The 109th Congress convened for the first time Tuesday, but the usual partisan horseplay was already ahead of schedule — and this time for the better: Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, asked fellow House Republicans at a Monday night meeting for a reversal of an (ethically dubious) rule passed late last year that strips an 11-year-old party ethics rule from the books, permitting indicted congressmen to continue holding chamber leadership positions.
Why were legislators so interested in rewriting guidelines at the end of a session? Well, DeLay is presently under investigation in Travis County, Texas, for illegal use of some $2.5 million in corporate money to help Republicans win state legislative races in 2002; a grand jury has already indicted three of his associates in the case.
(Don’t think that this was a push for a legislative supermajority: Republicans have a tougher hand in Texan state politics than their seven-election streak of red state-ness suggests. That year marked the first time the GOP held a majority in the Texas State House of Representatives
since Reconstruction.)
Anyway, with the old language intact, an indictment of DeLay would force the majority leader to step down from his post. Under the Republicans’ new but rescinded rule — unsympathetically nicknamed the DeLay Rule — an indictment
would instead trigger a review
by a party steering committee to determine whether the charges warrant removal. The change, which would have stripped much accountability from the authority of the increasingly ideologically centralized congressional Republican leadership, drew fire.
“We have gone from DeLay being judged by his peers to DeLay being judged by his buddies,” lamented Fred Wertheimer, president of
the Washington watchdog group
Democracy 21.
Rank-and-file Republicans naturally (and moreover reasonably) obliged DeLay’s request, happy to avoid a deserved imbroglio over unjustifiably tweaking the rules.
Count Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn. — who with some other Republicans opposed the original rule change — was among the relieved: He told CNN, “It takes a big man to do what he did, and a smart politician. This allows us to stick together.”
Behind this rule shuffling sits a plainer but more sinister story: House leaders nearly unraveled important ethical codes, trading down relative moral clarity for political potency. Conflicts between ethical and political aspirations are neither new nor surprising. But, of course, that’s why guidelines like those threatened in recent months exist in the first place: to illuminate and respond to those conflicts in accordance with the public interest.
DeLay takes a dim view of the potential indictment: “This has been a dragged out 500-day investigation, and you do the political math,” he told CBS News. “This is no different than other kinds of partisan attacks that have been leveled against me that are dropped after elections.”
DeLay’s historical appeal is shaky: The House ethics committee rebuked him three times in October and November, once for offering to trade an endorsement of a lawmaker’s son in exchange for a vote in favor of Medicare legislation.
All that aside, the threat of baseless attacks designed to destabilize a party’s leadership is a poor excuse to drop ethics rules: It’s exactly the grand jury’s place to filter the slings and arrows, determine which are legitimate and which are partisan nonsense. Dropping the rules in question would short-circuit the process, putting the decision in the hands of a possibly unduly sympathetic
steering committee.
This incident, however well-ended, should leave a public wary of future changes to congressional guidelines. If the above is any example, legislators rarely roll back ethics rules to improve the ethical character of politics.

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