Prolonged Cranston Probe Creating Turning Point for Ethics Panel : Senate: Many lawmakers are unhappy with the procedure for examining allegations of misconduct. They are also embarrassed by criticism.

The Senate Ethics Committee’s lengthy deliberations in its investigation of Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.)--now entering a third year--have created a watershed in the Senate’s perennial struggle to enforce ethical standards for its own members.

Even though the committee finally appears to be nearing a verdict on Cranston’s alleged misdeeds, the panel’s six members--as well as many other senators--have grown dissatisfied with the procedure for reviewing allegations of ethical misconduct against their peers.

Not only are committee members weary of discussing the Cranston case, they also have been embarrassed by the chorus of criticism from other senators, public interest groups and newspaper editorial writers who see the seemingly endless deliberations as evidence that the Senate cannot police itself.

Sen. Jesse Helms (C.), a member of the panel that is sitting in judgment of Cranston, said that the committee’s handling of the case illustrates the inherent weakness of a system that relies on members of the Senate to pass judgment on their own behavior.

“We have waited several months for disposition of a matter and nothing much has happened . . . “ he said. “If we learned anything during the past couple of years, we have learned that the existing Ethics Committee system is seriously flawed in its ever getting things done.”

Helms is by no means the only senator to question the procedures.

According to Ethics Committee sources, the Cranston case has left every member of the panel searching for a better way to investigate allegations of misconduct. Furthermore, several bills recently have been offered in the Senate to change the current system.

Nor is it the first time that the Senate has struggled with this issue.

Virtually every big ethics case in the Senate’s 200-year history has sparked a similar debate. The Ethics Committee itself was established in response to the 1960s scandal involving Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Senate who later served 18 months in jail for stealing $100,000 that he was given for the Democratic Party by savings and loan executives.

But through it all, Congress has always opposed putting itself under the same system that enforces a code of conduct in the executive branch on grounds that doing so would violate the separation of powers established by the Constitution.

Cranston is the last remaining member of the so-called “Keating Five” whose case has not been decided by the Ethics Committee. It was in the fall of 1989 that the panel first began looking into allegations that five senators--Cranston, Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), Donald W. Riegle Jr. (D-Mich.), John Glenn (D-Ohio) and John McCain (R-Ariz.)--had intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Lincoln Savings & Loan in exchange for contributions from its owner, Charles H. Keating Jr.

Last February, at the same time that the committee closed its investigations of the four other senators and issued a mild rebuke to DeConcini and Riegle, it declared that it had found “substantial credible evidence” that Cranston’s conduct in the case violated Senate standards. The committee then began debating what type of punishment would be appropriate for Cranston.

For his part, Cranston has strongly denied any wrongdoing. Yet he acknowledges that he agreed to contact federal regulators for Keating while at the same time soliciting nearly $1 million in contributions from the thrift executive for his campaign and other political endeavors.

A final judgment in the Cranston case has been delayed in part because the committee’s three Democrats want to issue only a mild reprimand while the three Republicans on the panel insist that the evidence against the California senator is serious enough to warrant a hearing before the full Senate.

Sources said that Cranston has lobbied strenuously against a full Senate hearing.

As a result of the stalemate, many newspapers have editorialized against the committee in recent months and public interest groups have warned that it will be viewed as irrelevant if it fails to agree on a punishment for Cranston.

Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, a citizens’ lobby that brought the original complaint in the Keating case, said that the committee’s failure to agree on a punishment for Cranston has undermined its credibility.

“The U.S. Senate does not have a credible process for dealing with people who violate the rules,” he said. “Without a credible process, you have a classic double standard. Citizens have to comply with the rules; members of the Senate do not.”

Criticism of the Ethics Committee only intensified after the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose highly controversial nomination hearings caused many to question the competency of the Senate. Shortly after the Thomas hearings, President Bush accused Congress of being “a privileged class of rulers who stand above the law.”

In fact, members of the Senate Ethics Committee were preparing to quietly drop the Cranston case before the controversy erupted over the Thomas nomination. Afterward, Ethics Committee members decided to return to their deliberations in an effort to find a compromise.

In recent weeks, the Ethics Committee has been meeting regularly in closed session and sources said that a decision in the Cranston case is imminent. The panel also is known to be discussing possible changes in its own procedures.

Unfortunately, however, the committee members are just as divided in their opinions of how to fix the current system as they are over the Cranston case. In general, Democrats are proposing to increase the secrecy surrounding ethics cases, while Republicans want to put these cases in the hands of outside judges.

Helms and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) have introduced legislation that would replace the six senators on the Ethics Committee with six private citizens, three appointed by the majority party and three by the minority. At least two members of the panel would be former federal judges, and at least two would be former senators.

Likewise, Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) introduced legislation last week that would abolish the Ethics Committee and establish a procedure for hiring a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of misconduct against senators.

But Sen. Terry Sanford (D-N. C.), who recently became Ethics Committee chairman, stunned the critics recently when he proposed to give the senators on the panel more latitude to operate in secret. He told Media General newspapers that the panel had erred in hiring an outside counsel to investigate the Keating case and in opening its hearings.