Collins reinvents herself — as Kwame defender

Isn’t it amazing how some people are blessed with the ability to avoid near-certain political or social death, re-inventing themselves so they can let loose their bag of tricks in some new venue?

I’m thinking about Barbara-Rose Collins, vaulted into headlines recently when she defended besieged Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick as the majority of her fellow City Council members illegally moved to snub his budget speech.

The council screwed up, by the way, in holding a “round robin” telephone meeting to agree on not hearing the mayor’s talk. Those meetings are illegal under the Michigan Open Meetings Act.

But I doubt concern about legality was on B-R’s mind when she weighed in to support hizzoner.

Continued -Well B-R might want to defend the man under siege. She knows what it feels like. It’s not that long ago that she was nearly disciplined by the normally moribund House Ethics Committee when she was a congresswoman from Detroit.

What she was investigated for doing — and apparently did — was the same thing that got another Detroit congressman — Charles Diggs — indicted, tried, found guilty and sent to prison some years earlier.

What she did doesn’t hold a candle to the apparent transgressions of another and still sitting Detroit congressman, John Conyers Jr.

What Diggs, Conyers and Collins have in common is a habit of forcing their congressional staffers, paid with taxpayer bucks, to do personal services for them. In Diggs’ case, he ordered staffers to work in his family’s funeral home. He paid them their congressional salaries for dressing cadavers and got zapped for mail fraud — filing false payroll documents. In JC’s case, the congressman who first took office in 1965 and rose to be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee abused staffers by making them do political campaigning on office time. He used government office equipment for campaign work and had staffers babysitting his kids and tutoring his wife, Monica Conyers, who aspired to become a lawyer. All done on the taxpayer’s dime. There was once an Ethics Committee investigation, prompted by Detroit Free Press stories reported by me and Free Press Lansing Bureau Chief Chris Christoff.

Like JC, B-R liked to have her congressional staffers do her campaign work. The case against her in the House Ethics Committee was closed in 1997 when she chose not to run for  re-election. A House investigative subcommittee adopted “one count of misuse of official resources — congressional employees regularly performed work for the member’s campaign while on official time.” The committee statement continued, “The campaign work, some of which was performed in the congressional office, included collecting and depositing campaign checks and maintaining campaign financial records.”

The statement concluded: “No further action taken because as of time investigative subcommittee completed work, member was about to depart the House.”

Having sidestepped Diggs’ fate, B-R created a new career on the Detroit council, where she’s recently been prominent defending the malefactor mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.

[Cross-posted at JoelOnTheRoad.com]

Joel Thurtell is a seasoned veteran of the Detroit Free Press and more recently of his own blog, JoelOnTheRoad.com. He is the author of UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER, featuring photos by Patricia Beck, 30-year veteran Free press photographer. UP THE ROUGE is in production now and will be published by Wayne State University Press early in 2009. Joel is also working on his second book, DIRTIEST RIVERS, about the Rouge and other polluted American waterways. You can contact him at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com