Wynn's machine. We wouldn't be able to connect Wynn's legislative support of the telecom companies to his contempt for disclosure laws meant to serve the public to his support for Bush's energy policies to his support for local developpers. But because Donna stepped up to the plate, now we know what we're up against.
