Two D.C.-Area Leaders Arrested in Very Different Circumstances

Yesterday, former County Executive Jack Johnson (of Prince George's County, Maryland) pled guilty to three of the charges he had earlier been arrested for. They involved extortion and evidence tampering, relating to a number of kickbacks Johnson had demanded of and received from developers within the county.

This event stands in sharp contrast to the recent arrest of Washington, DC mayor, Vincent Gray. In that instance, Gray was among 41 other people, many of them local administration figures, arrested for unlawful assembly following the budget compromise that, as part of the bargain Democrats had to make with the Republicans, imposed a number of burdensome and humiliating restrictions on the Washington, DC government.

The ironic thing is that, prior to these arrests, one righteous and one shameful, informed citizens in the metropolitan area would have considered Gray the tainted politician and Johnson the upright crusader.

Jack Johnson won election to the office of county executive based largely on his record as the Prince George's County's chief prosecutor. Not only did he carry out his duties faithfully and capably, he won points among the voters for attacking the rampant police brutality that had plagued the county for many years, as it transitioned from a white-majority to a black-majority entity. Some criticized his attacks as political pandering, but there is no denying that the Prince George's County Police Department had a major problem with brutality and that the situation got a lot better under Jack Johnson's prodding.

Add to that a simple, straightforward campaign style that saw him come across as "a man of the people," and Johnson had little trouble getting himself elected to the top office in the county. In fact, so popular was the candidate, his wife, Leslie, swept into a seat on the county council on her husband's coattails. She too is under indictment for evidence tampering, but her case is still pending. Insofar as we are all presumed innocent until proven guilty, she has retained her council seat, but was stripped of her committee assignments.

To the great distress of his most loyal supporters, Johnson's indulgence in bribery was found to be absolutely egregious. It was to the extent that, in a very short while, every developer who wanted to do business with the county knew you had "to pay to play."

Mayor Eugene Grant of Seat Pleasant and a former staunch ally of Johnson's, was particularly upset by the news. "If he's guilty, it's a betrayal of our ancestry," Grant said of his fellow black official. "It's a betrayal of W.E.B. DuBios and Booker T. Washington and Rosa Parks," he went on to elaborate.

The local evangelical community, where Johnson campaigned particularly hard and from which he drew immense support, was united in expressing deep disappointment. Regardless of how the process of his arrest plays out in the end, they insist that he needs to confess his sins and seek forgiveness before they will accept him as a fellow congregant.

Contrast Jack Johnson's situation with that of Vincent Gray, the newly-elected mayor of Washington, DC. He ousted previous mayor Adrian Fenty, who, many believed, was too arrogant for their liking. Fenty did nothing to alleviate that perception when he appointed the possibly-even-more-arrogant Michelle Rhee as the school superintendent. Yet, for all his personal unpopularity, nobody of any importance accused him of corruption.

Gray, on the other hand, was neck-deep in suspicion almost from the very beginning of his administration. The biggest part of the accusations stemmed from unsavory campaign practices that saw a number of marginally-qualified, but useful former campaigners get plush jobs. What, you mean Vincent Gray used political patronage to reward people who helped him in his campaign? What an outrage! Certainly no politician in the history of America has ever done such a vile and despicable thing. Well, maybe a few questionable characters like this guy Lincoln and that guy Kennedy. Seriously, though, Mayor Gray seems to have taken the process to unacceptable excess.

Taking that into consideration, there is no doubt that one reason for his stand against the authority of the federal police was to clean some of the tarnish from his already-stained reputation. That said, we are being entirely unfair if we imagine that was his only motive.

The two biggest sticking points in the budget deal (to say nothing of the ever-present issue that the people of Washington, DC have no vote in Congress) were that the local government would be prohibited, even from spending its own money, to fund abortions for poor women. The other was a revival of school vouchers, at the expense of the public school system.

To be sure, a case can be made for both of those causes the Republicans were so interested in fostering, and it is not the purpose of this article to argue them, one way or the other. The thing that most stuck in the craw of the protesters was the brutal reminder that Washington, DC was, in fact, not a sovereign city, all the malarkey about "home rule" notwithstanding.

If Pittsburgh does not want a school voucher program, it does not have to have one. If the people of Detroit want to provide financial assistance to enable poor women to obtain abortions, they are allowed to do so. In both those hypothetical cases, the results would have ultimately come about through the democratic process.

In Washington, the democratic process is often an unwanted stepchild, overlooked by a willful Congress. This, more that abortion and school vouchers, was what the protestors were so angry about.

People get the notion that Congress can call the tune because it pays the piper. It is true that the federal government forks over several million dollars to the District of Columbia, but it is not out of Christian charity. Those funds represent the very substantial real estate taxes that are not formally levied against the feds for the land and buildings they occupy, but for which payment is made in lieu of same. That the Congress gets to determine what that amount shall be and not the people who must govern the place where all that real estate is situated is yet another issue that contributes to the often patronizing attitude of the guests toward their host.

As clear and obvious as Vincent Gray's demagoguery may be in this instance, it does not in the slightest erase the arrogance of the Republican Congress in its shameless bullying of a defenseless constituency.

Sources

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021807140_3.html?sid=ST2010111204006

http://wamu.org/news/11/05/18/jack_johnson_will_seek_reduced_sentence_after_extortion_plea.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/politics/gray-council-members-arrested-at-protest-of-dc-riders-in-spending-bill/2011/04/11/AFRWPBND_story.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2291028/pagenum/2