Concept of ethical behavior is dying in Washington

Concept of ethical behavior is dying in Washington

Last week marks yet another occasion in the U.S. House of Representatives when a nail was pounded in the coffin holding the body of ethical behavior. It will soon be buried and the word ethics will cease to have any practical meaning in the nation’s capital.

The common definition of ethics is a system of moral principles.

The House has a committee that goes by the shorthand name of the ethics committee — its official name is the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. The job of the committee members is to apply to their colleagues in the House a system of moral principles. Chief among those is to serve the interests of the American people above their own interests.

In that light, consider two of the pronouncements to come out of the committee last week.

Murtha etal

In the first, the committee ruled that seven lawmakers who steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm had not violated any rules or laws by also collecting large campaign donations from those contractors.

Try as it might, the committee could find no smoking gun to connect the campaign donations to the action by House members to reward the contributors with earmarked projects. We can only conclude the committee tried with very little might to make the connection.

All the representatives were members of the late John P. Murtha’s defense appropriations subcommittee, all the campaign money came to them from a lobbying group headed by a former Murtha aide and the hundreds of millions of dollars in projects went to clients of the former aide.

“Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member’s actions are being influenced by campaign contributions,” the committee said in a unanimous statement — a rare example of bipartisanship in today’s Washington.

It is going to fall to the Justice Department to get to the bottom of this scandal. Until then, look for the congressmen involved to go around claiming that they’ve been exonerating and acting as if they — not the taxpayers — are the victims.

The Rangel case

In an even more blatant case of gutlessness, the committee declined to find that Rep. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., and five other lawmakers who traveled to conferences at Caribbean resorts that were underwritten by private corporations violated House rules. Once again, ignorance was apparently bliss to the committee. It found no evidence that the members knew that the trips were underwritten by corporations — despite evidence that in Rangel’s case, at least, he had been given three written warnings by members of his own staff. Apparently congressmen have staff to separate the wheat from all the chaff, but men like Rangel are too busy to even read their staff memos.

Rangel is not yet off the hook, though, because even though all the committee gave him was an admonishment, he faces other questions about unpaid taxes. And as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Rangel is going to have a harder time claiming ignorance of tax law.

Some Democrats have begun calling for Rangel to relinquish his chairmanship. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should join that chorus.

Ethics committee myopia is nothing new. It was epidemic during those years that the House was controlled by Republicans. But Democrats should be asking themselves how that worked out for, say, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and his party.