House ethics frenzy
SUBPOENAS RELATING to the Mark Foley case are flying out of the House ethics committee. There hasn't been this much activity since the committee admonished Tom DeLay, who was then the majority leader, for various improprieties in 2004. But these two cases bracket two years of failure to act on any other case of congressional malfeasance. The ethics process is broken and needs to be reinforced by an independent office of investigation.
Foley, who resigned his seat in Congress last week, is beyond the reach of the committee. Its objective ought to be the discovery of the individuals who covered up complaints that he was sending improper e-mails to congressional pages.
Doc Hastings, the Washington Republican who heads the committee, promised a thorough investigation, but one suspect is the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, who moved Hastings into the chairmanship after Joel Hefley, the chairman in 2004, took on DeLay. Anything Hastings does as chairman is suspect because the Republican leadership in the past has been more interested in protecting its power than in penalizing wrongdoing.
Once the Foley story became public, the leadership had to act quickly because of the lurid nature of Foley's communications and the approach of the November elections. But congressmen more readily succumb to avarice than lust in the course of their duties, and on those cases the ethics committee has been quiet -- in a bipartisan way.
In May, it decided to investigate corruption allegations against William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio, long after the US Justice Department had initiated its own probes. Since then, there's been not a word about them from the committee. Ney, who pleaded guilty last month to federal corruption charges, remains a congressman. By not taking action against him, the House is failing in its constitutional duty to judge ``the qualifications of its own members."
Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, have been trying all year to get the House to pass a bill that would create an independent office of public integrity to conduct preliminary investigations and present its findings to the committee. Congress will, as it should, be the ultimate judge of its members, but it needs a nonpartisan office to receive complaints, toss out the frivolous, and pursue those that seem to have merit.
A similar proposal by Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, got only 30 votes in the Senate last March, but the festering Foley scandal ought to force the House to approve the Meehan-Shays bill when it returns for a lame-duck session after the elections.
