Did the old guard finally relent on the stringent rules about post-legislative lobbying and reporting “bundled” contributions? Good for the freshmen for sticking to their guns and shaming the rest into doing the right thing*.
Prodded by Democratic leaders and by freshmen elected partly on promises to clean up Washington, the House approved new ethics legislation yesterday that would penalize lawmakers who receive a wide range of favors from special interests, and would require lobbyists to disclose the campaign contributions they collect and deliver to lawmakers.
Unless I am mistaken Nancy Pelosi just delivered on the last of her major ’06 campaign promises. Time to send ‘er on one of those Bush-sized vacations.
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(*) As always watch out for the devil in the details. Better legal scholars than me can weigh in on whether the bill really delivers what it promises.
p.lukasiak
While its good that lobbying/campaign reform has been passed, its just another demostration of Pelosi’s ineptitude that the whole subject has been overshadowed thanks to her mishandling of Iraq funding.
Or (as you suggest) it may well be just another example of Pelosi’s duplicity — and that there are devils in the details that she doesn’t want those of us who support anti-corruption measures to know about.
p.lukasiak
oh, and while I make it a habit not to go all “grammer police” on stuff that appears in the body of a post, “Delives” is in the title, and should be corrected.
RSA
Thus demonstrating (ironically, I assume?) a universal law of Usenet and later the WWW.
The Other Steve
I can’t help but thinking that the Democratic leadership intended to pass this bill all along.
But some Republicans leaked to the press that Pelosi was getting grumbles from Democrats that they didn’t want it… and the MSM and the bloggers jumped right on board the right-wing noise machine, as they always do.
Why do I think this? Well simple… it wouldn’t be the first time that has happened.
Zifnab
Oh, give it a rest. If this legislation was really so toothless, the Republicans would have been signing on in droves, hoping to wash their hands of corruption charges in a “bipartisan” manner.
Honestly, though, I see a Bush veto in the cards. It’s not like he hasn’t shot down every other piece of Democratic legislation that’s crossed his desk. I fully expect Bush to kill this bill on principle, lest Democrats walk away claiming they’ve scored political points.
dlw32
You’re assuming it makes it through the Senate.
Zifnab
True. Call me an optomist.
demimondian
Why would the Republicans wash their hands of it if it were toothless? Their line is “money is speech, and no matter how vile the speaker, their right to speek mush be protected.”
They’re just supporting civil liberties, Zif. Why do you hate civil liberties?
Adam
So far, Pelosi and Reid have both done a good job, I think. Every time I start to doubt, I say to myself, “Tom Daschle. Dick Gephardt.” –And then I start to feel nauseous and have to go lie down for a while.
MJ
Until last week, the only accomplishments that Pelosi & Co could highlight was (a) a funding bill left over from the last session, (b) a minor NATO restructuring plan that had no opposition, and (c) a number of bills that renamed federal property like post offices. The Democrats spent almost four months playing around with the Iraq supplemental, trying desperately to craft it in such a fashion as to force a withdrawal and blame it on George Bush, only to get outplayed by the White House.
The Democrats’ vow to end the “culture of corruption” in Congress has proven to be empty campaign rhetoric. Only two Democrats joined 187 Republicans on Wednesday in supporting an unsuccessful motion to discipline Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., for violating an ethics rules approved by the House in January. Murtha crossed the line when he threatened to bar spending sought by two Republicans who questioned earmarks in his home district.
Under Pelosi earmarks will be inserted into bills only after they’ve been approved by the House and sent to conference committees with the Senate. Under this newly rigged process, there won’t be any of those pesky amendments against things like the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, House members will only be voting on conference committee reports, not on the thousands of earmarks that will be inserted into the bills covered by those reports. In other words, after some tentative moves in the right direction earlier this year, Democrats are now putting the corrupt system disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff called the congressional “favor factory” back behind closed doors.
Pelosi Delivers On Ethics Reform??? LOL
MJ
From WoPo:
When the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed one of its first spending bills, funding the Energy Department for the rest of 2007, it proudly boasted that the legislation contained no money earmarked for lawmakers’ pet projects and stressed that any prior congressional requests for such spending “shall have no legal effect.”
Within days, however, lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) began directly contacting the Energy Department. They sought to secure money for their favorite causes outside of the congressional appropriations process — a practice that lobbyists and appropriations insiders call “phonemarking.” . . .
The number of earmarks, in which lawmakers target funds to specific spending projects, exploded over the past decade from about 3,000 in 1996 to more than 13,000 in 2006, according to the Congressional Research Service. Most earmarks made it into appropriations bills or their accompanying conference reports without identifying their sponsors. Upon taking control of Congress after November’s midterm elections, Democrats vowed to try to halve the number of earmarks, and to require lawmakers to disclose their requests and to certify that the money they are requesting will not benefit them.
But the new majority is already skirting its own reforms. . . . “Absolutely nothing has changed,” said the Center for Defense Information’s Winslow T. Wheeler, a Senate appropriations and national security aide who worked for both Democrats and Republicans over three decades before stepping down in 2002. “The rhetoric has changed but not the behavior, and the behavior has gotten worse in the sense that while they are pretending to reform things, they are still groveling in the trough.”
But the new majority is already skirting its own reforms.
Perhaps the biggest retreat from that pledge came this week, when House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) told fellow lawmakers that he intends to keep requests for earmarks out of pending spending bills, at least for now. Obey said the committee will deal with them at the end of the appropriations process in the closed-door meetings between House and Senate negotiators known as conference committees.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052301782.html
Ethics Reform? It’s all smoke and mirrors.
So are you a shill for the DNC or have you not been paying attention?
BIRDZILLA
Both parties are as crooked as a bolt of lightning