House Republicans Dump Inconvenient Ethics Rule
Published on Monday, November 22, 2004 by the Boulder Daily Camera
Arrogance of Power -
House Republicans Dump Inconvenient Ethics Rule
Editorial
When a congressional ethics rule poses an awkward problem for a legislative
leader and his political party, what is the appropriate response?
Republicans in the House of Representatives — fresh from an election in which their party sold itself to the electorate as a guardian of moral clarity and high principle — have delivered their unequivocal answer: Heck, just get rid of the rule.
The House Republicans went behind closed doors last week and voted to repeal a party rule barring any member from holding a leadership position while under indictment. The move was designed to protect their majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, who seems to regard ethics rules as annoying impediments to the exercise of political power.
DeLay has been cited three times this year by the House Ethics Committee for assorted violations, and more serious charges may lie ahead. Ronnie Earle, district attorney of Travis County, Tex., has indicted three of DeLay's political allies on charges of using corporate money illegally to aid Republican candidates for the state Legislature in 2002.
The candidates won, and their victories had national implications. With added clout in the Texas Legislature, the Republicans were able to push through a redistricting plan that helped the party lock up five additional seats and fatten its majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
DeLay remains under investigation. It's not clear that he'll face indictment, but the mere possibility was enough to induce a mass retreat from principle in GOP ranks.
Republicans adopted the ethics rule 11 years ago to underscore their discontent — and their differences — with the Democrats. After almost half a century in control of Congress, several Democratic leaders ran into legal and ethical problems for misuse of political power, and it wasn't hard for their political opponents to paint the entire Democratic party as arbirtary and arrogant. The Republicans adopted the ethics rule to dramatize their own higher standards.
As it turns out, Republicans are as vulnerable as Democrats or anyone else to a basic law of politics: Power tends to corrupt. With the Republicans now firmly entrenched as a congressional majority, their ethics rule has become disposable and their rhetoric is straight out of the Clinton era. Now it's Tom DeLay who laments "the politics of personal destruction, with me as a target." Now it's Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Tex., who sponsored the resolution to dump the ethics rule (and whose own seat became more secure after the Texas redistricting), insisting that his move is designed only to protect public servants against "crackpot" prosecutors.
House Republicans seem completely oblivious to the message they sent with their actions last week, so we call on a conservative, political columnist John Podhoretz, to explain it. "The message it sends is this: Party, not principle. And that is a terrible message, because when parties sacrifice principle for power, they begin to eat away at their own legitimacy."
The Republicans stood for a principle when they adopted the ethics rule in 1993. They stood only for themselves and their own power when they repealed it last week.
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