Sherrod Brown on Values - Ineffectiveness, Scandal, and Partisanship

Congressman Sherrod Brown’s career in public office has been marked throughout by ineffectiveness, rocked by scandal, and drenched in extreme partisanship. Taken together, these hallmarks of Brown’s record speak to his ability as a manager and his trustworthiness as a potential Senator.

Not once in his career has Sherrod Brown authored and passed legislation to help the lives of Ohioans. In his 22 years as an elected legislator (8 years in the Ohio General Assembly, 14 years in the U.S. House of Representatives), Brown has passed 8 bills into law. The laws authored by Brown in the Ohio General Assembly dealt with the following subjects: a conveyance of land to the City of Mansfield, issuance of ID cards to non-licensed drivers, standards for auctioneers, and liability insurance for court employees. Of the four laws authored by Brown during his time in Washington, three aided Taiwan’s participation in health conferences and one re-named a federal building.

To cover his paltry legislative record up, Brown has attempted to tack his name on to dozens of bills he had little or nothing to do with, inventing names for bills he did not work on (e.g. “King-Brown” Medicare law) and in some cases voting against the bills he claims as accomplishments. On top of that, Brown has missed more than 278 votes in the House of Representatives, including votes on funding for 9/11 Commission recommendations, programs that provide services for older Ohioans, and laws that protect Ohio manufacturers from unfair foreign competition.

As Ohio’s Secretary of State, Congressman Brown badly mismanaged his office and placed “party loyalty above his obligations to the citizens of Ohio” – leading voters to throw him out of office in 1990. As Secretary of State, Brown protected wrongdoers in the Statehouse by blocking computerization of lobbying records and refusing to investigate reports that corporate interests were buying votes. Then, he turned a blind eye towards 3 separate drug investigations inside his own office – one into reports of drug dealing in his mailroom, one involving undercover agents making multiple buys of marijuana and cocaine from his staff, and one into the hospitalization of a staff member that consumed marijuana. He even found a bag of illegal drugs under the front seat of his state-owned car.

Brown responded to these scandals by promoting one of his employees targeted in the drug-dealing probes and proposing to take a two month leave of absence overseas, reasoning that his “office was in good enough shape that he could go to Japan.” The job of the Ohio Secretary of State is to enforce Ohio election laws, but when Sherrod Brown was Ohio’s Secretary of State, he abandoned his official duties and traveled twice to the Soviet Union and once to China.

When he ran for Congress two years later, Brown continued his pattern of mismanagement by failing to pay nearly one year’s worth of unemployment taxes until the State of Ohio took legal action against him. After the state filed a lien on his property, Brown took almost two years to pay what he owed, voting in the interim to raise taxes on millions of Ohioans. Then, he compounded his mistake by lying about his failure to pay unemployment in campaign commercials.

As a Congressman, Brown has repeatedly found himself in the minority of his own party on major policy matters including taxes and national security, compiling a voting record rated in “the fringe” of his own party by the nonpartisan National Journal, and to the left of the liberal Dennis Kucinich, according to interest group ratings provided by Americans for Democratic Action.