A piece in yesterday's Post recaps the ups and downs of the new Speaker's handling of the ethics question as Minority Leader, with some revelations (if true) of the behind-the-scenes action.

Pelosi's speech at the Caucus meeting that voted Dollar Bill off Ways and Means, for instance.

The big freeze (ha, ha!) that greeted Karen Carter's attempts to drum up support for her attempt to dump the Fridge in the LA-2 runoff.

No insight, unfortunately, into Mollohan's, somewhat different, treatment in response to his legal difficulties - he's now chairing the apps subcommittee responsible for funding the FBI, of course.

Ain't politics grand!

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Think the culture of Washington hasn't become more unsavory over the course of the Republicans' dozen years at the helm of the House of Representatives? Former House ethics committee chairman Joel Hefley, a Republican stalwart from Colorado who is retiring this year after ten terms on Capitol Hill, disagrees with you, as Alexander Bolton reports in tomorrow's issue of The Hill.

Former House ethics committee Chairman Joel Hefley last week quietly inserted a statement into the Congressional Record defending Democratic Rep. Alan Mollohan's service on the panel and scolding GOP leaders for attempting to change ethics rules at the start of the 109th Congress.

[...]

On Wednesday, the same day he defended Mollohan -- Hefley also introduced legislation that would ban the use of so-called leadership political action committees by members of Congress, taking a direct swipe at the fundraising culture that former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) helped institute in the House in the mid- to late '90s.

[...]

Hefley's bill on campaign-finance reform is a shot at the broader culture that has taken root since Republicans captured the House 12 years ago. Since Republicans ascended to the majority, the number of leadership PACs, which lawmakers use to raise money for their colleagues, has proliferated wildly. And the amount of money raised for colleagues has become a major factor in determining the assignment of committee chairmanships and other plum panel spots. [emphasis added]

Taking a look at the specifics of the Hefley measure, which has literally no chance of being enacted during the currenty GOP Congress, the proposal appears to be a good start towards cleaning up Washington and beginning to decrease the power of the insider lobbyists and special interests. As Democracy 21's Fred Wertheimer explains, leadership PACs are the "perfect vehicle for lobbyists and trade associations and PACs to gain access and influence with members."

The fact that one of the very few Republicans on Capitol Hill willing to try to clean up Congress was not only stripped of his committee chairmanship and blocked from assuming the chairmanship of the House Resources Committee by his own party but also pushed into retirement is nearly as stunning an indictment of GOP domination of Washington as Hefley's comments, themselves.

And though the special election in California's 50th district back in June showed us a number of things, one of which is that the "Culture of Corruption" meme is not a panacea for all of the Democrats' woes, the fact that the former ethics panel head -- a conservative Republican, at that -- has called out his own party's activities does offer further ammunition for the Democrats as they seek to paint the Republicans as soft of ethics and retake the House of Representatives.

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The Hillupdates us on how things have been going at the House Ethics Committee since the departure of Brer Mollohan.

The answer seems to be, quite smoothly.

Mollohan's (temporary?) replacement, Howard Berman (CA-28)

reluctantly assumed the ranking member's post at the House ethics committee two months ago, insisting that his reign as senior Democrat be temporary. But since Berman's arrival, the ethics panel has started three new probes and created a voluntary approval process for member travel, with Berman displaying a warm rapport with Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) that Mollohan noticeably lacked.

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[Become a member of the Frog Pond].

Joe Gandelman has a good and quite amusing piece in the Moderate Voice about concerted GOP efforts to do to Nancy Pelosi what the Clintonistas did to Newt Gingrich.

You can hear the music starting now. That menacing cadence. The numbing feeling that something could soon happen. A small move that you see in the corner of your eye that makes your blood run cold. And then it happens:

Nancy Pelosi could be Speaker of the House...

That's apparently the gist of a GOP effort right now to try and rally the party's faithful.

Before I even discuss this strategy, it is worth noting that no woman has ever held the position of Speaker of the House. For a woman to rise to the top of an organization of 435 politicians would be a greater accomplishment and a more difficult task than for a woman to simply win the two step process (primary and general elections) to become commander-in-chief. If Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker, it will be a moment to celebrate on those grounds alone.

And that gets me to the analysis.

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According to the Posttoday,

The FBI has notified [Mollohan's] nonprofit organizations that they will be subpoenaed soon and, according to Mollohan, a subpoena has already been served on a D.C. real estate company in which he has invested. In addition, Mollohan plans to divulge that he misstated on House financial disclosure forms the amount of loans and income from some of his real estate holdings.

We're a long way from a indictment, miles away from a conviction, on any serious criminal count. (I suspect that the misdisclosure which Mollohan admits to, depending on circumstances, might be trivial or might not be.)

But, as I've said before, the GOP have already banked a nugget from the Mollohan farrago: the question What did Pelosi suspect and when did she suspect it?

And that's bad enough.

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