On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that House Republicans are leaning on House Speaker Dennis Hastert, urging him to do what it takes to resolve the ethics impasse with the Dems.
Privately, Republicans say the rules are a greater political worry for the party than the more publicized ethics questions about Majority Leader Tom DeLay. As a practical matter, Mr. DeLay’s problems will persist until the impasse is resolved, since Democrats are blocking the Ethics Committee from giving the Texas Republican a hearing and a chance to clear himself.
Actually, if the Ethics Committee were to conduct business, and agreed to consider DeLay’s multiple pending allegations, the likelihood is far better that he’d be admonished again than he’d “clear himself.”
Nevertheless, that’s not the sole reason congressional Republicans want the ethics gridlock resolved sooner rather than later. Aside from giving DeLay a chance to make his case to the committee, the GOP sees where this is going — and they’re not happy about it.
With the two parties now trading allegations of impropriety on a near-daily basis, the House could be moving toward what many Republican strategists fear is a political trap: a full-fledged ethics war.
As the media has intensified its scrutiny of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), his GOP colleagues have scrambled to put his behavior in context by providing examples of Democrats taking questionable trips and doing alleged favors for big donors.
While that strategy may help the party blunt attacks on DeLay in the short term, some GOP strategists on and off Capitol Hill worry that they are playing into Democrats’ hands. According to this theory, if Congress grinds to a halt amid partisan bickering, the party in power will bear the brunt of the blame.
For years, there was an informal ethics “truce,” whereby neither side would push for investigations against the other. Republicans took down Jim Wright, Dems undercut Newt Gingrich, and everyone decided it was time to call off the dogs for a while.
Now the truce is over. It seems DeLay thinks he can win out by launching attacks against Dems, hunting for lawmakers who’ve behaved similarly to him. He’s under the impression that Dems will cower in fear at the idea of facing ethics investigations. Unfortunately for DeLay, he has this backwards.
Put it this way: Dems go after DeLay for his multiple transgressions, so DeLay launches a few broadsides of his own. The public hears about DeLay being “ethically challenged,” see reports about some investigations into a handful of Dems who made clerical errors, and decides that the whole (GOP-controlled) Congress is a mess.
If you’re a Republican worried about re-election, and you can’t count on an increasingly-unpopular president for a boost, where’s the upside to this equation?
Way back last July, when Chris Bell filed his ethics complaint against DeLay, we heard all kinds of bravado from House Republicans about retaliation.
A DeLay ally, Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), said Republicans “are going to have to respond in kind” by filing ethics charges against key Democrats. From now on, he said in an interview, it’s a matter of “you kill my dog, I’ll kill your cat.” Doolittle said he plans to file ethics charges against a prominent Democrat but would not name the target.
You may have noticed, however, that there were no reprisals.
It’s not that GOP lawmakers believe they are guilty of more ethical transgressions than the Dems — though that is certainly the case — but rather Republicans don’t want an ethics war because they know, as the majority party that controls all of Washington, it’s a losing proposition for them.
Of course, Dems know it too. It’s the first chamber-wide fight in which they’ve had leverage in quite some time.