If one needed a visual clue demonstrating how much clout and respect the House Ethics Committee has, you had only to have been standing today in the basement of the Capitol in a cramped, overheated hallway outside a plain doorway leading to the Ethics Committee's drab digs. For too many years, the Ethics Committee has been the stepchild of House committees - its mission to investigate complaints about Members' and staff's alleged ethical misconduct, and to help members interpret the ethics rules. This is the one committee members don't lobby to get named to - no political contributions come your way and there's little prestige to serving on it. And nobody wants to judge his peers.
To say the Ethics Committee has lurched between moribund and ineffective over the past years is to be charitable. But today, as the Foley page scandal continued to explode on the nation's front pages, the Committee drew new glamour and importance. A flank of photographers and reporters crowded around waiting as each Committee member made his or her way through the closed door. Like paparazzi running after a fleeting glimpse of Oscar attendees, the capitol press photographers exploded with clicks and flashes whenever a Committee member strode by.
If that was the hope, it was dashed by this afternoon. The Committee's chairman Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and its ranking minority member Howard Berman (D-CA) announced that the Committee would issue four dozen subpoenas, although they would not name who would receive them. They would follow the evidence wherever it led them, although they were quick to point out that since Foley had already resigned, no one member or staff person was a target of their investigation.
They would get to the bottom of something, whatever it was. But what was not clear was how the Committee would get over the fact that it has failed dismally over the years to police its own. And when some of the serious questions deal with a possible "coverup" or at least blatant negligence of Foley's problems by the House's most senior leaders, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), the doubts that the Ethics Committee would do a serious and credible investigation that actually had the guts to take on its own leadership seemed highly unlikely.
Of course, Hastings did not help things by pronouncing that "The Speaker has done an excellent job"at today's press conference. While he quickly said that this compliment in no way referred to their pending investigation, it did not exactly restore confidence in the proceedings.
After all Hastings was Hastert's choice to lead the Ethics Committee after Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO) took his job seriously and actually led the committee to scold then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) three times for ethical misconduct. Hastert's purge also replaced other somewhat independent minded ethics committee members with more compliant ones.
Hastert declaimed, in his own press conference today, that "our young persons need to be protected and we are going to do everything we can to protect them." Gee, you'd think that teenage pages ought to be in pretty good hands under the supervision of our elected officials. Hastert made it sound like the pages were under the control of gang members. If your own Congressman cannot be trusted to conform to the absolute lowest common denominator of decency - namely don't exploit kids, and if you have reason to believe that someone is exploiting kids you ought to follow up and make sure no one is being harmed - then Congress is in even worse shape than even the cynics thought.
One element of the House investigation sounded a bit ominous. Hastert alluded to House staff knowing about the e-mails and "reports of leaks to the press" about them. But then, if the investigation focuses more on staff leaking unpleasant and embarrassing information to the press and less about why the people in charge did not take these e-mails seriously and do all they could to protect the teenage pages, it will only be in keeping with the House's behavior up until now. It appears that Foley's "over-friendliness" to the teenage pages always has been perceived as a matter to be contained and a public relations problem to be managed, not as a problem to be addressed.
