Opinion

House doesn’t clean itself

Charlie Rangel’s decision to temporarily step aside as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee does not signify an end to his ethics woes. More important, it doesn’t mean the House is finally taking ethics seriously.

Rangel is just the latest poster child for misconduct: Not a season goes by without at least one member of Congress ducking down halls to dodge reporters’ questions about ethical transgressions. Indeed, even in this case, four other members took exactly the same Caribbean trip for which Rangel has been admonished, but were let off the hook.

In a decision that defies logic, the Ethics Committee cleared Rangel’s colleagues on the theory they had learned corporations were sponsoring the trip only once they had arrived on the island — while Rangel’s staff (at least) knew beforehand.

The trip isn’t even the worst of Rangel’s problems. He’s still under investigation for a host of other alleged infractions, including: improper use of four rent-stabilized Harlem apartments, failure to properly disclose income from a Dominican Republic villa, and abuse of office to raise funds for the Rangel Center at City College. And last October he amended his disclosure reports, indicating he had underreported hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets.

As significant as the Rangel scandal is, the greater problem is the fact that the Ethics Committee does little more than provide cover for unethical members.

For example, lost in the Rangel news is the fact that last week the committee cleared Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) of trading earmarks for campaign contributions, though a Justice Department inquiry is continuing.

In the recent past, Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) and Bob Ney (R-Ohio) have gone to jail, William Jefferson (D-La.) was convicted of crimes, and the entire Jack Abramoff scandal unfolded — all with nary a peep from the Ethics Committee.

The lesson? Unless members are caught committing a crime, they’re generally in the clear.

Americans are rightly troubled by the refusal of Congress to take ethics seriously. Republicans won in Congress in 1994 in large part because of Democratic scandals. Ten years later, the stunning misconduct of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and the Abramoff scandal left the GOP vulnerable on ethics.

Democrats campaigned against the “culture of corruption,” and regained control of Congress.

Yet Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s new Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) hasn’t brought the promised a new era of accountability. In essence, every time it tries to hold members accountable, the Ethics Committee steps in to let them off the hook.

In January, the OCE concluded that Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) had inappropriately received a homestead deduction in Maryland; the Ethics Committee publicly reprimanded OCE for its “inadequate review.”

It had already chided OCE for taking Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) to task for having a friend testify before a congressional hearing on renewable fuels, without mentioning that his wife and the friend were co-investors in renewable fuels plants in Missouri.

For the Ethics Committee, the ethics process is the punishment. The rest of us expect members of Congress like Rangel to be punished when they go astray. If the Ethics Committee can’t bring itself to do this, it should at least get out of the OCE’s way.

Melanie Sloan is executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.