When Does a Politician’s Constituent Service Become String-Pulling? : Ethics: A Senate committee’s astonishingly slow pace in judging whether Cranston broke the rules is largely the result of fuzzy definitions.

Like any respected, opinionated, self-confident member of the U.S. Senate, Alan Cranston has been delivering some firm pronouncements lately on the character and fitness of those who would occupy seats of power and influence.

The California Democrat stated that he was impressed by Robert M. Gates, nominated to run the CIA, who admitted “in his opening remarks and later that he made mistakes, as we all do, and that in retrospect he would have done things differently.” Cranston announced he would vote against Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court because he was “deeply disturbed” by Thomas’ “disavowal” of long-held positions.

To a dwindling circle of admirers, it may seem remarkable that Cranston--who survived a recent bout with cancer and plans to retire next year--is still in the fray of Senate debate, fighting for what he believes. To detractors, it may seem incredible that Cranston still has the chutzpah to pass judgment on others.

From any perspective, it is simply astonishing that the Senate has been unable to reach any collective judgment about Cranston’s own ethics. It has been almost two years since Common Cause asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Cranston and four colleagues for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of their political patron, savings-and-loan tycoon Charles H. Keating Jr.

It has been seven months since the ethics panel mildly rebuked the other four, ordered a formal investigation of “substantial credible evidence” that Cranston “engaged in an impermissible pattern of conduct” and promptly froze in the ice of its indecision.

Whatever the outcome of the case--and there is talk again of some effort at compromise--the committee’s long, dreary delay in reaching a decision has revived doubts about the ability and willingness of the collegial Senate to police members’ ethics.

Three problems contribute gridlock:

The partisan imperative. Members of the Ethics Committee insist that their lofty deliberations are untainted by mundane partisan calculations.

But a party-line parsing of ethical standards has been at work since the beginning of its deliberations in the “Keating Five” case. The committee spent months deciding to let the other involved senators escape with carefully calibrated criticism of their dealings. It was no secret that the committee’s Republicans demanded complete vindication for John McCain of Arizona, the only member of their party in the accused group, an outcome the committee’s Democrats just as vigorously resisted. Much bargaining ensued before a compromise was reached. The six-member panel has been divided along partisan lines ever since as to whether to let the Cranston case fade away or send it to the full Senate for formal action.

The Cranston distinction. The Ethics Committee has struggled with only mixed success to define what makes Cranston’s case deserving of action by the full Senate, a substantially graver form of punishment than the muted criticism the committee meted out to the other senators who took Keating’s money and championed his questionable cause.

The special counsel, Robert S. Bennett, has contended that Cranston was in an ethical class by himself. His campaigns and political causes raked in almost $1 million from Keating and associates, more than the other four senators combined. And Cranston alone repeatedly collected checks within hours or days of intervening with regulators.

Cranston has insisted there are no real differences. “It’s clear that I have been singled out despite the evidence in all five cases,” he has said. He has suggested that he was made the scapegoat because he was the sole member of the Keating Five who had decided to retire and thus his sacrifice would “not affect the balance of political power in the Senate between Democrats and Republicans.”

Cranston’s angry insistence that his “behavior did not differ in kind from that of the other four senators whose cases were not sent to the full Senate for discipline” seems to carry an implicit threat: If his ethical shortcomings are dragged onto the Senate floor and the C-SPAN airwaves, his defense may dredge up the untidy details involving the other four of the Keating Five.

Even more, Cranston, who has always been a tough political street fighter when cornered, could attempt to put the ethics of the entire Senate on trial. During his appearance before the Ethics Committee last year, Cranston provided a taste of that strategy by displaying charts identifying the government staff members who are designated by each member to accept campaign donations under Senate rules. His ostensible point was that it is “absurd to suggest that fund-raising and substantive issues are separated in Senate offices by some kind of wall.” But Cranston also has sent the unmistakable message that he is willing to point fingers at colleagues.

Murky rules. Cranston told the Senate committee that he has been accused on the basis of “rules which have never been written and standards which have never been applied.”

The Ethics Committee has not suggested that the senator broke any law. Rather, it charges that Cranston went far beyond what is acceptable by brazenly, persistently mingling the raising of campaign funds with the dispensing of his influence as a senator. This, the Ethics Committee maintains, violates long-established and commonly understood “general guidelines” limiting intervention on behalf of campaign contributors.

But the committee has acknowledged that more is needed. In its report on the Keating Five case in February, the committee sought creation of a bipartisan task force to develop “specific standards governing contact or intervention by senators with executive or independent regulatory agencies” in an effort to “minimize the potential for appearances of impropriety.” Nothing has been heard from the task force.

If it ever does get to work, its task will be daunting. Distinguishing acceptable “constituent services” from unacceptable string-pulling in contemporary U.S. politics may prove virtually impossible. The members of the Ethics Committee became all gummed up simply attempting to define the problem. Try slogging through this sentence from its Keating Five report:

“(I)f an individual or organization which contributed to a senator’s campaigns or causes has a case which the senator reasonably believes he is obliged to press because it is in the public interest or the cause of justice or equity to do so, then the senator’s obligation is to pursue that case.”

Even more, the committee urged “comprehensive campaign finance reform,” insisting that “the reputation and honor of our institutions demand it.” That plea seems to have been forgotten, as the political parties bicker over rival, self-serving plans to tinker around the margins of a political system steeped in millions of dollars of special-interest money.

“A person who makes a contribution has a better chance to get access than someone who does not,” as Cranston put it with stark candor in a deposition last year. In any such system, there will always be a fuzzy line between rewarding contributors with favored access and providing them with favored results. And, fundamentally, there will always be a fuzzy ethical line between a campaign contribution and a payoff.