The politicians that West Virginians send to Washington know how to get the bacon back home — and they aren’t ashamed of it. Sen. Bobby Byrd, D-W.Va., fancies himself the “Big Daddy” of the state, and he celebrates critical awards like “Porker Of The Month” as badges of honor.
Rep. Alan Mollohan is almost as effective as Byrd at funneling taxpayer bucks back to my home state. Unlike Byrd, however, Mollohan doesn’t have an otherwise squeaky clean ethical record. He was tainted by the House check-kiting scandal in the early 1990s, and more recently, his pork-barreling ways have generated new ethical scrutiny.
The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call outlined the case against Mollohan in detail this week:
On March 22, 2004, Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., collected just over $300,000 for his re-election campaign, more than half the total that he spent for the two-year election cycle. Of the donations he collected that day, at least $100,000 came from individuals tied to companies that have addresses in the office park built around the Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center and operated by the West Virginia High Technology Cooperative, a foundation that Mollohan helped create.
The list of tenants in the office park reads like a who’s who of Mollohan campaign donors. But the connections between Mollohan and the building named after him don’t end there. The office park is at the center of a web of relationships among a dozen or so individuals and companies that support Mollohan’s campaigns, his local booster organizations and the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation Inc.
Mollohan has provided many of these same companies with millions of dollars of federal earmarks, and announced millions more in grants to these companies from government agencies and larger federal contractors. And the individuals who lead these companies also have deeply intertwined business relationships — many have overlapping memberships on the boards of organizations in the office park and of private for-profit companies.
Mollohan has been in office 26 years now, and he replaced his father, who served 18 out of the 26 years before that. The kind of behavior on display from the son is a direct result of the comfort that comes from being in power so long.
It’s past time for the Mollohan dynasty to end before Alan Mollohan further tarnishes the reputation of my beloved birthplace.
