Guess the Date

When was this written?

The …investigation of the Speaker of the House has been an opportunity to direct public attention to several issues that conservatives have considered key. Among these: the unprecedentedly heavy-handed tactics of the majority in Congress…; the frequently-disastrous self-serving involvement of Members of Congress into foreign affairs…; the leaking of classified information for partisan gain…; the unfair targeting of conservatives only in politically-motivated “ethics” probes.

If you guessed May 22, 1989, you are correct.

It could almost be written today, couldn’t it?

The paragraph comes from an in-house report I wrote on May 22, 1989 regarding National Center for Public Policy Research activities to bring public attention to the ethics problems of Speaker of the House Jim Wright of Texas. I found the report while searching some old files for something else entirely and couldn’t resist posting part of it after I realized the date was twenty years ago exactly today.

WrightRally042089

I was amused by the following paragraph:

Our second activity was a “Clean the House” rally “in demand of a full and fair investigation of Speaker Wright” held at the Democratic National Committee on April 20… The Democrats were not pleased. An internal DNC memo circulated to all staff inside the headquarters in advance of the rally instructed DNC staffers to ignore the rally and forbade them from looking out the windows overlooking the rally site. Some staffers disobeyed, however, and threw a large stack of copies of photographs of Republican Members of Congress and leading conservatives (Oliver North, Jerry Falwell) from the DNC roof onto the rally.

I no longer recall, but as we all had carried brooms at the rally, I guess we swept them up.


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The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.