Stephanie Mencimer

Reporter

Stephanie works in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. A Utah native and graduate of a crappy public university not worth mentioning, she has spent the last year hanging out with angry white people who occasionally don tricorne hats and come to lunch meetings heavily armed.

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Stephanie covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She is the author of Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. A contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, a former investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and a senior writer at the Washington City Paper, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2004 for a Washington Monthly article about myths surrounding the medical malpractice system. In 2000, she won the Harry Chapin Media award for reporting on poverty and hunger, and her 2010 story in Mother Jones of the collapse of the welfare system in Georgia and elsewhere won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism.

Rep. Dan Burton's Legacy: Lots of Sick Kids

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 31, 2012 12:57 PM PST

Dan Burton is wrong about vaccines and autism. Office of Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.)

So Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) is finally retiring, after two decades in Congress. He's got a notable record of craziness, having doggedly pursued President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal while knowing full well he'd had an affair himself and even fathered a child out of wedlock. He famously claimed to have shot up a "head-like object" (likely a melon or a pumpkin) to try to re-create the alleged "murder" of former Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who committed suicide. But Burton doesn't get enough credit for what may be his lasting legacy: helping turn Americans away from life-saving childhood vaccines.

Burton has said he believes one of his grandchildren became autistic after receiving a childhood vaccination. As a result, he spent many years and lots of congressional resources trying to investigate the alleged link between the two. In 2000, he held a circus-like hearing in which he provided a very high profile platform for the now entirely disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who helped spawn the myth that vaccines cause autism. Wakefield has since lost his medical license for allegedly falsifying the medical histories of the children he claimed had gotten autism from vaccines, among other issues.

As Wakefield's now-discredited, fabricated data started to raise questions in the medical community, Burton defended him, saying in 2002: "Dr. Wakefield, like many scientists who blaze new trails, has been attacked by his own profession. He has been forced out of his position at Royal Free Hospital in England." In 2007, Burton argued that autistic children should be eligible to receive compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, even though there was no evidence of any link between vaccines and autism.

Burton's official endorsement of Wakefield's science has had a wide-ranging impact. He gave high-level approval to an utterly false theory that ended up persuading thousands of American parents not to immunize their kids, leading to a resurgence of a lot of preventable diseases. Whooping cough has surged nationally, largely because of vaccine refusal. In places like California, where lots of parents refused to immunize their kids, whooping cough became epidemic. In 2010, four babies needlessly died as a result. Measles outbreaks are also becoming more common.

So lest people get nostalgic for Burton's good ol' days of shooting up watermelons, keep in mind that his form of kookiness had some very deadly consequences.

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Tea Party Roundup: Birthers, Slaves and Super PACs

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 31, 2012 8:25 AM PST

Photo by Stephanie Mencimer

The tea party movement has been keeping a pretty low profile lately, but that doesn't mean it has disappeared. Tea partiers are still fighting political battles at the local level and gearing up for the presidential election. Here's a brief roundup of recent tea party news you may have missed:

Rewriting US history to white-out slavery: Tennessee tea party activists have asked the state legislature to introduce a bill that would force the state to rewrite school textbooks to excise references to the Founding Fathers that might tarnish the image tea partiers would like to have of them. They don't want school kids to know the founders' uglier side, things like, for example, some of the founders owned slaves, had sex with them, and fathered children with them. In a press conference in mid-January, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the activists handed out materials that said:

Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

Keeping the birther movement alive: Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips may be bankrupt and thousands of dollars in debt to conservative billionaire and Las Vegas hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson, but that hasn't stopped him from going to Florida this week on a Tea Party Express "get out the vote" tour before the GOP primary. Along with his speaking events on the campaign trail, Phillips is doing his part to defeat Obama by supporting a lawsuit filed in Georgia by birther queen Orly Taitz challenging Obama's qualifications to be on the ballot there. Conceding that similar suits in other states have been dismissed, Phillips remains hopeful that they are the key to defeating Obama in November. "These are must win states for Obama. If he were excluded from one or more of these states, it would become almost impossible for Obama to win reelection," writes Phillips.

Still Raising Big Money: For all the talk of the tea party movement being "grassroots," they are certainly taking on some of the trappings of the establishment, namely by starting super-PACs. Two big tea party groups, Tea Party Express and FreedomWorks, have both started super PACs that can accept unlimited contributions to use in independent expenditure campaigns during this year's election. FreedomWorks is hoping to raise $5 million to push its free-market agenda through "street-level politicking."

Of course, whether these two organizations really qualify as the tea party movement is an open question. Tea Party Express was started by GOP political consultants in California who were already been attacking Obama in 2008 with outside expenditures, and FreedomWorks is a spin-off of the oil-rich Koch brothers' Citizens for a Sound Economy, a corporate front group that helped the tobacco and other big industry fight regulation and taxes. They're not purely grassroots organizations.

Koch-Funded Group Paying Tea Partiers to Collect Voters' Personal Info

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Mon Jan. 30, 2012 10:06 AM PST

Tea party activists have long disputed liberal charges that their movement is simply the product of a corporate Astroturf campaign designed to attack President Obama. For the most part, they've been right. But a new effort to recruit members and gather voter data by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, may serve to revive those old claims.

In recent weeks, according to the Florida-based conservative news outlet Sunshine State News, AFP has been quietly hiring tea party leaders to serve as "field coordinators" in Florida, leading up to Tuesday's GOP primary and beyond, reportedly paying them $30,000 each to help beef up AFP's membership. AFP has also offered tea party groups $2 for every new AFP member their volunteers sign up at Florida polling stations on Tuesday. An email from the West Orlando Tea Party organizers to its members explains:

Americans For Prosperity has offered many local tea party groups an opportunity to collect a few dollar$ for our cause and it revolves around the January 31st primary. Anyone who volunteers from our group will net our WOTP group $2 for every person they "sign up" for AFP which involves getting the name, address, and email of local voters at local polling stations that day. They will provide us with T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other handouts to recruit like minded conservatives.

(The person answering the contact phone number for the West Orlando Tea Party hung up when I called Monday to inquire about the AFP offer.)

The AFP effort in Florida is being spearheaded by Slade O'Brien, AFP's Florida director. O'Brien is a political consultant whose former* firm, Florida Strategies Group, specialized in Astroturf campaigns and "grass-tops lobbying." His clients have included big drug companies, Home Depot, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, and other big business groups. O'Brien's ties to the Kochs go back to at least the late 1990s, when he served as the Florida director for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a forerunner to Americans for Prosperity.

The bounty-hunting aspect of AFP's membership drive and its focus on recruiting tea party activists to do the groundwork has rankled some of the state's grassroots conservative activists, who tend to prize their independence. Activists have expressed concerns about what AFP plans to do with the information it collects, which they believe may be sold to political campaigns for years to come. AFP's membership drive certainly looks like a concrete expression of the Koch brothers stated intention to steer more than $200 million to conservative groups ahead of the fall presidential election. And the oil company magnates have been working for nearly two years on creating a massive conservative voter database dubbed "Themis" to help influence elections and get out the conservative vote in various campaigns. The Florida AFP membership drive would definitely fit with those plans.

O'Brien deferred questions about Themis to the AFP national office, which didn't return a call for comment. But O'Brien defended the tea party outreach effort. He says it's simply an effort to bolster AFP's membership rolls, and one that will mutually benefit like-minded "patriot" groups and also "puts money back into heart and soul of the movement." O'Brien says that none of the voter data collected by the volunteers will be sold.

Even so, the tea partiers on the ground may not be so amenable to serving as AFP's foot soldiers. Even the former Florida field coordinator for AFP, Apryl Marie Fogel, has criticized the initiative. "Incentivizing people with money is no different than what ACORN or other groups are doing," she told Sunshine State News, comparing the process to "Astroturf." "This is the opposite of what AFP stands for."

O'Brien disagrees. "There’s not a single tea party leader who has approached me and said, 'I think this is a bad idea.'"

* Correction: O'Brien left his firm when he became AFP's Florida director. The original version of this post indicated he was still with the company. We regret the error.

Another Reason To Be Glad Rick Perry Won't Be President

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Thu Jan. 26, 2012 12:08 PM PST

Texas governor Rick Perry. Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Woe is the injured consumer or medical patient in Texas who brings a lawsuit against a big corporation or the government. A new report out from the nonprofit advocacy group Texas Watch has taken a hard look at more than 600 decisions by the Texas Supreme Court over the past decade and found that consumers and plaintiffs are routinely taking it on the chin. And consumers are losing far more often in the court than they were before short-lived GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry became governor.

Since 2005, consumers have lost nearly 80 percent of Texas Supreme Court cases in which a consumer was pitted against a big corporation or the government. Most of the time, the consumer plaintiffs had already prevailed before a jury—the high court overturned jury verdicts in 74 percent of consumer cases, with very little dissent.

Texas Watch attributes the massive scale-tilting to the fact that the court is now dominated by judges who were appointed by Perry starting in 2000. Six of the nine judges on the all-Republican court were initially appointed by Perry. In Texas, the judges are elected, but when a vacancy occurs, a governor can appoint a judge to fill out the remaining term, a move that all but guarantees the judge will prevail in the general election. And in Texas, Republican judges who've wanted to retire have often done so mid-term, allowing Perry to appoint their replacements.

Plaintiffs never did all that well in Texas courts compared with the big companies they were suing, but once Perry took office, the little guy's odds got even worse. See this:

Texas WatchThe trend doesn't help the case of those who suggest the solution to the influence of money in judicial elections is to have appointed judges. The data also don't reflect the fact that since 2003, simply getting a plaintiff's case into court in Texas has become far more difficult, especially in medical malpractice cases. Changes in state tort laws have kept thousands of consumers and injured patients out of court all together. According to the most recent data from the National Center on State Courts, in 2008 (the most recent year available), there were 10,000 fewer tort cases filed in Texas than in 1999. Those numbers fell even though the population of Texas jumped 20 percent over the past decade.

The decisions made by the Texas Supreme Court in individual consumer cases have wide reach. In one case highlighted by Texas Watch, the court essentially ruled that the state does not have the authority to pass laws creating stricter consumer protections than those that exist at the federal level—a remarkable opinion in a state that is openly hostile to the federal government's rule of law.

The trend doesn't look to end any time soon, Texas Watch notes gloomily:

Justices that Governor Perry has appointed to the bench, and who were subsequently elected, have relentlessly and recklessly pursued an activist ideological agenda focused on immunity for corporate and state wrongdoers, subverting the rule of law from within and effectively turning the granite walls of the court into a mausoleum for plaintiffs.

The GOP's Unhappy Campers

Congressional Republicans convene a hearing on why the National Park Service won't tell Occupy DC to take hike.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 24, 2012 2:58 PM PST

Are the people living on the spit of grass at McPherson Square, under the banner of Occupy DC, protesters or merely "campers"? It's an important distinction. The National Park Service can tell campers to take a hike, but must allow protesters to exercise their First Amendment rights.

On Tuesday, House Republicans held a hearing designed to investigate the decision to "allow indefinite camping in the park," where occupiers have been, er, camped out since October.

They hauled in members of the DC government, including police chief Cathy Lanier and Department of Health director Mohammad Akhter, to help make their case that the park service has improperly given the occupiers license to do what other citizens can't—namely, pitch a tent on federal space for as long as they wish.

Officially, the hearing had been prompted by health concerns at the park, including rat-infested tents, fire risks, and, in one troubling case, a 13-month-old child who'd been abandoned in a tent. But the proceedings quickly turned into a debate over the definition of "camping." The hearing's primary punching bag was the director of the National Park Service, Jonathan Jarvis, whose agency has jurisdiction over the small park in the middle of downtown DC. GOP lawmakers needled him, insisting that he parse the difference between holding a vigil and simply camping.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked if he could tell his constituents back home that they are welcome to come to DC and pitch a tent wherever they please. Or, he wondered, would members of the US Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses, folks on the other side of the Occupy fight, also be allowed to make camp in McPherson Square?

"Are there certain constitutionally protected forms of sleeping, or have you engaged in selective prosecution?" Gowdy wondered.

But Jarvis was an unexpectedly forceful First Amendment champion. He repeatedly told his inquisitors that his job was simply to protect the free speech rights of the protesters. Absent an emergency, he said, the Occupy protesters must be allowed to stay in the park.

[Read the full article]

Herman Cain Returns!

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 17, 2012 9:54 AM PST

After dropping out of the presidential race in November amidst an avalanche of sexual harassment allegations, Herman Cain has reemerged from his self-imposed exile. On Friday, he appeared on Bill Maher's HBO show, giving one of the first TV interviews since suspending his campaign. (Cain told Maher that Americans need to "lighten up.") He recently announced that he was planning to tour the country in support for his "9-9-9" tax plan. And now, Cain is scheduled to headline a "grassroots" rally on January 28 for congressional candidate and conservative talk show host Martha Zoller, who's running for a seat in Georgia's 9th district. In a press release announcing Cain's appearance, Zoller said:

We are thrilled to have Herman Cain join us in Gainesville for this important and timely rally. Like Herman, I believe that we need to completely transform the U.S. Tax Code, restore common sense and accountability in government, and end 'business as usual' in Washington. It is an honor to have Herman support my campaign for Congress and I look forward to sharing the stage with such a remarkable leader again.

Cain's resurrection is another sign that sex scandals need not be a career-ender. (See Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Sen. "Diaper Dave" Vitter (R-La.), and...well, OK, maybe not former Idaho senator Larry Craig.) But Cain's timing is exceptionally good. His return to the political spotlight comes just as comedian Steven Colbert's SuperPac has started running ads urging voters to cast ballots for Cain in South Carolina's GOP primary. (Despite suspending his candidacy, Cain is still on the South Carolina primary ballot.) The Colbert ads may be a spoof, but as Zoller's embrace of Cain indicates, he still has some extremely loyal followers, many of whom refuse to believe any of the stories about his alleged sexual improprieties. Who knows? Maybe Colbert will manage to fully rehabilitate Cain by boosting his prospects in a primary he's not really even trying to win. You can watch the Colbert ad here:

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Go Ahead, Make Mark Meckler's Day

How the tea party leader accidentally became a gun rights poster boy.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Jan. 13, 2012 3:05 AM PST

As a leader of the Tea Party Patriots, Mark Meckler has settled into a role as the public face of this movement of irate conservatives. But in New York last month, he accidentally became the poster boy for another group of feisty activists, thanks to his arrest on felony gun charges.

En route to California in December, Meckler attempted to check in a handgun and several cartridges of ammo at New York's La Guardia airport. He was arrested on the spot and charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. The tea party leader had a California permit to carry a concealed weapon, but it isn't valid in New York. Meckler, who was back in court this week, faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

When he was released from jail, Meckler actually ran away from reporters, sprinting across Queens' notorious "Boulevard of Death" rather than use the opportunity to, say, decry New York's strict gun laws. But that hasn't kept gun groups and other conservative activists from using his case to continue lobbying to weaken the state laws like those Meckler violated in New York.

Gun activists persuaded the House in November to pass a law that would require states like New York to recognize concealed-carry weapons permits issued by other states. A similar version will be taken up in the Senate this year, making Meckler's timing impeccable. Gun activists have pointed to his arrest as an example of why such a law is needed to protect honest citizens from ridiculous arrests for possessing a gun that's legal in their home states.

While its laws have come under heavy fire after Meckler's arrest, New York City's strict gun laws have actually helped keep the city's residents far safer than in places with laxer regulations. New York is one of nine states that doesn't recognize out-of-state concealed carry permits.

"New York's strong gun laws save lives," says Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center. "Congress should be working to pass federal gun laws that mirror New York's instead of undercutting their effectiveness."

[Read the full article]

GOP Candidates Promise to Revive War on Porn

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 10, 2012 11:24 AM PST

Aquir/Shutterstock

Oh thank God. Three of the leading contenders for the GOP presidential nomination have come out strong—against porn.

The nation's men may be suffering from high rates of unemployment, but Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have pledged to ensure that those men aren't spending their involuntary down time surfing the web for smut. All three have pledged that if elected, they will revive intensive federal prosecutorial efforts to enforce the nation's obscenity laws.

The nonprofit Morality in Media has been hounding GOP candidates since October to go on the record with their positions on porn, in part because the group and its allies in the evangelical community are deeply unhappy with the Obama administration on this front. They believe that Obama has abandoned the nation's women to exploitation and even trafficking by disbanding a Justice Department obscenity task force and failing to initiate a single new obscenity prosecution since Obama was inaugurated. MIM didn't have to work hard, it seems, to get a couple of GOP candidates to go on the record against all things X-rated (especially the leading prude of the field, Santorum). After all, what candidate is going to run on a pro-porn platform?

But enforcing obscenity laws is a lot harder than the MIM pledge makes it sound. For all the fury the group has leveled at the Obama administration for failing to go after pornographers, it has also failed to acknowledge that many of the obscenity prosecutions begun during the last Bush administration were a huge bust. Obscenity prosecutions tend to create thorny First Amendment problems that prosecutors would generally rather avoid. Meanwhile, MIM hasn't noted the hypocrisy rooted in Gingrich's promise to enforce obscenity laws. The former House speaker is partly responsible for enabling the explosion of online porn, thanks to his successful opposition to a 1995 Internet censorship law introduced in Congress.

Nonetheless, Patrick Trueman, the president of MIM and the former chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at DOJ during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, issued a statement congratulating the GOP candidates for taking a stand. "Vigorous prosecution of those who violate our nation's obscenity laws is critical now," Trueman said. "Our nation is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography that is readily available—even to children on the Internet and in other venues. Addiction among adults and even children is now widespread. Pornography is a common cause of the destruction of marriage. It leads to misogyny and violence against women and is a contributing factor in sexual trafficking."

Rick Santorum's Big, Anti-Gay Ally

The National Organization for Marriage boosted the former senator's presidential campaign in Iowa. It could do the same in New Hampshire.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Tue Jan. 10, 2012 3:00 AM PST

2012 GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum

When Rick Santorum suddenly surged in the polls in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses, his rising popularity owed in part to a last-minute super-PAC ad buy that helped get his mug on the airwaves. But Santorum also got another boost from one of his anti-gay allies, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which hammered one of the ex-senator's main rivals—Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian from Texas.

Now the group is angling for a replay in New Hampshire, where it has already been waging a contentious battle to repeal the state's popular same-sex marriage law. (The state Legislature could vote on whether to repeal the law any day now.) NOM announced Monday that it plans to run a $50,000 independent-expenditure campaign against Paul in the hours before the crucial Tuesday primary. The group started running TV ads online on Friday and calling voters across the state to fill them in on Paul's failure to adequately oppose gay marriage.

NOM has tried this strategy before, in advance of last week's Iowa caucuses. Paul was rising in the Iowa polls until mid-December, when he became the subject of a major negative TV ad campaign paid for by NOM. Starting on December 28, the group spent about $80,000 on ads hammering Paul for being the only major GOP presidential candidate who had failed to sign its pledge to oppose same-sex marriage. It also launched a website called wrongonmarriage.com, which highlighted Paul's past statements opposing a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, as well his comments supporting the right of gays to marry.

NOM's ad campaign may have been a key part of Santorum's success. To the evangelical activists who dominate the Iowa caucuses, gay marriage is a line-in-the-sand issue. Paul clearly didn't pass the litmus test: Despite his claims of being personally opposed to homosexuality, he believes the states should have the right to make same-sex marriage legal. NOM made sure voters knew about that.

Whether NOM's New Hampshire effort will benefit Santorum as much as it did in Iowa is an open question. New Hampshire's GOP primary voters are far less socially conservative than those in Iowa. Granite State voters have booed Santorum for his gay-marriage views, and Paul is running much farther ahead in the polls there than Santorum. Still, NOM's attack on Paul certainly can't hurt Santorum, whose campaign has still remained badly underfunded compared with his competitors.

Santorum has a long history with NOM, the group behind ballot initiatives across the country attempting to ban gay marriage, including California's Proposition 8 measure. One of NOM's staunchest supporters, Santorum has frequently fundraised for the group in the past. (Santorum and group's president, Brian Brown, also reportedly attend the same Catholic church in Virginia.)

NOM board member Neil Corkery was a loyal Santorum campaign donor when he was in Congress. And when Santorum was gearing up to run for president in the summer of 2010, NOM helped introduce him to voters in the critical state of Iowa. That year, Santorum headlined NOM's "Judge Bus" tour, traveling the state in a successful effort to persuade Iowa voters to eject three state supreme court justices who in 2009 overturned a state ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional. (All three judges lost the election.)

It's no surprise, then, that NOM was pleased with the outcome of the Iowa caucuses. While the nonprofit group's tax-exempt status prevents it from explicitly endorsing a candidate, Maggie Gallagher, the group's cofounder, gushed on NOM's blog that Santorum was a "Catholic hero." Following his speech on Tuesday, she wrote:

Rick Santorum gave a magnificent speech tonight. It was an expression, a flowering in a way I do not think America has seen in my lifetime of Catholic culture. He made his economic message more than a question of self-interest—he made it a moral cause. He connected the dignity of every human life, with the dignity not only of work, but every human being who is made in the image of his Creator to be a creator—a worker, and not just a consumer.

God bless him, God bless him. This is a serious fight.

[Read the full article]

Rick Santorum's School Scandal

How the public-school-loathing GOP candidate used Pennsylvania's taxpayer dollars to school his kids in Virginia.

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Jan. 4, 2012 1:00 PM PST

Thanks to his surprising surge, which brought him within eight votes of winning the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum is the candidate du jour. With his front-runner status is bound to come a new level of scrutiny directed at his track record and positions. One place to start is his stance on public education, of which the former Pennsylvania senator is not a big fan. As he said while campaigning in New Hampshire back in March, when no one was taking him seriously as a candidate: "Just call them what they are. Public schools? That's a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools."

Santorum has campaigned on the fact that his seven kids have been home-schooled, which has earned him a loyal following of foot soldiers within the evangelical movement. (The same goes for Rep. Michele Bachmann, who on Tuesday dropped out of the presidential race.) Over the past year, Santorum has appeared at a handful of home-schooling conferences. In April, he won the Home School Legal Defense Association's straw poll. There's even a "Homeschoolers for Santorum" Facebook page.

But Santorum wasn't always so opposed to government-run schools—especially one Pennsylvania cyber charter school that offered students free computers, internet service, and online classes. Between 2001 and 2004, that online school allowed the Santorum family to live in Virginia, while sticking Pennsylvania taxpayers with a $100,000 bill.

In 2004, Santorum spawned a minor scandal when news broke that he was no longer residing in the state that sent him to Congress and was living instead outside the Beltway in Leesburg, Virginia. Santorum owned, and still does, a house in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, next door to his in-laws. The Santorums bought the three-bedroom house in 1997 for $87,800. But after Santorum got elected to the Senate in 1994, he bought a much larger home in Virginia that would accommodate his ever-growing family. Some relatives moved into the Penn Hills house, but Santorum continued to use it to claim residency in Pennsylvania, where he voted by absentee ballot.

[Read the full article]