Out Of Touch

I've been out of touch with current events, sports, entertainment, the real world, etc. for the last two days.  My 'on-call' day Thursday was unbelievably busy, caring for numerous serious injuries at two different hospitals, and it took me all day yesterday just to catch up.  Having not seen Gwendolyn or the little jesters for the last 2 days I thought I'd spend last night with them.

A couple of items did catch my attention, having had a glance at the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal while between operative cases yesterday.  The Globe carried a lead editorial discussing the Tom Delay 'ethics problems'.  Their biggest complaints relate to the changes in the rules for the ethics committee which have the Democrats acting like spoiled children, taking their ball and going home rather than playing by the rules.  The Globe's take is that the rule changes are an attempt to block investigation of Mr. Delay.  From my own observations it seems that the ethics committee itself is the problem.  With equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats on the committee and with a rule that says an even split forces an investigation it invites politically motivated investigations.  The rule change makes such investigations impossible, though obviously it also makes blocking even a legitimate investigation possible. 

Looking at it that way there is really no way for such a committee to function, regardless of the rules.  Under the old rules tarring a member with false accusation and investigation is easy; under the new rules protecting a member from any investigation is also easy.  Unless men and women of perfectly good character are the only inhabitants of the committee, representatives who are willing to defy their leadership if the facts so dictate, then this committee has no use.  To be perfectly frank, looking at the ranks of both parties, where in Congress are you to find such men and women?  If you really want congressional ethics to be disciplined perhaps the GAO is the organization to do it, publicly releasing reports on each member's activities on a yearly basis.

The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, published an editorial discussing attempts by Senate Democrats to block release of an investigation into the Henry Cisneros 'ethical' problem.  (subscription required).  This case involves the independent counsel investigation into Mr. Cisneros payments to his mistress and failure to disclose the money involved to the IRS.

Perhaps you remember Henry Cisneros. He's the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who pleaded guilty in 1999 to lying to FBI investigators during his pre-appointment background check about hush payments to a former mistress, on which it also happens he hadn't paid the requisite taxes.

Well, the special counsel report investigating all this still hasn't been made public, thanks largely to procedural roadblocks by Mr. Cisneros's attorneys. And now, all of a sudden, a rash of news stories and editorials are urging Independent Counsel David Barrett to wrap up his investigation forthwith, without releasing his findings.

Then there's the amendment that North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan and co-sponsors John Kerry and Richard Durbin are trying to attach to the latest supplemental war appropriations bill that would de-fund Mr. Barrett immediately. This would have the practical effect of making sure that Mr. Barrett's report never sees the light of day. After 10 long years and $21 million, don't they think taxpayers deserve to see what the special counsel has learned?

I thought Democrats wanted evidence of ethical problems exposed and wrong-doing punished?  Apparently not, for the ethical problems reportedly reach into the former Clinton administration.

So what don't Democrats want everyone to know? We're told that early on the Barrett probe moved away from Mr. Cisneros and his mistress and focused on an attempted cover-up by the Clinton Administration, especially involving the IRS.

Back in the early '90s Mr. Cisneros was considered the rising savior of the Democratic Party in Texas. "So there were people who wanted to save his political future," a source tells us. To that end, when the IRS began investigating him for tax fraud an extraordinary thing happened: The investigation was taken from the IRS district office that would always handle such an audit and moved to Washington, where it was killed.

One would think that every - and I mean every - organization and individual who is currently demonizing Tom Delay should, to avoid rank hypocrisy, call for Senators Dorgan, Kerry and Durbin to withdraw their amendment and allow the independent counsel to complete his work.  But of course they won't because they are, in fact, hypocrites when it comes to ethics.  It's more important for them, as it certainly may be for the Republicans, to turn a blind eye to such violations.

(UPDATE: minor grammatical edits)