From today’s WSJ Political Diary E-mail:
During last year’s GOP House leadership elections, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx pointedly asked a question of every candidate: Would a Member be allowed to hold a position of trust if he or she was under criminal investigation? John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who eventually became Minority Leader, answered that it would be unwise to prejudge such cases. His message, according to one source who was present: "We have to be careful here. We can’t abandon people based on media reports."
Well, the media reports may soon be backed up with concrete developments in a couple of cases. Last Friday, FBI agents raided the Beltway home of California Rep. John Doolittle, who served in the last Congress as the secretary for the House GOP conference. Investigators apparently were searching for files related to his wife’s fundraising business.
While the raid was not directly related to Rep. Doolittle’s official duties, the implications are ominous. Convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff was a close friend of the Doolittles, and Mrs. Doolittle earned $66,600 from Abramoff’s law firm in exchange for planning events. The congressman also was helpful to several Abramoff clients. On the same day as the search of the Doolittle home, Kevin Ring, a former top Doolittle aide who joined Mr. Abramoff’s staff, suddenly resigned his position from a D.C. law firm. In 2005, Mr. Ring exercised his Fifth Amendment rights not to answer questions before a Congressional committee.
More trouble may be brewing elsewhere for other California GOP congressmen. Rep. Jerry Lewis, ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, has spent some $1 million in legal fees since last year as part of a federal investigation into possible abuses involving earmarked items in the federal budget not unlike those that landed former Rep. Duke Cunningham in jail. The San Diego Union-Tribune has reported that Mr. Lewis has steered hundreds of millions in federal funds to clients of lobbyist Bill Lowery, a former congressman so close to Mr. Lewis that the two have exchanged key staff members, "making their offices so intermingled that they seem to be extensions of each other," as the newspaper put it.
Then there is Rep. Gary Miller from Orange County, who faces questions about his role pushing for a provision that allowed the city of Rialto to close its airport, the first time an act of Congress has ever closed such a facility. The Hill newspaper reports that the airport’s shuttering allowed a local company, Lewis Operating, to build a planned community on the grounds. It’s not surprising that Lewis Operating would have contributed to Mr. Miller’s campaigns. What’s surprising is that Mr. Miller took out nearly $7.5 million in promissory notes in 2004 from Lewis Operating, which he then used to purchase real estate from the company.
Mr. Boehner has admitted that Republicans were stripped of their Congressional majority because "we lost our way and forgot sometimes why voters sent us to Washington." So far he has done a decent job trying to return his party’s conference to first principles. But his overriding imperative now should be making sure his party acts swiftly and decisively to deal with the ethics problems several of his members may be facing. Democrats have their own ethical issues involving Reps. Bill Jefferson of Louisiana and Alan Mollohan of West Virginia, but you can bet more media attention will be focused on the GOP members because of how successfully Democrats were able to hang the "culture of corruption" issue around the necks of Republicans in last year’s elections.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Let’s hope Jerry Lewis is next. He’s the poster child for our over spending pork riddled appropriations process.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Jefferson and Mollohan are not the only Democratic ethical question marks. Don’t forget the recent revelations about our own Senator Feinstein and earmarked no-bid projects for her husband’s firm!