[For more on this scandal, see this post: SEIU Bosses Gave Gov. Blagojevich More Than $1.7 Million Already, Not Including Possible Payout for Senate Seat]
By now, many of you have already heard about the pay-for-play scandal enveloping Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Unsurprisingly, Blago’s corrupt antics are intimately connected to Big Labor. In return for a cushy appointment at the SEIU’s Change to Win coalition, he apparently offered to name SEIU’s hand-picked candidate to Barack Obama’s newly-vacant senate seat (from the federal complaint .pdf):
Defendants ROD BLAGOJEVICH and [his aide] JOHN HARRIS, together with others, attempted to use ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s authority to appoint a United States Senator for the purpose of obtaining personal benefits for ROD BLAGOJEVICH, including, among other things, appointment as Secretary of Health & Human Services in the President-elect’s administration, and alternatively, a lucrative job which they schemed to induce a union to provide to ROD BLAGOJEVICH in exchange for appointing as senator an individual whom ROD BLAGOJEVICH and JOHN HARRIS believed to be favored by union officials and their associates.
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HARRIS said they could work out a three-way deal with SEIU and the President-elect where SEIU could help the President-elect with ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s appointment of Senate Candidate 1 to the vacant Senate seat, ROD BLAGOJEVICH would obtain a position as the National Director of the Change to Win campaign, and SEIU would get something favorable from the President-elect in the future.
The SEIU, of course, is denying any connection to the Blagojevich bribe, which is a bit hard to swallow given the circumstances. Here’s another damning excerpt from the charges (emphasis mine):
On November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with SEIU Official, who was in Washington, D.C. Prior intercepted phone conversations indicate that approximately a week before this call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH met with SEIU Official to discuss the vacant Senate seat, and ROD BLAGOJEVICH understood that SEIU Official was an emissary to discuss Senate Candidate 1’s interest in the Senate seat. During the conversation with SEIU Official on November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH informed SEIU Official that he had heard the President-elect wanted persons other than Senate Candidate 1 to be considered for the Senate seat.
SEIU Official stated that he would find out if Senate Candidate 1 wanted SEIU Official to keep pushing her for Senator with ROD BLAGOJEVICH. ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that “one thing I’d be interested in” is a 501(c)(4) organization. ROD BLAGOJEVICH explained the 501(c)(4)idea to SEIU Official and said that the 501(c)(4) could help “our new Senator [Senate Candidate 1].” SEIU Official agreed to “put that flag up and see where it goes.”
For those of you wondering, "Senate Candidate 1" is Valerie Jarrett, the SEIU’s once-favored choice for the Illinois senate vacancy. As the excerpted segment shows, the feds also have an anonymous SEIU official agreeing on tape to convey Blago’s proposed bribe to his superiors.
BREAKING NEWS: Notwithstanding SEIU denials, Politico reports a Democrat source has revealed the unnamed SEIU official is none other than President Andrew Stern himself.
UPDATE: NPR now reports that the SEIU official was actually Tom Balanoff, the union’s Illinois chief.
Blago’s abortive bargain was a pretty sweet deal. The Illinois governor would have picked up a plum SEIU job funded by forced union dues, while Big Labor would have gotten another bought-and-paid-for senator.
The workers funding Blago’s lavish new salary and the SEIU’s vast political apparatus may have felt left out of the deal, but that’s just the way Big Labor operates.
Just another example of the corruption that goes hand-in-hand with the injustice of forced unionism.
