Hopes, fears amid transfer of power

Re “Pelosi takes the helm in triumph,” Jan. 5

Republicans who underestimate the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), do so at their own peril. Pelosi is a lot sharper than your average Democrat and is only in politics for one reason -- to make America a better place. She is independently wealthy and doesn’t have any favors that she has to repay to get reelected. She is a true public servant.

MARC PERKEL

San Bruno, Calif.

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This current noise about Pelosi’s determination to bring ethics reform to the House is, when you poke beneath the surface, totally laughable.

I expect this ethics reform to last maybe a couple of weeks, and then it will be the same old dirty business by the Democrats that the Republicans honed so well. You can change a person’s clothes, but you don’t change the body inside the clothes.

Why doesn’t someone ask why grown men and women, supposedly mature, elected to national office, need to create an institutional set of ethical rules to govern themselves with integrity?

Why wasn’t their ethical sense already built into them in childhood?

If this weren’t so disgustingly tragic, it would be utterly hilarious.

So the nation observes these moral infants scurrying around trying to find a way to keep their colleagues’ hands out of the cookie jar. It’s no wonder that the general public regards the ethics of our congressional members as ranking somewhere between used car salesmen and card sharks at the casino.

DAVID H. WALLACE

Newport Beach

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I am afraid that Pelosi prescribed the failure of her leadership by announcing that the Democratic Party did not intend to use the power of Congress to reduce the funding for our occupation of Iraq in order to force President Bush to withdraw our troops. The Democrats, by taking off the table their only veto-proof power of the purse, have in effect lost their chance to extricate us from the quagmire of Iraq.

RENO S. ZACK

San Dimas