The doors opened at 10 a.m. sharp, and Rep. Bob Ney, R-OH, walked in. He patted a reporter acquaintance on the shoulder, then strode to the front and took a seat, joking and talking with the other men at his table.
In happier times, it could have been a friendly conversation over lunch in a House cafeteria. Or it could have been a power lunch with pals at Signatures, the restaurant just a couple blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue.
But things were different on this Friday the 13th. Abramoff, fallen from grace, awaits sentencing in Washington and Florida on corruption and wire fraud charges. Ney's conversation partners were attorneys. And the table at which he sat was not in a House cafeteria, but a federal courtroom at the foot of Capitol Hill.
A card on the table said all you needed to know in huge block letters: "DEFENDANT."
For today was Judgment Day for Ney, the man who was once called "the Mayor of Capitol Hill" when he chaired the House Administration Committee. He was the man a few years ago who became a household name when he created "Freedom fries" and "Freedom toast" in the House cafeterias to protest the refusal of the French to join the "coalition of the willing" in the Iraq war.
Today, he reached another milestone: Bob Ney, the first member of Congress to be convicted in the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff.
As court hearings go, it was a formality. Ney pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and one count of conspiracy -- both felonies -- for accepting trips and gifts worth more than $170,000 from Abramoff, for accepting campaign contributions, for taking these and other gifts such as meals, concert tickets and tickets to sporting events, for attempting to insert amendments into legislation such as the Help America Vote Act in 2002.
His conspiracy charge came for failing to properly declare $47,000 worth of British pounds he won abroad while gambling, for leavin it off his personal financial statement, and for misrepresenting his trips on travel forms.
Ney is now facing between 24 and 33 months in prison and up to $60,000 in fines. His attorney, Mark Touhey, signaled Ney's political career is over. "By the time he appears before you for sentencing, he will have resigned from Congress," Touhey told Judge Ellen S. Huvelle.
Never mind that Ney's sentencing, on Jan. 19, comes more than two weeks after Ney would have left Congress, since he's not running for re-election. And House leaders in both parties are threatening to expel Ney if he doesn't resign before the lame-duck election begins following the Nov. 7 elections. If they do, he'll be the second member expelled from the House in the past four years. Congress expelled Rep. James Traficant, D-OH, after he was convicted in federal court; he's now serving time in federal prison.
The plea agreement ended after about an an hour, and the onetime chairman was escorted into a waiting limousine amid a violent scrum between U.S. marshals, TV cameras and boom microphones.
This whole thing is sad. Not because Ney is going to jail, or that he, too, has fallen from grace. It's because this is one of the things you get when Congress doesn't clean itself, largely because they believe you aren't paying attention.
In this Congress alone, we've had Abramoff snare Ney. Former Rep. Duke Cunningham, R-CA, is serving an eight-year sentence for bribery involving a federal contractor. Rep. William Jefferson, D-LA, is under investigation after the feds found $90,000 in marked bills in his freezer last year. Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-WV, is under investigation for steering earmarks to friends and political supporters.
And let's not forget that former Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, left just weeks ago after news spread of his e-mail messages with pages. Or that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-TX, left the house while under indictment in Texas on money-laundering charges.
And if that wasn't enough, the Senate Finance Committee reported yesterday that five nonprofit organizations appeared to sell their influence to lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
As all this -- and more -- has gone on, the House Ethics Committee has done virtually nothing for 18 months, thanks to its crippling at the hands of Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL. He sacked the ethics committee chairman and two members as payback for admonishing DeLay, replaced them with three partisan supporters. It's now investigating Foley, but can you trust them, especially when the chairman has said he thought Hastert was "doing a good job?"
We can't.
I'm sad because only one person was on trial today in federal court. Where do you go to indict Congress for failing to police itself when some of its members wind up under investigation, for going along with the executive branch on issue after issue instead of holding it accountable, for failing to address the critical issues that affect us today or, even worse, pass haphazard laws in the hopes that states will come up with their own solutions or the judiciary will sort it out?
Where, indeed, do you go when the system, and Congress itself, is broken?
You can't go to court for that.
There is only one place you can go. It's in your neighborhood, and it's open on Tuesday, November 7.
