Florida Man and Republican Rep. Gregory Steube has been on a tear since entering his second year Congress. In January, the Trump-supporting, fast-talking Floridian introduced HR 5657, the “Religious Insignia on Dog Tags Act,” that was somehow worse than what it sounds like. It’s a bill that would allow a Christian for-profit jewelry company to be allowed to produce Christian-themed dog tags with official military licensing. The military does not allow Department of Defense items to be licensed for things like religious beliefs. This is all to say that Rep. Greg Steube is a special kind of ridiculous.
Well, the Trump-loving Republican, taking another page out of fellow Florida Man Rep. Matt Gaetz’s political theater playbook, decided to go after Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar with an ill-advised bill. Rep. Omar is a favorite target of the conservative movement because she’s a woman and she’s not white and she’s not Christian. Rep. Omar touches all of the most provocative and frightening buttons in the Republican base. But, as the Daily Beast reports, Steube seems to have inadvertently created a law that would hamstring Donald Trump from spending money on Trump properties.
On May 1, Rep. Steube introduced a bit of legislation he calls the Obstructing Monetary Allocations to Relatives Act. There’s an acronym in there: OMAR. Get it? The trolling by Steube is intended to call out Omar’s relationship with her now husband Timothy Mynett, and more specifically, the amount of money her campaign spent on Mynett’s political consultant group this past year. Rep. Steube and other Republicans are hoping to weaken Omar’s reelection campaign in their normal fashion of promoting intrigue about a powerful woman, sprinkling in sex and corruption, and then providing little in the way of substance for those arguments.
However, one of the big problems with a Republican attempting to create something resembling a meaningful bit of campaign finance legislation is that the Republican Party, and more specifically Donald Trump, are arguably the most corrupt campaign finance violators on the planet. As Rep. Steube said himself: “Our elections should be held to the highest ethical standards and this loophole only serves to invite corruption into the process. We should be serving the people as elected officials, not lining our own pockets. This legislation will add more protections for American campaign dollars and prevent candidates from violating the trust of the public.”
Hey, that doesn’t sound so bad to me. Plus, the Daily Beast points out:
The bill prohibits any campaign payment “to a vendor which is owned or controlled by an immediate family member of the candidate,” which it defines as “a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, father-in-law, or mother-in-law.” A company is considered to be “controlled” by a candidate’s family member if that family member “is a member of the board of directors or similar governing body of the vendor.”
That’s great! I’d sign onto that. But, sadly, there’s a catch. This bill seems to have an interesting omission. It allows the candidate to be left off the banned list of vendors. But, like most Republicans from Florida, Rep. Steube is dumb as a brick made out of novelty dog poop, and his attempts at creating an anti-campaign corruption bill that left a loophole to the biggest corrupt official in the country seems to have failed at that too. This is because Donald Trump turned over the “control” of his businesses to his sons, dumb and dumbest.
Rep. Steube’s people tell the Daily Beast that this is wrong and that Donald Trump is strong like bull and the least corrupt person in the history of corruption. Maybe they should just rewrite the bill to say: “Everybody but Republican campaigns?” I mean, it’s not like the GOP has any semblance of giving a shit about anybody but themselves anymore.