As the House Democratic leadership tries to keep its focus on passing a health care bill, a pair of unrelated ethics probes are pulling energy and media coverage in a different direction.\u00a0 It’s also reminding people of this statement that Nancy Pelosi made in 2007 near the beginning of her reign as House Speaker: “We’ll keep our promise to drain the swamp that is Washington, DC to let sunshine disinfect the Congress.”<\/p>\n
Flash-forward three years and you get this week: Democrat Eric Massa announced that he’s resigning citing a cancer scare but it comes amidst an Ethics Committee investigation that he sexually harassed a male staffer.\u00a0 Plus, fellow Dem Charlie Rangel stepped down from his position as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee after the Ethics Committee admonished him for traveling to the Caribbean on corporate money in violation of House rules.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pelosi says her party is acting ethically and working for the people they represent.\u00a0 “I feel we’re very strong. We have been very effective in terms of passing the full Obama agenda in 2009,” she said. “So, we know that when you’re effective, you’re a target.”<\/p>\n
\u00a0Democrats certainly haven’t cornered the market on questionable behavior.\u00a0 In 2006, when the GOP was in charge\u00a0ofthe House, Republican Congressmen Tom Delay and Bob Ney were caught up in a lobbying scandal while Duke Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting bribes.\u00a0 Mark Foley also resigned after news reports that he sent sexual messages to male pages.<\/p>\n
In that big election year and this one, one thing seems to be constant – the Ethics Committee has plenty of work in front of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the House Democratic leadership tries to keep its focus on passing a health care bill, a pair of unrelated ethics probes are pulling energy and media coverage in a different direction.\u00a0 It’s also reminding people of this statement that Nancy Pelosi made in 2007 near the beginning of her reign as House Speaker: “We’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5564,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-397151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5564"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}