Chris Van Hollen of the DCCC is not thrilled about the party-switching of Parker Griffith to the Republican caucus. In fact, he wants the party’s money back:

The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said that Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Ala.) should return the money the DCCC invested in his campaign.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of the DCCC, said that Griffith, who announced Tuesday he will switch parties to become a Republican, “has a duty and responsibility” to return to Democrats the financial resources they invested in Griffith.

“House Democratic Members and the [DCCC] took Parker Griffith at his word and, as a result, invested a great deal in working with Alabamans to bring Mr. Griffith to Congress,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “We were committed to helping Mr. Griffith deliver for his constituents and successfully helped Mr. Griffith fend off the personal attacks against him from the far right.”

“Mr. Griffith, failing to honor our commitment to him, has a duty and responsibility to return to Democratic Members and the DCCC the financial resources that were invested in him,” Van Hollen added.

The DCCC has spent over $560,000 on Griffth as of mid-July, according to OpenSecrets.org.

This is somewhat of a lowball number. The $560,000 represents the money given to Griffith from the DCCC this cycle. Last cycle they provided him with $1,050,042, enabling him to win his 2008 election by four points. Griffith then promptly voted against Democrats on practically their entire agenda, including the stimulus, health care, climate and energy legislation, financial reform, cramdown, the budget and equal pay for women, and then changed parties within less than a year.

It’s important to note that this investment in Griffith ranked him 38th among all Democrats in largesse from the DCCC in 2008. Many solid Democratic incumbents, like Carol Shea-Porter ($2.4 million), and progressive challengers like Darcy Burner ($1.6 million) and Dan Seals ($2.03 million), received more. But that $1 million dollar investment clearly would have been better served on other races which weren’t even on the radar of the DCCC in 2008.

A good case in point is in Riverside County, California. Bill Hedrick challenged incumbent Republican Ken Calvert in a district won by President Obama. He received no support from the DCCC or any other national group and he spent less than $200,000 on his campaign. But he came within 6,100 votes of unseating Calvert, who had a raft of ethical issues in a district trending toward Democrats.

I asked Hedrick, an antiwar progressive who is running again against Calvert, if he could have used a sliver of that money sunk into Parker Griffith. He replied:

We spent $191,000 in a district thought unwinnable by the DCCC. We had 900 volunteers, and the truth is that if we’d had $40,000 more, we could have won the 44th District. In the end, we needed to flip 3100 votes–and could have done so–if anyone had looked closely at the region and directed 1/25 of the resources lavished on Mr. Griffith.

$40,000. And there are probably a half-dozen stories like this across the country, of races separated by a few percentage points that would have benefited from the investment. (Bill Durston in CA-03 is another.)

I appreciate Van Hollen seeking his money back from Griffith. Hopefully Rahm Emanuel will do the same with the $2,000 donation he gave to him in January. But Van Hollen is lowballing the number owed. And the fact that someone this opposed to the Democratic agenda can get seven figures from the national party, only to betray them within a year, speaks to at best an oversight and at worst a fundamental problem with how the DCCC does business.