Nancy Pelosi’s House leadership just voted to make their own jobs harder.
In the wake of a string of Congressional misconduct and corruption cases, the House on Tuesday created an independent panel to investigate suspected wrongdoing by lawmakers, despite deep reservations from rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties.
[…] By creating a panel of six people of “exceptional public standing,” the House, for the first time, delegated the authority for regulating behavior in the House to nonlawmakers. Current members of the House, federal employees and anyone who has been a registered lobbyist in the past year would be ineligible.
Good for them. Tom DeLay’s GOP Congress showed beyond any conceivable doubt that American government suffers from a gross deficit of oversight, and it equally showed that in-house ethics committees, when they act at all, only move when it’s politically convenient (Bill Jefferson, Larry Craig). After watching Republicans hash the government during six years of more or less total power it seems naive to think that a one-party Democratic government will entirely resist the obvious temptation. We will be better off locking in whatever safeguards we can get while there is still some motivation to do it.
Republicans and some Democrats complain that the panel will tie up lawmakers in “frivolous” investigations. That concern would worry me more if guilty lawmakers didn’t use that exact word literally every time an investigation gets under way. The word doesn’t necessarily signal guilt; it’s just a reflexive response to being investigated. As long as the investigating body is relatively non-partisan and free from political control it won’t bother me at all to hear the word “frivolous” used quite a bit more around DC.
On the list of good results, the real threat of oversight will clear out lawmakers who come to DC for the perks. Coincidentally, these guys tend to be shitty lawmakers (see DeLay, Cunningham, Renzi, Cunningham, Jefferson et cetera ad nauseum). A little honest fear will go a long way towards getting more of the people’s work done amidst the usual vanity and graft.
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As a side note, MissLaura at Kos pointed out yesterday that Bill Foster won the special election for Hastert’s seat on Tuesday and cast the tie-breaking vote for ethics reform one day later. Not bad for a guy who doesn’t have an office yet.
