Ben Carson has offered several explanations for how a $31,000 dining set came to be ordered for his office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) has her own theory: the deep state did it.
An actual member of the United States Congress said that. Carson himself has said he knew nothing about the dining set, and that his wife ordered it, and that it had to be ordered because the existing furniture posed a physical danger to his staff. But no, Tenney knows better.
“Somebody in the deep state ― it was not one of his people, apparently ― ordered a table, like a conference room table or whatever it was, for a room,” Tenney said. “And that’s what the cost was. Ben Carson tried to — he said, “You know how hard it is to turn it back because of the way that the procurement happens?”
If by “deep state” she means “career professionals trying to follow the rules and do their jobs,” then somebody in the deep state got demoted for trying to get Carson’s team to keep redecorating expenses to a reasonable level. But this is right on par with Tenney’s recent streak of, shall we say, noteworthy ideas. Like that beating your wife isn't a crime of character or that there’s a media conspiracy to cover up mass murders by Democrats.
So while it’s perhaps shocking that a member of Congress is blaming the deep state for a dining set—a full dining set, not “a conference table or whatever it was”—that Carson himself admits was chosen by his wife, it is not at all surprising that Claudia Tenney as an individual is saying it.
It would be much less disturbing if Claudia Tenney was saying these things as a private citizen rather than as a House member, and we can do something about that. Can you chip in $1 to the Democratic nominee fund for New York's 22nd Congressional District?