It's All OK if You're a Democrat

El Paso Port of Entry Port Director Beverly Good, right, greets U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke after he finishes the Run International U.S.-Mexico 10k race at the top of the Paso Del Norte international crossing in El Paso, Texas, Aug. 8, 2016. Nearly 700 runners participated in the event which led them on a course spanning the border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. CBP Photo by Roger Maier

Writing at National Review, Andrew McCarthy explains that if you’re a Democrat with past transgressions like those of Beto O’Rourke, who is running for Senate in Texas, you will be forgiven. (Perhaps Bill Clinton is a more apt analogy given the allegations being hurled at Brett Kavanaugh.) McCarthy writes (abridged):

Representative Beto O’Rourke had a pair of felony arrests in his mid-to-late 20s, including a reckless drunk-driving incident in which he crashed into a car and allegedly tried to flee from the scene. The cases appear to have mysteriously disappeared without serious prosecution, notwithstanding that O’Rourke continues to deny basic facts outlined in at least one police report.

So, what really happened? We don’t know. See, Representative O’Rourke is a Democrat.

Not just that. O’Rourke is the Democrat running for a Senate seat against Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent who is a favorite of grass-roots conservatives. Consequently, the press and Democrats have about as much interest in probing O’Rourke’s checkered past as they do in exploring allegations against Keith Ellison — the hard-Left Minnesota congressman, attorney-general candidate, and deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who has been accused of physically abusing his longtime girlfriend.

The drunk-driving incident is not a one-off, an aberration in an otherwise uneventful early adulthood. About three years before the car crash, O’Rourke was arrested for allegedly burglarizing a campus building at the University of Texas at El Paso. He reportedly claimed the incident was a college prank, but he was not a college student at the time.

Both of these potential felony cases against O’Rourke seem to have been dropped. This is strange, particularly given the palpable seriousness of the car crash and alleged attempted flight. The press is remarkably uncurious about the unanswered questions, taking a “nothing to see here” approach to the lack of prosecution.

Interestingly, O’Rourke’s late father, Pat, a longtime political ally of Texas’s Democratic governor Mark White, was a powerful El Paso judge in the mid ’80s, a few years before Beto’s hijinks. In 1983, a condom filled with white powder, suspected to be narcotics, was found in Judge O’Rourke’s car while it was being serviced. But a sheriff-captain, conveniently surmising that Judge O’Rourke must be the target of a frame-up, directed subordinate officers to flush the powder down a toilet.

All in the family? You might say that. In 2010, Charlotte’s Furniture, a longtime O’Rourke family business then run by the congressman’s mother, Melissa, pled guilty to federal money-laundering charges — specifically, to avoiding currency-transaction reporting requirements by structuring $630,000 in payments by a single customer.

Who was the customer, who apparently needed $630,000 worth of furniture? Was the customer involved in laundering money connected to some illicit cash business such as drug trafficking? Why was only the O’Rourke business prosecuted (a $500,000 fine, half of which was suspended), as opposed to the business’s operator(s) or employee(s) who carried out the illegal structuring? We don’t know; the authorities have sealed the relevant records and — well, I’ll be darned — journalists have not been curious enough to investigate.

Meanwhile, as a first-term lawmaker, O’Rourke skirted a 2012 law that barred members of Congress from profiting on initial public offerings of stock based on information not available to the public.

It’ Good to be a Democrat.