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The New York Times ran a story today outlining the increasingly uphill battle House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay faces in holding on to his post as head honcho. DeLay was admonished by the House Ethics Committee three times during 2004 for making end runs around fundraising rules and allegedly offering bribes on the House floor. Now he’s facing heat over charges that he further violated House ethics rules by ignoring restrictions on allowable travel expenses.
The Times, after quickly alluding to the ethical admonishments from 2004, frames DeLay’s current troubles with the committee as part of a larger — largely partisan — problem within the committee itself:
The focus on Mr. DeLay comes as the House ethics committee, which is supposed to be the enforcer of House rules of conduct, is paralyzed by a partisan impasse over a series of rules changes forced through earlier this year by Republicans. The senior Democratic member of the evenly divided panel, Representative Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia, has blocked attempts to organize the committee for this session until Republicans agree to rescind a change that will make it harder to pursue ethics inquiries.
True enough, but to reduce the matter to little more than another example of partisan sniping is to miss the full story. Digging below the surface of what the Times covers, we find there’s a bit more to it.
First off, the piece fails to do justice to the full story of the recent ouster of the ethics committee chair and two staffers. As the Washington Post‘s Mike Allen noted last month, “House Republican leaders tightened their control over the ethics committee yesterday by ousting its independent-minded chairman, [Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.)] appointing a replacement who is close to them and adding two new members who donated to the legal defense fund of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).”
The two House members appointed to the committee were Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.) and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), both of whom donated significant funds to a defense fund set up to help battle the charges being leveled against DeLay last year. For his part, Smith contributed $10,000, while Cole gave $5,000. On top of this, at the time of Hefley’s removal, the Post wrote that his replacement, Rep. Richard Hastings (R-Wash.), “is known as a favorite of Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.)”
Despite all that, and what appears to be the stacking of the deck in favor of DeLay, the Times decided to go with the old left vs. right meme — and in the process reduced what is a major (though largely uncovered) story into what appears to be little more than a beltway playground dust-up.
–Paul McLeary
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