Pelosi Walks Tightrope Enforcing Rules

Pelosi quickly realized that late-night jokes about "Dollar Bill" and his cold cash were muddying her message about GOP corruption. She joined with Hastert in condemning the raid as an executive-branch intrusion on congressional prerogatives, but she also met privately with Jefferson and asked him to leave Ways and Means.

He refused, saying his lawyers were not letting him tell his side of the story. But she insisted that he must step down, just as a police officer would be suspended during an official investigation. When he balked, she sent a formal letter requesting his resignation from Ways and Means, "in the interest of upholding the high ethical standard of the House Democratic Caucus."

Jefferson replied that Pelosi's request was "perplexing and unreasonable," noting that his legal problems had nothing to do with Ways and Means. He wrote that it was also "discriminatory" because no other House member under federal investigation has been asked to leave a "substantive, legislative committee," an obvious reference to Mollohan and the appropriations panel.

Jefferson's allies took up his cause. Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.), a Yale Law School graduate who heads the Black Caucus, told Pelosi at the June meeting that her decisions on ethical issues would be totally arbitrary without a "bright line standard." Pelosi said her standard was common sense, noting: "Anybody with $90,000 in their freezer, you have a problem at that point."

That was not good enough for Watt. "Okay, how much cash in the freezer does it take?" he asked in an interview. "The problem is not that there's a double standard. The problem is there's no standard."

In early June, after Republicans retained Cunningham's seat in a special election, some pundits declared the corruption issue a political loser. But Pelosi saw that the GOP had been forced to spend heavily to defend a conservative district. She had faith in the corruption issue, as long as voters could see that the two parties were not equally corrupt. That meant distancing Democrats from "Dollar Bill." "We wanted our members to be able to say: 'We deal with this kind of thing, and they don't,' " one leadership aide recalled.

At the Democrats' June 15 meeting, Reps. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (Mich.), Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (Ill.) and Watt all spoke on Jefferson's behalf before Pelosi took the floor. Pelosi said that she did not want to force this decision on the caucus, but that Jefferson, unlike "other people" -- another reference to Mollohan -- had refused to step down. "We're about high ethical standards," she said.

When she was done, one of Jefferson's supporters demanded a secret ballot. "I would have it no other way," Pelosi replied.

The Democrats then followed their leader.

Pelosi is a San Francisco liberal, and some critics expect her to steer her caucus to the far left. But her allies say the Jefferson affair shows that she cares less about ideology than unity. "It was a real defining moment for her leadership," said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.).

'Incumbent-Protection'

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During the Democratic landslide on Nov. 7, more voters told exit pollsters that corruption was "extremely important" to their vote, rather than terrorism, the economy or the war in Iraq. Emanuel counted eight races in which charges of personal misconduct had cost incumbents their seats. That did not bode well for Jefferson, who had limped into a runoff with Carter, a young state legislator from a prominent Democratic family in New Orleans.

Carter ran on corruption, arguing that Jefferson had become a pariah in Washington. Louisiana Democrats endorsed her, and she hoped that the national party might as well. She knew the DCCC did not usually help challengers against Democratic incumbents, but she figured incumbents were not usually caught with $90,000 in their freezers.