Hilarious Outrage From Before Media Knew Virginia Horse-Trade Was a Democratic Scandal [Wayback Edition]

Charlie Cooke has already mourned the bones of Sir Walter Raleigh and Patrick Henry in his great Terry McAuliffe philippic, so I’ll just point out something about the specific scandal that has the gladhanding governor of Virginia in hot water.

The Phil Puckett resignation started out as a Republican scandal — and back then there didn’t seem to be much concern from the media that, in the Washington Post’s Laura Vozzella and Jenna Portnoy’s phrasing, “it was not entirely clear to Richmond’s increasingly bewildered and antsy political class just what [the offender at the moment] had done.”

Back then, Virginia Senate Republicans stood accused of offering state senator Phillip Puckett a job if he resigned his seat, which would have thwarted a McAuliffe scheme to push increased Medicaid commitments through the senate. I reported on that story in June, when Puckett had in fact given up his senate seat. At the time, Puckett, a Democrat with deep roots in southwestern Virginia who managed to stay in office for many years in a heavily Republican district, mentioned the need to vacate his seat so his daughter could be confirmed to a judgeship that was being blocked by what Vozzella and Portnoy call “Senate Republicans’ anti-nepotism policy.” (When will the Republicans lighten up with these ethical rules of theirs, for heaven’s sake?) Puckett also alluded to some family health problems (also rumored to be the case by other observers), and he discontinued discussions of his own job prospect once the issue came up. 

Quoting my earlier article:

Yet Puckett has been turned into an Old Dominion Benedict Arnold by national media.

“They come with festering cancers, rotting teeth, wheezing lungs and aching joints, lining up for hours to see the doctors who arrive with a mobile clinic to deliver health care to the most underserved of America’s poor,” the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak wrote in her column titled “By resigning, Virginia lawmaker Phillip Puckett betrayed his own people.”

“GOP Straight Up Bribes Democratic Senator In Effort To Block Obamacare,”reported the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Ashley Alman. “Republicans offered to move Democratic state Sen. Phillip P. Puckett and his daughter into prestigious jobs in exchange for Puckett’s resignation,” Grim and Alman continued, “which will flip the chamber into Republican hands. Puckett officially accepted the offer on Monday, but then appeared to back away amid a public outcry.”

“I used to think Gov. Terry McAuliffe was the most venal politician among Virginia Democrats,” thought Jamelle Bouie of Slate. “But, I was wrong. That title goes to state Sen. Phillip Puckett, who resigned on Monday as part of a deal to give Republicans control of the state Senate, and thus a full veto on the Medicaid expansion.”

Bouie had it right the first time. Now the Puckett brouhaha has boomeranged on the Democrats, as it turns out McAuliffe’s chief of staff Paul Reagan made an extraordinarily straightforward and oily plea to Puckett to stay in office:

“We would be very eager to accommodate her if, if that would be helpful in keeping you in the Senate,” Reagan said in a voicemail to Puckett. “We, we would basically do anything.”

Why don’t I ever get voicemails like that?

And while it’s fun to read about team McAuliffe’s venality (McAuliffe’s proud delight in his own corruption is in fact the closest thing he has to charm), do we really need federal investigators hunting heads over some horse trading in a state capital? (Presumably the answer will be yes, because the GOP got the better of this particular trade.)

At least the Democrats can still blame Reagan.