Mail this congressman home

The Tacoma-News Tribune recently published a story regarding Washington Rep. Dave Reichert’s profligate use of free postage, called “franking” in congressional lingo. Since he was elected on 2004, Reichert the Republican spendthrift has availed himself to a $500,000 worth of postage stamps, more than any of his fellow congressional legislators. Nevertheless, even that amount is understates the case: Democrat colleagues include total cost of mass mailings, Republicans—who wish to maintain the public fantasy that they are “frugal” with taxpayer money—usually only report the postage.

And what is all this postage paying for? To mask the widely-held belief that Reichert is an “empty suit”—that he is actually doing something. The House Legislative Resource Center found that most of Reichert’s mass mailings contained nothing but the typical empty-shelled Republican talking points—the usual scare tactics and simple-minded slogans designed to cause mass paranoia for nakedly partisan purposes. Scaring seniors, frightening families, attacking the stimulus bill, conducting “surveys” with loaded questions like one regarding health care: “Do you like your current coverage and want to keep it?”—implying falsely that Obama and the Democrats have some evil scheme to take it away from whoever is simple-minded enough to not understand this empty-handed gimmick. The more pertinent question is what has Reichert accomplished in six years? He certainly hasn’t shown himself to be capable of independent thought, let alone concrete ideas. He has merely been a tiny screw in the do-nothing Republican monkey wrench.

Why, exactly, was this “empty suit” elected in the first place?
Oh, I forgot. In November of 2001, police arrested Gary Ridgway, the so-called “Green River Killer,” accused of killing 48 women, mainly prostitutes, drug addicts and others living on the fringes. Ridgway was allowed to plead guilty in 2003 to avoid a date with the chair, apparently because of the circumstantial nature of much of the evidence against him, and because he “promised” to assist police in locating missing bodies (not very helpfully, as it turned out). King County Sheriff Reichert reserved largely undeserved “acclaim” for the apprehension of Ridgway, and in two years he was riding his law and order “credentials” to a seat in Congress as a Republican.

Yet there were things about this case that disturbed me, beyond the fact that Ridgway was never obliged to confront the verdict of a jury. His killing spree began in 1982; in 1983, police had a suspect: Gary Ridgway. In 1984 he was given a polygraph test, and later samples of hair and saliva. Yet police failed to track his movements and chose to follow pointless leads on other “suspects.” Reichert was the chief detective in conducting this investigation. It wasn’t until 2001 that DNA evidence belatedly tied Ridgway to some of the victims. After he was arrested, Ridgway claimed that he continued his killing spree until 1998—15 years after he was first identified as a suspect. It testifies to either incompetence or the failure to take seriously his status as a suspect by the police—and Reichert in particular—that Ridgway felt no pressure to end his killings; perhaps he was too much the average white Joe to the police. At least three dozen more women lost their lives because of this failure.

And voters overlooked this fact when they rewarded Reichert with a House seat, where he has gained “fame” being an empty suit and spending a lot of money on postage stamps.