Blogs For Victory

More news from the most ethical Congress, ever:

Democracy 21 and other good-government groups are expected to ask the House ethics committee next week for an investigation into lawmakers with close ties to defunct lobbying firm PMA Group, Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer said on Friday.

The request will seek a probe into whether the millions of dollars in campaign contributions the firm generated for favored Members of Congress influenced the tens of millions of dollars in earmarks those lawmakers secured for PMA clients.

Outside groups are barred from filing complaints with the ethics committee, but the panel can initiate probes on its own and the request is sure to pile political pressure on an already strained House Democratic leadership team.

Democratic leaders have remained in a defensive crouch in the wake of reports that federal investigators are probing the earmark empire of Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the defense-spending chief in the House and a close confidant of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

But that position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Since news broke in February that federal agents raided the offices of the PMA Group and the home of its founder, former House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense aide Paul Magliocchetti, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has kept the issue front and center by calling votes on whether to force an ethics probe. His first attempt gathered 17 votes from the majority party, but Democratic defections on subsequent votes have mounted, reaching 27 on his seventh and latest attempt before the spring recess.

Remember back in 2006 how Her Majesty, Nancy I and her Democrats were running against an alleged GOP “culture of corruption”? Well, that wasn’t really the case, now was it? I mean, if we’ve got a Speaker so divorced from morality that she’ll claim to be shocked about interrogation techniques she was briefed about years ago, just where would she draw the line? Certainly not a Murtha’s various scandals.

It is good to keep in mind that one of the things Matt and I discovered about Nancy Pelosi is that she learned very early on that political corruption pays. In the very first campaign she was involved in, she illegally failed to report some printing work by a union as an in-kind donation – the work was worth something like $90,000; the fine for not reporting the work was $7,000. Nancy was $83,000 to the good and she’s never looked back (and you can read all about her in Caucus of Corruption). She got into politics to be a mean, bitter attack-dog against Republicans; she rose in politics via corruption (including the use of illegal PACs to engineer her rise to Minority Leader after the 2002 elections) and she runs the House just as one would expect a corrupt, partisan hack would.

We’ll have to see if anything comes of this – no one thought the House “check kiting” scandal would lead to much. Certainly, the Democrats never did, but it played a large role in their defeat in 1994. Pelosi can’t clean house – she’d have to start with herself. So, look for Democrats to attempt to smear GOPers and just confuse the issue any way they can in hopes of turning people off to politics…make it seem, that is, like both Democrats and Republicans are hip deep in this stuff and hope that independents sit 2010 out in a “pox on both your houses” fit. Our job is to keep it front and center – not because it helps the GOP, but because until Democrats are held to account, we’ll never get politics cleaned up.

The GOP house has been cleaned up – our corrupt members are gone and we’ve learned our lesson, at least for a while. It is time for Democrats to learn theirs.