Editorial: Ethics get tossed aside

Friday, Jan. 7, 2005 | 9:07 a.m.

This week Republican House leaders overrode Democratic objections and opened the 109th Congress by ramming through a controversial change in ethics rules that will make it harder to investigate members of the House. Now it will take a majority of the ethics committee, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, to investigate an allegation. Previously, an investigation could proceed even if the committee was deadlocked, a safeguard that ensured neither side's members could stick together and block a probe for partisan reasons. As icing on the cake, Republicans also amended a House rule that had previously stated only a spouse or a child could accompany members on a lobbyist-funded trip. The rule has been expanded so that even a relative now can tag along on these junkets. Let's just say that, in light of the public's increasing cynicism abou t politics, the Republicans had a novel way of ringing in the new year.

GOP congressional leaders had hoped that the aforementioned changes might get overlooked because media attention would be focused on their decision not to relax other ethical standards. In a bid at damage control, Republicans junked an internal party rule passed last November -- and designed to insulate House Majority Leader Tom DeLay from an ongoing political corruption probe in Texas -- that would have allowed a Republican leader to keep his post if he were indicted. This week DeLay asked fellow Republicans to get rid of this rule, which had caused a political stir, saying it was necessary to remove from Democrats a potent political issue they could use against the GOP. In addition, the Republican House leadership dropped a plan that would have made it more difficult to publicly reprimand members of the House if their ethical misconduct hadn't violated a specific rule or law. DeLay, once again, has been at the center of this controversy: In the past year he has been admonish! ed three times by the ethics committee for some of his strong-arm tactics, even though none of his actions technically violated a specific House rule or the law. "It would have been the right thing to do (to make the changes to the ethics rules), but it was becoming a distraction," John Feehery, a spokesman for Speaker Dennis Hastert, told the Associated Press.

What Hastert's spokesman and DeLay really are saying is that it wasn't remorse that caused them to discard their plans to weaken some of the ethics rules. No, this was all about trying to quell the political fallout that was occurring. Even with the partial concessions they've made on ethics enforcement, though, it's safe to say that the Republican leaders haven't been able to shake off something that still clings to them -- hubris. Their unchecked arrogance could cause them to overreach yet again, causing the kind of public backlash that they could feel come next election.