Whenever I read a story like this, I think of the time I told a town solicitor that no, he couldn't hire his wife as the borough secretary -- that it was against the state ethics laws. He looked at me, astounded. "If I'm not doing this to give jobs to my friends and family, what's the point?" he asked. And there you have the Republican mindset. Via the New York Times:

Representative Anthony D’Esposito of New York knows well the power of political patronage. Every member of his immediate family has held a town or county job, and as a local official, he routinely helped friends find spots on the government payroll.

Yet even by those standards, Mr. D’Esposito’s hiring decisions since he won a seat in Congress in 2022 have been audacious — and in two cases may have transgressed ethics rules designed to combat nepotism and corruption.

Shortly after taking the oath of office, the first-term congressman hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, eventually bumping her salary to about $3,800 a month, payroll records show.

In April, Mr. D’Esposito added someone even closer to him to his payroll: a woman with whom he was having an affair, according to four people familiar with the relationship. The woman, Devin Faas, collected $2,000 a month for a part-time job in the same district office.

I wonder if it was a no-show job? Oh, and he used to work for the NYPD, which has its own scandals right now.

Mr. D’Esposito, who is facing off against the Democrat Laura Gillen this November, is one of the most politically vulnerable Republicans in the country. Voters in his district, which stretches from the border of Queens east along Long Island’s South Shore, supported President Biden by a 14-point margin in 2020 but swung rightward to elect Mr. D’Esposito in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans have made defending it a top priority. Former President Donald J. Trump even rallied in the district last week.