Last week, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and the Dem staff of the House Rules Committee released a pretty damning report, “America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption.” Over 103 pages, Slaughter explored — in considerable detail — all the examples of GOP shenanigans we’ve come to love: the surge in the number of registered lobbyists, the K Street Project, the dysfunctional House Ethics Committee, and outside-the-beltway controversies like the Medicare prescription-drug bill, energy prices, the environment, homeland security, Hurricane Katrina, and defense contractors.
“The culture of corruption has thrived in Republican-controlled Washington because the Republican Congress has intentionally allowed the processes that normally hold our politicians accountable to the American people to completely collapse,” the report said.
House Republicans have responded — by arguing that Slaughter’s report on their corruption is itself corrupt.
The House Republicans’ campaign operation is charging that a recently released Democratic report on Republican corruption violated ethics rules. […]
“It’s a political document through and through. The headline is all you need to know it’s a political document,” said Ed Patru, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). “It’s nothing more than Democrats using official resources to promote political talking points.”
House ethics rules prohibit members of Congress from using official resources to fund campaign activities. Democrats, however, counter that chronicling Republican ethical abuses is well within the rules.
“It is … deeply ironic that the NRCC would have the audacity to suggest that a detailed, fact-based report documenting the collapse of our legislative system would constitute unethical behavior,” Slaughter said in a statement, “while at the same time, top Republican officials … have willingly undermined ethical behavior in our House.”
The irony is rich. Substantively, the House GOP isn’t on firm ground — the rules limit lawmakers from using House resources for documents including specific campaigns, calls for fundraising, etc. Slaughter’s report didn’t include any of these “red flags”; it merely documents what the House Republicans have been up to.
For that matter, by the NRCC’s logic, a member of Congress could hardly use their office to criticize the other party at all. Do Republicans really want to go there?