What Harry Reid did was perfectly legal

A huge fuss has been created because Harry Reid accepted free boxing tickets.  This is part of an effort led by conservative personalities on both talk-radio and Fox News television to try and prove that Congressional Democrats are no less corrupt than their Republican counterparts.  But before we start comparing Harry Reid to Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, let's make sure we know the specifics.

Reid accepted these boxing tickets between 2003 and 2005 courtesy of the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC), which is not a private firm.  The NAC is a state-run wing of the Department of Business and Industry in Nevada, and was created in the year 1941 by the Nevada legislature.  So what we have here is a public agency in Nevada allowing a public official in Nevada to have free access to one of its events.

So why the fuss?  Conservatives raise the point that Reid received those free boxing tickets from the NAC at the same time as the agency was lobbying the U.S. Senate to vote on a measure that would have positively impacted that industry.  So was Reid bought off?  As it turns out, Reid actually voted against the side of NAC anyway -- meaning that Reid's vote was not impacted by the free tickets that they gave him.

Reid, a former boxer himself, has served the NAC as a boxing judge.  Surely the NAC, not to mention just about every government agency, rewards those that serve in the public sector.  This is completely different than Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham, who advanced a system that allowed private firms to manipulate the votes of lawmakers.  While Harry Reid's boxing tickets that he lawfully received from the state were each around one-thousand dollars, Duke Cunningham made an estimated $2 million in bribes from Jack Abramoff's private firm.

See the clear distinction?  Fox News and the rest of the Republican noise machine need to pick their fights more wisely.