News Intelligence Analysis
From the New York Times
June 16, 2004
Complaint Against DeLay Ruptures
7-Year Truce in House
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON, June 15 - A seven-year-old unofficial truce discouraging
House members from filing ethics complaints against one another
disintegrated Tuesday when a freshman Democrat accused one of
the most powerful members of Congress, the House majority leader,
Tom DeLay, of "bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering
and the abuse of power."
The Democrat, Representative Chris Bell of Texas, who is leaving Congress because he lost a primary election, filed a 187-page complaint against Mr. DeLay, also of Texas, with the House ethics committee. The complaint accuses the majority leader of illegally soliciting campaign contributions, laundering campaign contributions to influence state legislative races and improperly using his office to influence federal agencies.
Mr. DeLay said "there is no substance" to the accusations.
The complaint is deeply intertwined with Texas politics. This year, Mr. DeLay helped orchestrate redistricting there. Mr. Bell, who is white, was subsequently pushed into a district that is largely black, and he lost the Democratic nomination to a black candidate. The accusations in Mr. Bell's complaint, which news organizations had raised earlier, revolve in part around Mr. DeLay's actions in the redistricting.
The complaint makes three specific accusations, that Mr. DeLay traded contributions from the largest electric utility in Kansas, Westar Energy of Topeka, for help on measures that would save it billions of dollars; that Mr. DeLay funneled contributions from one of his political action committees to the Republican National Committee "in an apparent money-laundering scheme"; and that Mr. DeLay improperly exhorted federal agencies, including the Justice Department, to search for Texas state legislators when they fled to Oklahoma to avoid a debate on redistricting.
Mr. DeLay said the charges were "all based on press clippings." Of Mr. Bell, he said, "Evidently he is very bitter about his losing the primary, and he's using the ethics committee to express his bitterness."
Mr. Bell, who called Mr. DeLay "the most corrupt politician in America today," said that he had been preparing the complaint for months and that his defeat at the polls had nothing to do with it.
"Tom DeLay,'' Mr. Bell said, "has created a climate of fear and retribution inside the people's House, and it must come to an end."
The complaint was drafted with the help of a watchdog group, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The ethics panel, formally called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, has 14 calendar days or 5 days while the House is in session to determine whether it meets the threshold for consideration. After that, the panel can dismiss the complaint, decide to investigate or consider it for an additional 45 days.
Since 1997, after politically charged ethics fights led to the resignation of one speaker, Jim Wright, another Texas Democrat, and a $300,000 fine against another speaker, Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, the House approved rules to bar outsiders from filing ethics complaints. Those rules prompted what has been called an unofficial truce on ethics inquiries. Though there have been inquiries since then, they have been initiated by the ethics panel itself, not by individual House members.
Mr. Bell's action provoked a controversy between Democrats and Republicans over whether the truce should have been broken and questions about a possible retaliatory complaint against a Democrat.
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who rarely grants interviews, made a surprise walk through the Speaker's Lobby, the corridor that runs alongside the House chamber where reporters generally congregate to interview members.
"The worry I have," Mr. Hastert said, "is that you again politicize the process, and it denigrates what ethics is all about."
Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois, said, "This is the gotcha politics that ruins our system here in Washington."
Mr. LaHood said he was contemplating proposing a rule to prevent "lame-duck members" from filing ethics complaints and said Democratic leaders should tell Mr. Bell "to back off."
The Democratic whip, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, said he supported Mr. Bell's right to file the complaint.
"I haven't seen the complaint," Mr. Hoyer said. "But from what I've read in the newspapers, it's a substantive complaint."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Send a letter
to the editor
about
this article