House Republicans offered a deal to Democrats this week to break a partisan standoff on the chamber’s Ethics Committee. They offered to open a committee investigation of Majority Leader Tom DeLay if Democrats would go to work under new committee rules imposed by the GOP.
Democrats have been boycotting the committee. They say the new rules are designed to protect House members from ethical scrutiny. So it was no surprise that they rejected this deal. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) labeled it a “charade.”
A charade? Not exactly. Republicans said they acted in good faith in offering to get to the bottom of allegations against DeLay concerning his dealings with lobbyists and other issues.
But this was, in effect, a GOP effort to negotiate the terms of an ethics investigation. The ethical standards and expectations of the House should not be subject to dealmaking. Republicans still haven’t come to grips with that.
The decision to weaken the Ethics Committee rules in the midst of all the questions surrounding DeLay is turning into a political disaster for the Republicans.
Here’s what they did. In January, the House adopted a measure that seemed designed to curtail investigations. It said that a majority vote of the committee would be required to launch an ethics investigation. Since the committee membership consists of five Republicans and five Democrats, either party could block an investigation of one of its members. A case would be dismissed if a majority didn’t vote for an investigation within 45 days.
Democrats charge the changes were made to protect DeLay, and they have kept up the attack during months of stalemate.
The Republicans finally countered. Ethics Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) offered to extend to three months the time period to consider an investigation and establish that no investigation could be dismissed without a vote of the committee. Hastings and three Republican colleagues also said they were willing to open an investigation of DeLay.
Close, but not good enough. If the Republicans want to stop the slow bleeding, they’ll go back to the old committee rules and let the group do its work.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert suggested that Democrats had another motive for their boycott of the Ethics Committee. He said there were “four or five cases out there dealing with top-level Democrats.”
Is that bluster, or is Hastert on to something? We’re only going to find out if the Ethics Committee has the power to investigate, under rules that don’t permit either party to stand in its way.
