Will Roy Blunt be implicated in DeLay's shady dealings?

Ahhh, my love/hate relationship with The New Republic. This time it's good news-- their November 7 issue will feature an article outlining my fellow Missourian Roy Blunt's own sliminess as he's risen through the ranks of the House. The Blunt family is a mini-dynasty that demonstrates-- not unlike the Bush family story, not to mention DeLay-- that cash and connections can land even the most incompetent jockeys on a thoroughbred horse. But it can't last forever.

A month before the [2000 Republican National] [C]onvention, a new law had gone into effect requiring that organizations like DeLay's and Blunt's file regular reports with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) listing their contributions and expenditures. But, if you wanted to know exactly how much DeLay and Blunt blew on the 2000 convention, you would have to look elsewhere. That's because the documents their PACs filed for the months just before and after the convention list hardly any contributions or expenditures at all--certainly nothing that would explain the level of spending that took place in Philadelphia. A legal or ethical oversight, perhaps, but, if so, it seems not to be the only one that took place in that heady year, when DeLay came into his own as the most powerful Republican in Congress. The story of the missing convention expenses (and a related tale of the curious path taken by $150,000 that DeLay's PAC gave to Blunt that spring) reveal a lot about the symbiosis between DeLay and Blunt--and the way the two men turned greed and political power into cash.