House approves ethics measure

The House voted Tuesday night to impose a new layer of outside ethics scrutiny on itself after two weeks of open rancor on both sides of the aisle and more than a year of wrangling over the proposal.

The final 229 to 182 vote was preceded by plenty of fireworks, despite the comfortable margin. Democratic leaders first had to overcome a procedural hurdle that threatened to kill the measure. They also held the vote open for 15 minutes while leaders pressed several Democratic members to change their no votes to yes.

In the end, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) managed to find the support she needed to pass the measure and fulfill a commitment to try to fix a broken ethics process that has suffered for decades from partisan deadlocks, inaction and secrecy.

The resolution would change House rules to create an independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The OCE would be comprised of six board members, none of whom could be sitting lawmakers. It would be able to conduct investigations against members based on allegations from outside groups and individuals, and decide whether to forward them on to the full ethics committee for further review. From 1997 until now, only members could file complaints against other members.

Democrats only narrowly won a procedural vote to close debate and move to the ethics resolution over the opposition of Republicans and many Democrats. If the procedural move had succeeded, opponents would have been able to offer alternative measures and “poison-pill”amendments.

Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) worked the floor looking for members who would switch their votes.

In the end, several Democrats did, including: Reps. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), G.K. Butterfield (N.C.), Emmanuel Cleaver (Mo.) and Bart Stupak (Mich.). They helped win Democrats the procedural vote by a one-vote margin, 207 to 206.

“I was up in the air and I could have gone either way,” Stupak said, explaining that other members of the Michigan delegation had voted against the leadership.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the dean of the House and a known institutionalist, voted to keep the debate open against his leaders’ wishes. When Pelosi and Hoyer approached him to ask him to switch his vote during an intense moment, Dingell sat firm in his chair.

Afterward, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) asked what the parliamentary procedure would be to challenge the outcome of the vote. They argued the process had violated rules Democrats had put in place when they took over the majority against holding votes open in order to get a desired outcome.

“Does this rule have any impact at all?” Blunt asked.

Blunt was told that such a challenge would have to be in the form of a privileged resolution and come after a vote on the resolution itself.

Some senior Democrats were surprised about how much political capital Pelosi was willing to expend on the ethics issue. All day, Democratic whip counts were far below the support needed to pass the measure comfortably, according to those tracking the vote-counting process.Some 50 members of the watchdog group U.S. PIRG visited members’offices to push the proposal Tuesday.

In a leadership meeting Monday night, Clyburn asked Pelosi for more time to gather support for the bill.

But Pelosi had made up her mind to go forward with a vote, counting on the strategy that despite all the grumbling, members could not oppose an ethics reform measure on the floor.

"She's pretty much stopped talking about it,” said one Democratic aide. “She thinks it needs to happen."

Earlier Tuesday, when asked how he felt about voting on the ethics resolution, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) said: “I don’t think we have a choice.”

A parliamentary maneuver designed to minimize debate and objections to the process, helped secure late support. The Rules Committee on Monday night agreed to bring the measure up in what is known as a self-executing rule. If the rule for debating the ethics resolution was approved, the ethics changes would be automatically be adopted.

Opponents had thought they might have enough objections to the process, which did not allow for amendments or extended debate, to bring down the rule governing the measure. In that way, they could effectively kill the ethics measure without having to vote on it directly.

Others said the headlines about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s call-girl scandal, gave the ethics measure the necessary momentum to pass.

“Recent events remind us that ethics and politics is something that the public is deeply concerned about,” said Gary Kalman of U.S. PIRG.

Some opponents had a different view on Spitzer’s impact.

As late as Monday evening, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who has opposed ethics reform measures in the past, said he remained undecided about the measure. He voted with Democratic leaders on the procedural vote, but voted against the resolution.

“We have a New York governor in the news right who shows that you can’t legislate ethics,” he said. “It always comes down to the individual.”

In the end, three committee chairs voted against the resolution: Dingell, who chairs the Energy and Commerce committee, as well as Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (Mo.) and Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Bob Filner (Calif.).

Reps. John Doolittle (D-Calif.), who is under FBI investigation for his ties to Abramoff, voted against the resolution, while Rep.William Jefferson (La.), who faces trial on bribery and corruption charges, voted for it. Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), who was indicted last month for his role in a land deal, was not present for the vote.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, registered his displeasure with the proposal by using a parliamentary tactic to delay the vote. Just after 8 p.m., Abercrombie forced a vote on a motion to adjourn, which only served to delay the vote on the ethics resolution until an hour later. The vote failed 177 to 196, with 14 Democrats voting in favor of it.

Afterward, Abercrombie railed against the proposal to resounding applause on both sides of the aisle.

“With this proposal we are indicting ourselves, yielding and retreating to those who would tear this House down and denigrate us as crooks and knaves and hustlers…we cringe before our critics,” he said. “If we have no respect for ourselves—how to we expect it from anybody else?”

Two watchdogs, U.S. PIRG and Common Cause, support the measure, while other prominent groups, including the Campaign Legal Center, argue it doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t give the OCE the right investigative tools such as subpoena power. In addition, two longtime Congressional scholars, Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, also gave the proposal their seal of approval.

Several freshmen members pushed for a stronger measure but ended up supporting the Capuano proposal when it came to the floor for a vote.

“We haven’t been very good at policing ourselves,” said Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio), who won the seat former GOP Rep. Bob Ney gave up when he resigned after becoming ensnared in the Jack Abramoff scandal. “This resolution is necessary because the American public has lost faith in the institution of Congress, and we ignore that lack of faith at our own peril,” Space said.

“There’s a generation of young people who stand on the precipice of losing faith in this government,” said Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).“We have a chance to do something about that.”

Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), the ranking member on the Rules panel, said adding an outside ethics body would do nothing to fix the real problem: problems with the ethics committee itself. He called the use of a self-executing closed rule on an ethics bill was the height of hypocrisy and argued that the resolution would “set the stage for partisan witch-hunts.”

Mike Soraghan contributed to this report.