Senate balks at ethics watchdog agency

WASHINGTON -- A key Senate committee yesterday scuttled a proposal to establish an independent watchdog agency that would enforce ethics rules on members of Congress, dealing a severe blow to efforts to beef up oversight following a series of high-profile scandals.

The bipartisan plan to create an Office of Public Integrity -- sponsored by Senators Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut -- was viewed as perhaps the best chance to overhaul ethics enforcement after the multimillion-dollar bribery conviction of Representative Randy ''Duke" Cunningham and the influence-peddling scandal surrounding former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

But both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee balked at the proposal, voting, 11 to 5, to remove it from a broader measure that aims to overhaul lobbying laws.

The decisive vote means that ethics committees made up of House and Senate members, which meet in secret and rarely dole out severe punishments, will continue to enforce the rules. Proponents of farther-reaching changes said that leaving judgment in the hands of lawmakers' colleagues could render any future changes essentially meaningless.

''We can pass all the ethics reforms we want -- gift bans, travel bans, lobbying restrictions -- but none of them will make a significant difference if there isn't a nonpartisan, independent office that will help us enforce those laws," said Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is leading his party's efforts to revise lobbying and ethics regulations.

Collins and Lieberman, the chairman and ranking Democrat of the committee that oversees government affairs, pitched an independent office as the only way to establish an enforcement system that is above reproach.

Their proposal called for Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate to create the integrity office, then choose an independent enforcement chief to investigate allegations of misconduct. The House and Senate ethics committees would have the power to overrule the office's recommendations regarding misconduct.

Still, several senators said they feared the office would add bureaucracy and cost -- estimated at about $2 million a year -- while duplicating the tasks of the House and Senate ethics committees. Others warned of the potential for political challengers to file unfounded charges against incumbents.

Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said such an office ''adds another dimension of political tools to opponents" and would probably not be able to operate with the same level of secrecy as the congressional ethics committees. Senator Mark Dayton, a Minnesota Democrat, said that creating an independent enforcement office ''makes a statement [to voters] which I think is totally incorrect: that this body of 100 senators is so institutionally and individually corrupt that it cannot be trusted to police its own."

But some watchdog groups point to the Cunningham and Abramoff scandals as evidence of shortcomings in the current ethics process. Though few have suggested problems with the Senate Ethics Committee, its House counterpart hasn't launched a single investigation in the 2005-2006 congressional term, despite some of the most serious allegations of misconduct in years.

The House Ethics Committee spent all of last year locked in partisan bickering and has only in recent weeks pronounced itself ready to consider complaints against members. The standoff occurred after Republican leaders ousted the last chairman, Joel Hefley, Republican of Colorado, following a series of formal admonishments his committee issued against Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas and the House majority leader at the time.

Even when the process is functioning, members can't escape the perception that Congress is ''inherently conflicted," Collins said. ''We are our own investigators, we are our own prosecutors, we are our own judges, we are our own juries."

Public interest groups wanted lawmakers to go ever farther than the Collins-Lieberman proposal; Obama and some Senate Democrats want a watchdog agency with fewer congressional checks over its operation. Proposals similar to the Collins-Lieberman bill have been filed by Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and two House members: Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Lowell, and Representative Christopher H. Shays, Republican of Connecticut.

Backers of an independent office say they will keep working to include their provision in the bill, though they acknowledged that the votes will be hard to find.

Without tougher enforcement, the legislative response to the Cunningham and Abramoff scandals probably will focus almost exclusively on increased disclosure by lobbyists and tighter controls on privately funded travel for lawmakers. The final legislative packages will take shape in the coming weeks, when House and Senate leaders are expected to cobble together a raft of sometimes conflicting proposals.

''There must be a measure of independence" on ethics enforcement, said Joan Claybrook, president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. Anything short of that, she said, leaves overhaul efforts ''crippled."