Jan 7, 2008 -- The Buffalo News: Democrats must heed demands for change
By: Douglas Turner

Nancy Pelosi and Louise Slaughter have a chance to show in a few weeks whether they will heed the demand for change voiced by young Democrats in Iowa Thursday night, or not.

Both are longtime Democratic organization politicians. Pelosi, of California, is speaker of the House. Slaughter, from Fairport, chairs the House Rules Committee.

Pelosi must decide soon whether to pass new House rules on ethics — proposals that offer only superficial sanctions against corrupt practices that have plagued the House for decades.

Slaughter has the job of steering this leaky package through her committee. She will decide on how open the floor debate will be, and will be charged by Pelosi with getting it passed.

Pelosi and Slaughter offered plenty of talk about ethics during the 2006 campaign to wrest control

from Republicans. Both liberally spiced their floor speeches and campaigns with talk about Republican "corruption." Now, having assumed majority status, they're not talking about ethics.

Pelosi last month issued a dry comment on the package proposed by her close friend, Rep. Michael E. Capuano, D-Mass.

Slaughter has declined to respond for more than two weeks to several requests to comment on a letter of complaint sent by four nonpartisan reform groups, principally the Campaign Legal Center.

The Capuano ethics plan would create an outside Office of Congressional Ethics to assist the House Ethics Committee in deciding whether to investigate a member. But it fails to give the outside office the power of subpoena.

The four groups said Dec. 19 that "without subpoena power or access to subpoena power, the office can be ignored in its efforts to interview individuals and obtain documents that may be central to the ethics matter at hand. The findings of fact by the office, furthermore, are often likely to be limited to information that is already publicly available."

Meredith McGehee , the Legal Center's policy director, said "Slaughter, who is in charge of the Rules Committee, is in a good position to make a real difference here."

McGehee said she is hoping to persuade some young House Democrats to propose amendments to the Capuano plan that will give the new office subpoena power, when Slaughter's committee meets to consider the changes.

The other three groups that complained on Dec. 19 — Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and Public Citizen — are now under pressure from Pelosi and other party regulars to soften their opposition and just go along, which is the usual Washington game.

The excuses being proffered by the Pelosi camp include the claim that giving the new office the power to actually investigate would slow down the process of investigation. That's laughable considering the cases involving such House Democrats as Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana and Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania have layers of dust on the cobwebs.

Another silly plea to reformers is to give the window-dressing plan a year to see if it works. There's been a bipartisan truce in the House against considering complaints from non-House members in force for 11 years.

Pelosi will soon provide the answer to whether this half-baked plan is really hers, or Capuano's. He was her transition chairman after the 2006 election. Incidentally, Capuano, like Murtha, voted against an ethics package proposed when the GOP ran the House.

Polls show the likelihood of the Democrats' retaining the House majority this year, but Pelosi's unpopularity is a drag on their programs. Pelosi's negatives nationally are 51 percent.

Meanwhile, Sen. Barack Obama's Iowa numbers are staggering. The Illinois senator's campaign for change won him an equivalent of 84 percent of the entire vote for all GOP candidates. The state is 95 percent white.