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With Bill DeWeese pleading the Fifth before a judge in Harrisburg this week, Outrage Fatigue has reached epidemic levels in Pennsylvania.
I first made reference to this malady in 2000. That summer, an intrepid PG investigative reporter revealed the casual, bipartisan and perfectly legal corruption of the statehouse.
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Republican John Perzel of Philadelphia, then the House majority leader, and his Democratic counterpart, then-Minority Leader DeWeese, had been grabbing money with both hands. They each averaged a $5,000 restaurant tab per month, payable by taxpayers, despite the fact that they and other legislators each received $115 a day for food and lodging while in Harrisburg.
When that hit the papers, you can only guess what happened next.
Nothing, of course.
A decade has passed. Though there was a brief raking of muck after the unconstitutional pay grab by legislators in 2005, bad habits have proven hard to break.
Lawyers for Mr. DeWeese's former right-hand man, Mike Veon of Beaver Falls, and three co-defendants just completed their defense in Harrisburg concerning all the state money dispensed in Mr. Veon's years as House whip. The charge is that he was giving out your tax dollars for campaign, not government, work.
The so-called Bonusgate trial has lasted six weeks and, I expect, most Pennsylvanians have either stopped reading about it or never started. Seeing how we've been represented can be as comforting as a razor-blade ride into a pool of iodine.
What has been telling this week is not casual, endemic corruption. That we know about. The new twist is that casual corruption is central to Mr. Veon's defense strategy.
State Rep. Jim Wansacz, a Democrat from the Scranton area, testified about dinners he had in Mr. Veon's Capitol office after pickup basketball games among lawmakers and staff. The four-year tab for those dinners ran to $15,600.
It appears we can rule out Arby's. Lawmakers ate, smoked cigars, played cards and had a drink now and again while discussing enough legislation to let taxpayers pick up the bill. Boy, that sounds like a blast. Particularly when, each day, the dapper Mr. V also collected taxpayer-funded per diems of $126 to $148.
Nobody is suggesting Mr. Veon was the only lawmaker double-dipping, but the implicit defense is that we shouldn't pick on him because it happens all the time. Absent is any notion that, as a leader, he is responsible.
The same is true for Mr. DeWeese, who began distancing himself from Mr. Veon when it became clear that his old right hand might soon be fitted for a metal cuff. Mr. DeWeese and the other former House speaker, Mr. Perzel, have been charged separately by Attorney General Tom Corbett.
Mr. DeWeese, of Greene County, also charged with using state money for campaign purposes, has said at times that he didn't know what was going on, at other times that he didn't realize he was doing wrong. These assertions are made despite -- or maybe because of -- serving more than three decades as a state lawmaker, and most of the past two decades as a leader.
Thus we have two variations on what passes for House leadership.
Veon takes a page from the Bart Simpson playbook: All the kids at school were doing it! Nobody else's parents were making 'em stop!
Mr. DeWeese uses a dash of Bart but, having long prided himself on his classical readings, he also invokes the doctrine of Stalag 13's storied Sgt. Schultz: I see NOTHING. I know NOTHING.
Mr. Veon and Mr. DeWeese are the same two men who penalized lawmakers who voted against the unconstitutional pay grab of 2005. Now they want to claim they were just part of the Harrisburg culture.
That's a tough case to make when they long manipulated and helped create that culture. They were not just another substance in the Harrisburg petri dish, they were in charge of the experiment.
