No Checks, Please

Congress does have some shame. The House of Representatives voted 390 to 8 Thursday to shut down its in-house bank by year’s end--but only after the General Accounting Office disclosed a plague of check-bouncing by members. That disclosure was followed by news that hundreds of present and former customers of the House’s restaurant were able to dine happily on the House for years, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills unpaid.

In the check-bouncing scandal--Rubbergate, some are calling it--House members in a single year wrote 8,331 bad checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars at the private bank maintained for their convenience. Unlike your bank, the House bank assesses no penalties for this hot paper, among which were 581 overdrafts for $1,000 or more. The bank, in effect, provided interest-free loans by honoring checks until it could collect from the offending legislator.

Meanwhile House members had free use of someone else’s money for weeks at a time. It’s been one of those little known but lucrative perks of being in Congress.

The subsidized House restaurant is another. Until last August it had been operated under contract during the previous five years by Service America Corp.

In that time, as earlier, a lot of members chose not to eat on a pay-as-you-go basis but to run a tab, day after day, week after week. Rep. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) of the House Administration Committee says about 300 current and former members have close to $300,000 in restaurant bills outstanding. That includes more than $30,000 owed to the House itself by 30 current members for meals eaten before Dec. 31, 1986, when the contract with Service America took effect.

Roberts and others think that delinquent diners should be given 30 days to pay up. If they don’t, their names would be posted in the restaurant, they would lose their dining privileges and a private collection agency would be put on their case. This splendid idea is likely to be utterly disregarded by the House leadership.

But at least there’s some progress. The new managers of the restaurant, knowing their clientele well, now require up-front payment. That’s cash or credit cards only, please. Checks, for some reason, are not being accepted.