Since winning both houses of Congress and the White House in November, Republicans could be forgiven for being a little eager to flex their political muscle. After the election, the media attention winds down and the subject of politics leaves the dinner table for the dustbin of memory. Until the next presidential election comes along to remind us- it is easy to forget- that we do, in fact, decide the leader of the free world.
It is this distance of time, then, that Congressional Republicans must have been counting on when they decided to sack the chairman of the House Ethics Committee and replace two of its members with those less likely to cause trouble.
The controversy centers on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tx.), who was reprimanded by the same ethics committee three times before last year’s election. He is also currently the target of a grand jury investigation in Texas involving charges that he may have used illegal campaign contributions to win re-election.
Before public outcry caused them to reverse their decision, Republicans tried to change the rules so that a grand jury indictment against DeLay would not require him to resign his position as leader (surprise, surprise, a similar bill has been introduced in the Texas legislature to try to end the investigation against DeLay altogether).
Another rules change that was left standing makes it harder to launch an ethics inquiry to begin with and changes the committee’s bipartisan nature. The ethics committee has an equal number of Republicans and Democrats. In the past, when an ethics complaint was before the committee and it was deadlocked for whatever reason an investigation would proceed regardless.
Now that is no longer the case- a majority vote is required. In other words, if a party doesn’t like what’s being investigated, the investigation ends. Where an investigation could once proceed in spite of partisan gridlock it can now end because of it, leaving ethical questions unanswered.
And get this: the two committee members slated to replace the ones who were dismissed were actual contributors to DeLay’s legal defense fund, according to the Washington Post, putting them in a direct conflict of interest. The official excuse is that the original members’ terms were set to expire, but the Speaker of the House can and does easily and regularly extend their tenure. He did not extend this courtesy to the dismissed committee members and chairman.
Why haven’t you heard about all this in the news? Part of the problem, according to a Feb. 5 article in the Washington Post, is that Republicans regularly wait until after 8 p.m. to release the information, so that by the time it makes it in the next day’s newspaper it’s old news. They use the news cycle against the press to keep unpopular information from becoming too exposed.
Apparently House Republicans want to use their power to protect their majority leader at all costs. They must not want a repeat of the demise of Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was Senate Majority Leader until he expressed regret at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in 2002 that Thurmond was never elected president – which would have been fine, except he ran on a pro-segregation, states’ rights platform.
Changing the makeup of the House Ethics Committee to protect the majority leader is an attack on the principles of good government. We rely on the integrity of our elected officials to represent us while in office, and a strongly independent and bipartisan ethics committee is the best way to ensure that integrity. Changing the rules for the convenience of the moment can only set a dangerous precedent. Making it harder to pursue ethics inquiries now can hinder future efforts to keep our politicians accountable.
The irony of all this is that Republicans were themselves the ones who created the ethics committee in the first place upon taking power in 1994 in the name of rooting out government corruption.
How times have changed.