Speaker Pelosi's Ethics
Targeting the bad people who lead the innocent lambs of Congress astray.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, January 5, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
Ethics in politics is not the same as ethics in real life. Ethics in politics is a martial art. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that the ethics package proposed by new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is mainly about "cleaning up" politics. Maybe. But it's first of all about cleaning the clocks of the Republicans.
The House Republicans got lazy. Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, earmarks, Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney. When Nancy Pelosi saw the Republicans had developed a compulsion to flagrantly throw their weight around, she grabbed them by the lapels of their Hickey Freeman suits, hoisted them into the air and slammed them onto the House floor, shrieking "the most corrupt Congress in history!" That's right. In history.
Ms. Pelosi started the long road to earning a black belt in political ethics (again, not to be confused with ethics as taught at, say, Aquinas College) back in 1987 by studying the Master--Newt Gingrich. That was the year Nancy Pelosi entered the House as a California freshperson. And that was the year Newt Gingrich turned ethics into a weapon against the imperious Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, who left in disgrace two years later. "We currently have the least ethical speaker in the 20th Century," said Grandmaster Gingrich. Nancy noticed.
Aficionados of the sport of political ethics will recall another name from that era, Fernand St Germain, then the Democratic chairman of the House Banking Committee at the time of the infamous savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, arguably the greatest source of congressional ethical lapses in, well, history. Enough of the ethical backwash from the S&L mess soiled Democrats that when Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, his party actually lost nine seats in the House. After the midterm elections two years later, Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, with a 54-seat swing from Democrats to Republicans.
You think Nancy Pelosi didn't remember all that when one year ago this week Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty? Meet the first Madam Speaker--in history.
Exploiting this gain, Speaker Pelosi is breaking a champagne victory bottle over the hull of a new set of House ethics rules. If you stare at these rules awhile, eventually you notice that they are less about the members of Congress than about someone else. They are about the bad people who lead the innocent lambs of Congress astray. They are about "lobbyists" and "private interests" and, not least, "corporate jets," which for the modern member of Congress appear to be the rough equivalent of demon rum.
Let us quickly note for the historical record that ever has it been congressional practice to deflect ethics elsewhere. The famous 1978 Ethics in Government Act, passed after Watergate and a Democratic Congress's war with Richard Nixon over spending power, was also aimed at bad people elsewhere, to wit, the executive branch. After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, a parade of independent counsels authorized by the Ethics Act tortured a long series of executive branch officials, with piling on by shocked, shocked committees of Congress. Ray Donovan, Ed Meese, Ted Olson. All were entrapped by the ethics mores Congress wrote into the law.
The set of ethics rules proposed yesterday by Speaker Pelosi should be called the Condé Nast Traveler Ban. One can never underestimate the willingness of the political class to put a whole career at risk for one chance to fly over to play golf on St. Andrews or fly free with the significant other to investigate trade practices at Machu Picchu. Silly as it sounds, Ms. Pelosi, of sophisticated San Francisco, is probably doing the rubes a favor by weaning them off their addiction to free travel and goodie bags.
Her proposed earmark reform scuffles closer to the heart of the real problem. Earmarks, formerly known as pork, are spending items for a discrete interest which a member inserts into a broader spending bill. They aren't illegal, and in a democracy probably shouldn't be. As with campaign contributions, it doesn't matter to me who gives how much to whom, so long as the particulars are posted in public. Now, presumably, that will be the case with earmarks.
The Democrats successfully made earmarking for "corporate interests" the poster boys for a GOP "culture of corruption," but the fact is that the divisions of Beltway lobbyists seeking earmarks also represent cities, universities, state governments and government contractors. What caused this wretched excess? Our hallowed government.
Except for wars, federal spending as a percentage of GDP--from 1792 until after World War II--held below 10%. Then from about 1953 onward, it rose steadily to 20% of GDP. The spending itself runs to nearly $3 trillion dollars. These large numbers--a veil for uncounted agencies, regulatory bureaucracies and federal rules--represent what conservatives sometimes call Leviathan.
Liberals tend to think that conservatives "hate" government. That's not quite it. Smaller government is--was--a conservative principle for a reason relevant to Speaker Pelosi's ethics quest. The idea is to reduce, not eliminate, the switch-points of potential public corruption. If the parsons of the Beltway had wanted to avoid this ethics problem, they would have resisted helping the U.S. government become so crucially important--for example, FCC rules--to every nook and cranny of American life. Too late now.
Back in the late '80s during the days of the Keating Five--one of the scandals that fell out of the S&L fiasco--former Sen. William Proxmire said of the implicated senators: "These fellas did what senators have been doing for a long time. There's nothing illegal about it. It's just wrong." This is what Ms. Pelosi's rules are aimed at--sleaze, the painted ladies of public corruption.
When Jack Abramoff was wheeling the system for Indian casinos, his right-hand henchman, Michael Scanlon, a former congressional aide to Tom DeLay, squealed in email ecstasy to a colleague, "Wheez gonna be rich!" Well, yeah, that's gross, but it's the same aspiration with which many Washingtonians drift off to sleep each night now against the warmth of their $2.8 trillion Leviathan. What's a piddling 90,000 bucks in the office freezer?
Nancy Pelosi, who believes big government is gloriously good, put the "most corrupt" GOP on its fat fanny. She has made congressional ethics the first act of her historic speakership. What else is there to say? Good luck, Madam Speaker.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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ROTFL - Pelosi saying "Please don't leave anything out where I can steal it." |
