Originally published April 2 2005
Gridlock in ethics committee leaves House without ethics rules
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A revolt by five Democrats on the evenly-divided House Ethics Committee has left the House of Representatives without a procedure for investigating and disciplining House members who violate ethical standards. The Democrats have refused to agree to a new set of less-stringent rules pushed through by Republican committee leadership.
THIS MAY NOT sound like news, but the House of Representatives is now an ethics-free zone.
To be precise, it has no mechanism for investigating or disciplining members who violate ethics rules.
The proximate cause of this breakdown is the revolt by the five Democrats on the evenly divided ethics committee.
Last week's tumultuous events cap a year in which the committee took the extraordinary step of issuing three admonitions to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), infuriating the majority leader and his supporters.
In the aftermath, the ethics panel's chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), and two other committee Republicans were removed and replaced with those more loyal to the Republican team.
In addition, the GOP leadership did its best to neuter the committee by rewriting the rules for the new Congress.
When their own members were too embarrassed to go along, the leadership was forced to backtrack on some of the most egregious changes.
Instead, committee Republicans were bypassed, their ordinary role was usurped and the new, rigged rules were written in secret by the leadership.
The new rules also pose substantive concerns, the most critical of which provides for the automatic dismissal of a complaint if it's not acted on within as little as 45 days and no longer than 90 days.
Another rule, to let a single lawyer represent multiple parties in an investigation, is a road map to obstruction, letting those involved in an inquiry get their stories straight in advance.
Republicans are now trying, laughably, to portray the impasse as the result of Democrats' refusal to "put the ethics process above partisan politics," as a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) put it.
Mr. Mollohan now has a single Republican, Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.), co-sponsoring his resolution.
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