Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL) has announced that he will retire at the end of his term, ending 20 years in office.

He may have been the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history, but his legacy is forever tarnished by his bungling of the Mark Foley scandal and his fervent belief in putting partisan politics above the public interest.

So now Rep. William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, D-LA (or D-Freezer, if you're the Feds) has been indicted on federal bribery, racketeering and money-laundering charges.

Aside from the obvious (never stash 90 grand in your freezer or try to solicit bribes while holding elected office), do you think Congress, and specifically, the Democratic leadership, will learn anything from this?

Here's a suggestion: You campaigned to create an "ethical Congress" but then you came up short on reform, specifically tracking the money that pays for "Astroturf lobbying" and a two-year "cooling off" period for yourselves and key staff.

But you've got one more shot to make things better. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, has a task force out there led by Michael Capuano, D-MA, to study whether the House should have some independent ethics oversight.

The House Democratic leadership appears to think you don't care about House ethics reform anymore.

They were all for it last fall, when control of Congress was in the balance and everyone was shocked that former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) had been chasing teenage pages for years, and no one had bothered to blow the whistle on him. That was when the Democrats promised they would stop the scandals that had plagued Capitol Hill for years and left members resigning from Congress in disgrace or heading to prison.

They said they would tighten ethics rules and lobbying requirements, and they did do that. But they have consistently ignored action on the most critical ethics problem: the toothless House Ethics Committee and its inability to punish members who break ethics rules.

Have you ever wondered what exactly embattled, scandal-ridden politicians have to pay in legal fees?  The Washington Post has a partial list of legals fees for the first three months of 2007 alone:

House Democrats want to be seen as the standard-bearers of ethics reform in government - but their efforts seemed to have stalled somewhere after the "100 hours" ended.

From today's Post:

Let the excuses begin!  There's something called an "options menu" out there...and this gem from task force Chairman Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA):

Pardon me?  Did I misread that?  After DeLay, Ney, Cunningham, Jefferson, and Foley, they can't possibly delude themselves that the current ethics process works and doesn't need outside enforcement.

Or can they?

Follow me inside to read what the watchdogs are saying, including a quote from our own Sarah Dufendach.

With elections less than two weeks out, Washington these days is fairly quiet as all of the House and a third of the Senate has gone home to campaign.

About the only members left in town these days are the ones  testifying to the House Ethics Committee as it investigates  former Rep. Mark Foley's digital wooing of House pages.

Yesterday, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-IL, and Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-NY, went before the committee. Hastert became the first Speaker to go before the committee since Newt Gingrich did in 1997 during its investigation into Gingrich's book deal.

Reynolds, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, appeared before the committee just before Hastert. Reynolds has said he personally told Hastert that Foley had sent suspicious e-mails to a teenager in Louisiana. Hastert has said he didn't recall that conversation.

If you ever wanted to know what things are likely to happen when Congress doesn't really police its ethical misdeeds, today's Washington Post provides three sobering examples.

First, they report that the scandal involving sexually suggestive e-mails and instant messages between former Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, and House pages appears to be expanding again (registration required), with the new focus on an incident five years ago that involved a 16-year-old page and Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-AZ. Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican in Congress, is retiring this year. The ethics committee's review comes after the Justice Department "had opened a preliminary inquiry into a camping trip" Kolbe took with male former pages 10 years ago.

Then, the Post points out that the investigation into Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA, by the FBI (reported on this blog yesterday) is focusing on ties among Rep. Weldon, his daughter Karen, and their connections to a Serbian businessman with reputed ties to former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. Appears Rep. Weldon was trying to get the businessman, Bogoljub Karic, removed from a list of people barred from visiting or trading with the United States -- while Karen Weldon was doing business with Karic's family.

And if that wasn't enough, there's news of a report from a House committee's investigation that shows former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-CA, channeled more than $70 million worth of Pentagon and intelligence agency contracts to two companies that bribed him, which required the "cooperation or at least the non-interference of many people" in government to succeed.

The full report is still classified, but you can see an executive summary of it here.

Here we go again with another potential ethics flap involving a member of the U.S. House.

After two and a half years of percolating beneath the surface, today's morning papers are abuzz with news of FBI raids on the homes and offices of Karen Weldon, the daughter of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA. The feds also raided the home of Charles P. Sexton Jr., a Weldon ally, and the Florida offices of the Itera Group, a Russian natural-gas supplier.

And if that wasn't enough, Rep. Dale Kildee, D-MI, a member of the House Page Board, said yesterday that the investigation into Rep. Mark Foley's explicit communications with House pages may expand to other members.