Congress at odds to the bitter end

WASHINGTON -- The 108th Congress slogged toward an unhappy end yesterday, with leaders trading bitter personal accusations and lawmakers still fighting over stalled legislation in the final hours of the session.

Capping what lawmakers in both major parties say has been one of the most poisonously partisan sessions in recent history, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct issued a scathing four-page letter citing Representative Chris Bell, Democrat of Texas, for violating committee rules by filing a ''speculative" ethics charge against the House Republican leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas.

''This is a serious matter," said the letter, signed by the senior Republican and Democrat on the panel, commonly called the ethics committee. The panel did not recommend any disciplinary action against Bell, a freshman who lost his primary following a GOP-engineered redistricting DeLay backed.

DeLay -- who was sternly admonished by the panel in October on the very matters Bell raised -- cast himself yesterday as the victim and suggested Bell ought to pay his legal fees. ''He acted out of anger at losing his seat in Congress and turned his obsessive rage on me," DeLay said.

Bell said he accepted the ethnic committee's conclusions that he violated rules barring the use of ''innuendo, speculative assertions, or conclusory statements" in his complaint against DeLay. But he said the majority leader was mounting a ''shoot-the-messenger" strategy. Bell said he was worried that the letter might discourage others from filing ethics complaints against their colleagues.

Capitol Hill was also tinged with sadness and frustration yesterday, as lawmakers bid goodbye to their defeated and retiring colleagues and others bemoaned the failure to reach bipartisan agreement on legislation. But the sorrow did not outweigh the strife.

DeLay charged his Democratic counterpart, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, with criminal behavior, saying she had ''broken federal law" when she operated two leadership political action committees. Pelosi was fined $21,000 by the Federal Election Commission for operating the two committees. Her staff said Pelosi had received initial guidance from the FEC that it was permissible to run the two PACs and was fined the relatively small sum after working with the FEC on the matter.

Pelosi, meanwhile, retorted that DeLay was ''delusional," and suggested House GOP moderates lacked the collective spine to hold Delay accountable for his behavior.

''Many of the Republicans who are out there . . . were masquerading at home as moderates and voting here with the right-wing, radical agenda in the Congress of the United States. They got away with it once, but . . . people will see that they're not the moderates they advertise themselves to be at home," Pelosi told reporters yesterday.

Thomas Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota and the Senate minority leader, delivered an emotional last speech on the floor where he has spent 18 years. With only five Republicans present in the chamber, Daschle talked lovingly of his colleagues, his staff, and his constituents.

Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader and a Tennessee Republican who took the unusual step of traveling to South Dakota to help defeat his counterpart, walked onto the floor only after Daschle finished. The display stunned veteran Hill staff members, who noted that in the past, the chairs of the opposing party were filled for departing leaders' speeches and personal tributes were delivered by the other party as well.

''If I would leave this body with one wish, it would be that we never give up the search for common ground," Daschle said, choking up as he spoke. After receiving a standing ovation from his Democratic colleagues, the few Republicans present, and the visitors' gallery above the chamber, Daschle waved and walked out the door.