Lawmakers call Trump's taxpayer ads 'plainly illegal,' so his PAC pays for the identical ads

…(cont) That was also the day the obituary got its cause. House Democrats Jamie Raskin and George Whitesides sent a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate ads that House Democrats, in a separate statement, called the president's "narcissistic ego trips" — paid for, the complaint noted, by the people being asked to watch them. The Guardian's sourcing called the practice "plainly illegal." Nobody in either party, as far as the wire can tell, called it legal.

Preceded in death, by one week, by the warning from its own party. Survived by a Trump super PAC, which announced Monday it will now pay for the same ad blitz the Treasury can no longer touch — the message unchanged, the audience unchanged, the only thing that moved was the name on the check.

This is how a funding practice dies in this town: not forced out by a ruling or a vote, but quietly relocated the moment the number of people willing to ask where the money came from reached a number nobody wanted to answer for. The ads will keep running. The malarkey continues; only the ledger changed hands.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners direct the GAO's investigation to the super PAC's filings too, since the message it is buying was never really about who signed the check.