Lowering the Bar for Government Ethics?

House Republicans scrapped a rule so Rep. Tom DeLay (Tex.) could remain majority leader even if indicted. (Ray Lustig -- The Washington Post)

Though out of power, Democrats still have ethics issues of their own. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that family members of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) have earned more than $1 million over eight years doing business with interests she helped.

The White House has raised objections to some controversial ethical moves. After the Department of Health and Human Services granted a waiver to then-Medicare administrator Thomas A. Scully allowing him to look for a job, Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., issued a memo prohibiting Cabinet agencies from granting such waivers.

But various other ethical controversies have gone unchallenged by the White House. For example, the Center for Public Integrity calculated that nine of the 30 members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board had ties to companies that won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four of the 30 were registered lobbyists. Also at the Pentagon, then-Army Secretary Thomas E. White was scolded by the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee because he retained options to buy Enron Corp. stock eight months after he told the company he would divest his holdings.

Now there are probes into the Air Force's controversial lease of Boeing refueling planes. Negotiations were tilted toward Boeing by an Air Force procurement officer, Darleen A. Druyun, who later took a job with Boeing. Druyun and Boeing's former chief financial officer pleaded guilty to ethics charges.

Larry Noble, director of the Center for Responsive Politics, charges that "the administration has been slowly undermining a number of [ethics] rules."

Republicans say nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. "I don't see any loosening of the ethics regulations," said Jan Baran, who runs the law firm Wiley Rein & Fielding's ethics practice and represented former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in his ethics battles. "Those who administer these laws are so numerous they have a trade association now."

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, examined the 43 inspectors general appointed by Bush and Clinton. Although the inspectors general -- internal watchdogs in each agency -- are supposed to be nonpartisan, Waxman found that 64 percent of the inspectors general Bush appointed had previous political experience and only 18 percent had audit experience.

Stanley Brand, an ethics lawyer who has represented many Democrats, said that, with the exception of complaints against DeLay, both parties on Capitol Hill have stepped back from the barrage of ethics complaints that dominated the 1990s when interest groups were permitted to file complaints against lawmakers. Some of that relaxation was necessary, Brand said. But now, he said, things may have "swung too far the other way."

Brand pointed to a letter made public by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct last month warning that it could take "disciplinary action" against a House member if that lawmaker filed an ethics complaint containing "innuendo, speculative assertions, or conclusory statements."

The chairman and ranking Democratic member of the House ethics committee told colleagues in a letter in March that since outside parties were barred in 1997 from filing ethics complaints against lawmakers, the committee had initiated 18 "informal" probes of its own.

Still, the two acknowledged, there is "a perception, however incorrect, that we have taken no action on matters where there is credible information indicating a violation of the rules."