Restore honesty to Congress; rein in all the free-spenders

As we pointed out in an editorial Sunday, the first step toward cleaning up the corruption in the nation's capital is to encourage congressional ethics committees to establish a standard of zero-tolerance for corruption.
Members of Congress and their staffs must know that if they abuse their positions of trust, they will lose them. And if they break the law, they will go to jail.
But reality is such that standards slip over years, memories of other congressmen sent to jail fade. When Randall "Duke" Cunningham admitted taking bribes of $2.4 million, it was the largest bribery case since several members of Congress were convicted of the crime in the early 1980s. Corruption had become so pervasive then that the FBI set up a sting using undercover agents as Middle Eastern sheiks. Congressmen were caught on camera stuffing wads of money into their pockets.
Memories are short. Those images of the early '80s were supplanted by images of the early '90s, when Newt Gingrich promised a cleaner, more responsive Congress. And those images were replaced in the early 2000s by Tom DeLay's arrogance and Jack Abramoff's contempt for propriety, the law and even for the people from whom he was taking millions of dollars.
So after the ethics committees are restored to their rightful places as gatekeepers, what then?
Lobbyists are obviously the conduit through which money and favors find their way to members of Congress. But lobbyists -- not by name, but by function -- enjoy the protection of the Constitution. It's there in the First Amendment, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion -- the right to petition the government for redress of grievances is assured.
Lobbying can't be outlawed, but it can -- and should -- be controlled. Likewise, campaign contributions can't be outlawed, but they can and should be controlled.
Out of control
If they are not, the nation will suffer under more legislative aberrations such as the Medicare Plan B pharmaceutical coverage, which was passed in the Senate based on administration lies about the projected cost and rammed through the House by way of an unprecedented three-hour vote and strong-arm tactics. The greatest beneficiary of the law was the pharmaceutical industry, which not only gave millions of dollars in political contributions to legislators, but within months of passage hired the committee chairman who pushed the bill. He resigned from Congress to take a new $2 million job.
The revolving door between Congress -- members and staff -- and the lobbying industry must be locked.
Free travel must be controlled. Congressmen must travel, they must have a sense of the country and the world. But surely members of Congress should not have to hitchhike rides on the private jets of special interest groups. The United States of America pays for its president, vice president, Cabinet members and thousands of bureaucrats to make necessary trips. It can pay for the legitimate travel of members of the House and Senate.
There is no reason for members of Congress to accept meals or gifts or other freebies. At the very least there should be stringent limits and reporting requirements.
Congress must also ban "dead of night" insertions in bills and require a waiting period between the time a bill emerges from committee and the final vote, to give members a chance to read what they're voting on. Otherwise, a single congressman has the ability to make and deliver on promises that are worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars -- and that invites corruption.
In retrospect, the Mahoning Valley provides a fascinating insight into how easily Congress slipped into a mode that allowed a House leader to spend the public's money as if it were his own. In 2000, even while U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant was under investigation for bribery, he was able to trade his vote for speaker of the House of Representatives for support of a $26 million appropriation for a convocation center in Youngstown. Traficant, a Democrat, promised to vote for Dennis Hastert, a Republican, as House speaker. In exchange, Hastert delivered the $26 million.
No one in the Mahoning Valley was going to complain; we saw it as money the area had coming. But very little was said in Washington about the propriety of Hastert being able to, in effect, buy a congressman's support for a leadership position with $26 million in tax money. Why not? Because members of Congress no longer think of the billions they spend as taxpayer money. They think of it as their own, and they trade it and spend as if it were.
Restoring discipline
Banning "earmarks," special-interest spending provisions added to bills outside the normal appropriations process, would not only eliminate opportunities for members of Congress to curry favor with special interests, it would restore some sense of budget discipline. In the last fiscal year, earmarks such as the infamous $500 million bridge to nowhere in Alaska added more than $27 billion in spending to the budget.
Another way of reining in earmark spending would be to return to "pay-as-you-go." New spending and new tax cuts must be offset with spending cuts and tax increases elsewhere in the budget.
Congress didn't just walk into the ethical abyss, it spent its way there.
Take away the ability for congressmen to spend as they please, and they will become much less valuable to lobbyists with deep-pockets.
The beautiful thing about cleaning up this mess is that doing so will help restore fiscal responsibility to an institution that has been running up trillions of dollars in deficits while taking millions from lobbyists. This has been the best Congress that K Street could buy, and that has to end.