Ethics panel in partisan deadlock

New York Times

By Anne E. Kornblut

Washington – With the House ethics panel locked in a tense stalemate, the majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, accused Democrats on Tuesday of deliberately stalling an investigation of him in order to drag it into the midterm elections next year.

A leading Democrat swiftly responded by demanding that Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., recuse himself as the ethics chairman, saying he had shown ineffectual leadership and had potential conflicts of interest.

The committee is deadlocked over a routine staffing question—who will fill the position of staff director and effectively oversee any potential investigation into accusations that DeLay, R-Texas, and other members violated House rules.

Meanwhile, the number of potential cases for the committee to address has grown. The latest involves Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Del Mar (San Diego County), who in 2003 sold his home to a military contractor with business before his committee.

The contractor took a $700,000 loss on the sale, according to Copley News Service, which first reported the transaction.

Cunningham defended the sale of his home to Mitchell Wade, whose company had business before Cunningham’s committee when he paid more than $1.6 million for it in 2003. Wade later sold the property for $975,000. But Cunningham said the deal was proper.

“I have no reason to believe the value of the house was inflated then, and I have no reason to think so today,” he said.

Referring to the deadlocked panel, Stan Brand, a former general counsel to the House, said: “It’s never been paralyzed this long, and it’s never been paralyzed in this way. You have an evenly split committee, which makes things difficult, especially in an era when people dig in and vote along party lines. It only reflects the larger problem in the chamber.”

Republicans on the ethics panel would like to have two co-directors, one Democrat and one Republican. Democrats are demanding a sole nonpartisan staff director. The dispute has left the panel deadlocked for weeks, and several members and their aides said Tuesday that they did not expect even to resume negotiations before next week.

“If the Democrats really wanted this committee to be functioning, they would work in a bipartisan way to make it happen,” DeLay said Tuesday.

But Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., the ranking member of her party on the Rules Committee, accused Republicans of breaking with tradition by trying to put a Republican in the staff job. Hastings, she said, “is trying to unilaterally replace the nonpartisan professional staff with his handpicked team of Republican operatives.”

Hastings has indicated he would like to install his longtime chief of staff, Ed Cassidy, as the head of the panel’s professional staff.

“It is time for Chairman Hastings to step aside,” Slaughter said.