Sheldon Silver's Biggest Sin Was What He Did to His Own Neighborhood

The New Republic reports:

So they hauled Sheldon Silver away in handcuffs last month. The longtime Democratic Speaker of the New York State Assembly, quietly one of the most powerful men in one of the country’s most powerful states, has been charged with crimes that were stunning even in the standing sewer of corruption that is the legislature he presided over.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara froze some $4 million in assets belonging to Silver—but that still left Shelly, who Aaron Naparstek, the liberal political advocate (and recently unmasked author of the Fake Sheldon Silver Twitter parody feed) called “a walking human filibuster,” with another $3.4 million in leftover campaign money with which to defend himself. The indictments exposed a dizzying network of connections and schemes through which Silver and his confederates had enriched themselves. He stands accused of looting charities, suborning a Columbia University medical researcher into referring asbestos victims to Silver’s law firm in exchange for state grants, and secretly selling out New Yorkers to developers on issues that included rent laws, mass transit, and more. Suffice it to say that, thanks to Speaker Silver, New Yorkers today pay higher subway fares.

Yet none of it—not the plundered charities or the subway fare hike, or even the hoodwinked asbestos patients—is as bad as a handful of vacant lots in Silver’s district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and what they represent.

The great moments of the Democrat party.