On the Hill, Business and Politics as Usual

Newspapers and magazines have been hammering Tom DeLay over all kinds of questionable activities: foreign trips financed by lobbyists, flying on corporate jets, putting relatives on his political payroll.

Only now it turns out that -- guess what -- lots of members of Congress have been doing these things.

That doesn't let the House majority leader off the hook -- he has been admonished three times by the ethics committee and is headed for a fourth investigation -- but it raises the question of why journalists have been slow to discover such seamy behavior across Capitol Hill.

"There's no question that the higher the profile of the congressman, the better the story is," says Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org, who has written about money and politics for decades. "If it's Congressman Schmendrick, a first-termer from Nowhere, Utah, that's a big story back in Utah but not a national story."

The recent slew of reports on congressional ethics (or lack thereof) brings to mind the long-ago observation by Michael Kinsley that the real scandal in politics is what's legal.

The Washington Post has reported that lobbyist-under-investigation Jack Abramoff financed DeLay's jaunt to England and Scotland -- a violation of House rules. But the same rules say it's perfectly okay for a big corporation or trade association to write checks for lawmakers' junkets and even send their lobbyist along. If the purpose of the House rule is to prevent lobbyists from exercising undue influence on faraway beaches and golf courses, how can this distinction be justified?

"The scandal here isn't DeLay so much as a system designed to get representatives and their spouses free trips to gay Paree and other desirable locations, even as they pretend to labor under a strict ethics regime," writes National Review Editor Rich Lowry.

Congress allows its members to fly on corporate planes for the price of a first-class ticket, which is a small fraction of the real cost of using a private aircraft. After the initial DeLay stories, the Wall Street Journal reported that corporations and industry groups spent $3 million last year to sponsor almost 2,000 trips for members of Congress and their staffs. The Post reported that members of the House and Senate leadership, Democrat and Republican, have flown on corporate jets at least 360 times from 2001 through 2004. DeLay was No. 3 in the number of trips, and former Senate minority leader Tom Daschle was just behind him. The Chicago Tribune found 835 trips by Illinois lawmakers and their staffs since 2000, with two Democrats filing no disclosure forms.

The New York Times ran a front-page story on DeLay's wife and daughter being paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by the Texas Republican's political committees. But local papers soon found dozens of lawmakers paying their relatives, from the $357,000 paid to California Rep. Richard Pombo's wife and daughter (Los Angeles Times) to the more than $150,000 paid to the wife and stepdaughter of Vermont Rep. Bernard Sanders (Brattleboro Reformer) to the $107,000 paid to the wife of Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth (Arizona Republic).

"These stories are always cyclical," says Fred Wertheimer of the advocacy group Democracy 21, a longtime critic of lobbying rules. "They get triggered by events. The focus on this area was triggered by the stories that flowed out of Jack Abramoff's activists and then became tied up with Majority Leader DeLay."

DeLay has delighted in blaming the "liberal media" for his woes. But The Post and Times also led the investigative charge that prompted the resignation of two top Democrats, speaker Jim Wright and majority whip Tony Coelho, in 1989.

Dan Allen, DeLay's spokesman, blames a "carefully orchestrated campaign" by such groups as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Its director, Melanie Sloan, as the Journal recently reported, is a former aide to two Democratic lawmakers -- a point regularly omitted in news stories.