Hastert Willing to Repeal Change in Ethics Rules

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) announced today that he will seek the repeal of three changes to the chamber's ethics rules that Republicans pushed through in January. The changes prompted a Democratic protest that has kept the House ethics committee shut down for three months.

Hastert announced his plans for the rollback this morning during a 90-minute meeting of House Republicans, and a vote is expected today or tomorrow.

"I'm willing to step back," Hastert said after defending the original thinking behind the changes.

Republicans had sought to avoid the embarrassment of admitting they were wrong after absorbing so much bad publicity over the ethics impasse, which was preventing an investigation of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).

"I think that there's a member, especially on our side, that needs to have the process move forward so he can clear his name," Hastert said. "Right now we can't clear his name. The media wants to talk about ethics, and as long as we're at a stalemate, that's all that is in the press today, is the ethics stalemate. We need to move forward. We need to get this behind us."

Hastert proposed repealing a new rule that automatically dismisses an ethics investigation if the committee, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, remains deadlocked on whether to go ahead with it after 45 days. A document given to Republican members at their conference meeting last week had defended the rule as a restoration of presumption of innocence, saying it was "unfair for Members to be kept in perpetual limbo."

The speaker also came out in favor of rolling back the "right to counsel rule," which gives members the right to a lawyer of their choice if called before the committee. Democrats complained that this would allow one lawyer to represent multiple witnesses, and thereby learn all the evidence.

The third rule Hastert favors repealing is the "due process rule," which guarantees a member the right to respond if the committee is going to issue a public letter of reprimand or admonishment. Democrats said this could force a hearing too quickly, but agreed that members should have some kind of notice.

The first Democratic response to the speaker's announcement came from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said the committee must have a bipartisan, professional staff rather than a director who is close to the ethics committee chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.).

Republicans touched off a political uproar in January by changing a rule that had required the ethics committee to continue considering a complaint against a House member if there was a deadlock between the committee's five Republicans and five Democrats. The January change reversed this, calling for automatic dismissal of an ethics complaint when a deadlock occurs.

Democrats rebelled against that and other changes -- saying Republicans were trying to protect DeLay from further ethics investigations -- and blocked the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, as the ethics panel is officially known, from organizing for the new Congress.

Republicans on the committee say they will launch an investigation of DeLay's handling of overseas trips and gifts as soon as the impasse over the rules is broken. The Washington Post reported last weekend that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff charged DeLay's airfare to London and Scotland to his American Express card in 2000.

House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists.

DeLay said that he will meet with the committee chairman and the ranking Democrat, and that his staff is assembling documents to turn over to the committee. The ethics committee admonished DeLay three times last year for what it deemed inappropriate official behavior.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told reporters after a meeting of top House Republicans yesterday that leaders were working to resolve the impasse as soon as possible.

"While I'm confident that the rules changes that were made are fair and defensible, it's of overriding importance to have an ethics committee that's functioning," he said.

"There will be a [political] cost to this, but if he had not done this, the cost would continue to increase," a Hastert adviser said of the proposed repeals.

A House Republican leadership aide said that the automatic-dismissal rule is "the rule that is most commonly believed to be designed to protect Tom DeLay" and that it was "impossible to win the communications battle" on it.

The vote to repeal the measures will mark the second time in four months that House Republicans have changed a rule but then changed it back under public pressure because the changes were perceived as designed to protect DeLay.

Last November, Republicans rewrote an 11-year-old party rule that required a party leader to step aside if indicted, and instead made it possible for such a leader to maintain the party position. A grand jury in Austin was investigating the campaign finances of a political action committee created by DeLay and his political associates. After public objections to the maneuver, DeLay asked his party colleagues to rescind that change when they returned to Washington on Jan. 3 for the 109th Congress, and they did.

The next day, the full House approved -- on a largely party-line vote of 220 to 195 -- changes that Democrats contended would make it harder to launch investigations and would undermine their effectiveness. The ethics chairman at the time, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), broke with his party and voted against the rules package. Hastert later replaced Hefley as chairman. Republican aides concede that many lawmakers will be unhappy about having to vote again on ethics rules.

"This will be the second time that they went home and defended a change, then we pulled the rug out from under these guys," one aide said. "We went to them and defended the changes on the merits, and then made it look like the Democrats got their way. That's a tough position to put your members in."

The aide said that the change will mean "a couple of great days for Democrats" but that Republicans have calculated that this will deny them long-term use of the ethics issue heading into next year's midterm elections.

Pelosi has demanded the creation of a bipartisan panel to consider changes in the ethics rules, rather than accepting the changes Republicans forced through in January.