NYT: Ethical Notes on the Reforming Class -- (Dinner for two? $2800!)

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Ethical Notes on the Reforming Class -- Published: May 6, 2006

First the House Republican majority shirked the crying need to create an independent ethics enforcement office. Then it approved a watered-down version of the grand promises of last January to rein in its quid pro quo romance with Washington's lobbyists. The measure now goes to a conference with the Senate, which has passed its own package of pulled punches. The resulting "reform" compromise can only become worse. Tailored for campaign sloganeering, it will do nothing about the influence-peddling core that was laid bare by the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal: lawmakers' unconscionable dependence on favored lobbyists eager to bundle campaign contributions from special-interest clients.

There's also no reason to believe that the average lawmaker has any real intention of following even the extremely modest ethics improvements that do make it through into law. Congress's ability to explain away almost anything was exemplified recently by the bumbling attempts of Representative Katherine Harris, the Florida Republican, to explain away her dinner with a since-convicted defense contractor on the make for earmarked helpings of taxpayers' money in return for his campaign donations. Disaffected staff members revealed that the dinner for two cost $2,800. This is a bit more than the $50 gift limit on feeding a lawmaker, and Ms. Harris had a number of creative explanations, including a theory that her dining partner might have taken the opportunity to order some expensive take-out wine. But the real bottom line was that with no one enforcing ethical rules in the House — hey, bon appétit.

And to gauge the sincerity of all the speeches on behalf of a new world order on Capitol Hill, consider the impassioned plea of Senator Rick Santorum during the ethics debate that lawmakers swear off their treasured perk of using private corporate jets for V.I.P. travel at token fees. It turns out that only two days earlier, before the plea by Mr. Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican, fell on deaf ears, he used a BellSouth jet to hurry off to two fund-raising events for his re-election campaign. It came staffed with an attentive lobbyist.

For a perfect example of the ability to live in two different realities at the same time, one has to go no further than Michael Scanlon, former spokesman for Tom DeLay, the deposed majority leader whose House legacy includes neutering the ethics committee. As he awaits sentencing in the Abramoff scam that bilked $80 million from Indian casino tribes, Mr. Scanlon quietly picked up "a loose end in my life" and returned to college to defend his nearly forgotten graduate thesis. Reported in The Hill newspaper as a story of "irony on steroids," Mr. Scanlon's scholarly thesis six years ago was an "evaluative history of the House ethics process."

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