U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Image via Wikipedia
From: Judicial Watch
A New Ethics War Brewing in Congress? Don't count on it...
Politico posted an article this week talking about a new "ethics war" brewing in Congress. The point of the piece was that House Republicans are turning up the heat on Democrats by requesting an ethics probe into the relationship between earmarks and campaign contributions – a not-so-subtle jab at leading Democrats such as John Murtha, under fire for his relationship with PMA Group, "a lobby shop raided by federal authorities last year."
It's also a shot at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who filed a dozen resolutions calling for investigations into a number of Republicans when she was in the minority.
But here's a squib from the article that I found most interesting:
The Republicans have stopped short of filing formal complaints against any Democratic member — a move that would require a response by the House ethics committee.
Republicans say they don't want to ignite a full-blown ethics war like the one that dominated the House in the 1990s, but there's another cause for their caution: If they were to file a complaint against Murtha or anyone else, Democrats would retaliate by filing their own complaints against Reps. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) and Don Young (R-Alaska).
Because of this threat of mutually assured destruction, no member has filed a formal ethics complaint against another member since Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) did it to DeLay in 2004 — and he did so only after it was clear that he wouldn't be returning to Congress.
Not one ethics complaint filed by a member in five years! In other words, nothing has really changed. As long as Members of Congress are willing to protect each other (and only use "ethics" to score political points), we will never see any real attempt to hold corrupt members from either party accountable.
And whatever happened to the congressional ethics reform promised by Democrats during the 2006 election cycle? You may recall I testified before a House special task force in 2007 to give my recommendations for the most effective way to clean up corruption in Congress. I was worried at the time that any reforms that made it through Congress would be too watered down to be effective. I was right to be worried. There has been no meaningful ethics reform. Republicans don't want the rules enforced. And neither do Democrats.
The bottom line is this: As long as citizens and outside groups (like Judicial Watch) are prohibited from filing ethics complaints against corrupt members of Congress there will be no true ethics enforcement – no matter which party controls Congress.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=1fe19acb-4695-4f47-8e72-534a175b8f25)
