Since Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) was given a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee — sparking a mini-rebellion among conservative activists — there’s been considerable scrutiny of some of the controversial lawmaker’s more notable scandals.
With this in mind, Roll Call reports today that an eyebrow-raising earmark Calvert championed was cleared by the House ethics committee for reasons you’ll find hard to believe.
The House ethics committee has declared that an earmark requested by Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) to build a commuter transit center near a handful of properties he owns would not be an impermissible financial conflict because any benefit to Calvert would be shared by other similarly situated landowners. […]
The committee ruled in a May 3 letter that Calvert’s real estate holdings did not represent a “financial interest” in the earmark because “the Corona Transit Center project will not immediately affect the use of any of your properties or provide any other direct or unique benefits to the properties.” The committee noted that any financial benefit Calvert achieved “would be experienced as a member of a class of landholders in the vicinity of the transit Center.”
Let’s flesh this out a bit. Calvert owns seven properties in Corona, Calif. He wants a $5.6 million earmark for a transit center right by his holdings, which would in turn increase the value of his properties dramatically. The House ethics committee said all of this is kosher — not because Calvert won’t personally benefit (he will), but because he’s not the only person who will personally benefit.
I know congressional ethics can be a little loose, but this really doesn’t make any sense.
Put it this way: if I’m a member of Congress, I can insert a multi-million dollar earmark that will increase the value of my investments, and that’s perfectly ethical, as long as I can show that someone else might also see an increase in their investments.
Paul Kiel seemed just as surprised as I am.
OK, so let’s just say that I’m a property-rich lawmaker who wants to push the boundaries and play the earmark game for all its worth. What would it take for me to get into trouble? Just how self-serving of a project would actually garner the House ethics committee’s disapproval?
“You’d have to be remodeling your kitchen,” Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me.
The committee’s ruling is great news for Calvert (whose earmarking shenanigans have attracted attention before) and the growing group of lawmakers in the “honest graft” game (Justin had a great round-up over at ABC yesterday). And it’s yet another indication that the House ethics committee actually has a lower standard for wrongdoing than our criminal justice system, which is why far more lawmakers have come under federal investigation in the past several years than have been investigated by the ethics committee (Calvert is no exception).
House Dems have only been on the job for five months, and they have quite a mess to clean up after 12 years of GOP rule. But the sooner they can reform the House ethics process, the better. As Kiel noted, “It would be wrong to call the House ethics committee incompetent. Because, really, it ably strives to make itself as irrelevant and impotent as possible.”