Anger Growing in Check Scandal : Public opinion: Many voters across the country also express cynicism about lawmakers’ overdrafts. Some say the controversy is being blown out of proportion.

With 355 current or former members of Congress in the dock, the court of public opinion began trying the congressional bad-check case Saturday and, from small towns to big cities, the initial reactions indicated that the jurors were inclined to be tough.

“It gets me real mad that someone who makes that amount of money would be bouncing checks and (is) not being penalized like the average guy,” said John Lamoreux, a 24-year-old ex-Marine from Swampscott, Mass.

“It’s another example of corruption in Congress,” said Fred Caufield, a retired retailer from Phoenix. “They have low morals. They write their own rules. . . . I doubt their constituents will vote them all out, although I think that would probably be the best thing for the country.”

The reactions were typical of those heard across the nation from voters asked to voice their opinions about disclosures that past and present House member have written thousands of bad checks at their now-closed private bank.

Although no laws were broken, no taxpayer funds were lost and few checks were actually returned unpaid by the casually run House bank, those subtleties appeared to be lost on many of the voters who expressed their outrage in interviews across the country.

Some, such as Giselle Deschenes of Salem, Mass., expressed surprise that the officials entrusted to get the country “out of its financial mess can’t seem to take care of their own finances.”

Others echoed the cynicism of Bob Vendt, manager of a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in New Orleans, who said no one should be surprised when politicians “do things wrong . . . it’s in the nature of their business.”

A number of citizens said any congressman found to have bounced lots of checks should himself be bounced out of office come November, when all 435 congressional seats will be at stake.

Still others said that while the scandal made them angry, they thought it was being blown out of proportion when compared to more important issues such as the government’s seeming inability to do anything about the lingering recession.

And while they expressed different degrees of anger and cynicism, dozens of citizens interviewed by Times reporters all voiced strong disapproval of the “Rubbergate Affair”--with most saying it was likely to affect the way they vote this fall.

“I would hope it would ignite the politics and make the people not vote for these officials in November. I won’t be voting for them,” said Terry Lyon, 37, an engineer from Lancaster, Calif. “It is preposterous we allow them the authority to balance the budget when they can’t balance their checkbook.”

“I would be reluctant to vote for those candidates who abused the system,” said Bob Fish, a 46-year-old warehouse worker, as he sipped coffee in a cafe in Portland, Ore. “If they do it once, they will do it again. It’s human nature. If you don’t get caught the first time, you try it again.”

“I think people will vote against them regardless of who their opponents are,” said John Breen of St. Paul, Minn. “They could have Donald Duck running against them, and I’d vote for Donald.”

Talk-radio stations across the country reported receiving similar complaints.

“This has caused the most angry reaction among my listeners. . . . People are very, very angry,” said David Tyree, host of a nightly talk show on WWL, a radio station in New Orleans. “Over the past week, we have easily received hundreds of calls on this.”

In Minneapolis, 56% of the callers to radio station WCCO’s “Dark Star” program said that Democratic Rep. Gerry Sikorski should resign following his admission that he and his wife wrote 670 bad checks totaling $119,966 on his House bank account. The callers were evenly split over whether Republican Rep. Vin Weber, who wrote 125 bad checks totaling nearly $48,000, should also quit, according to a station official.

In Seattle, radio station KIRO polled listeners with the question: “Would you vote for a House member who bounced checks?” It reported that 49% of the 943 callers said no, 14% said yes and 35% said it would depend on the number and amount of checks involved.

More-scientific national surveys tended to corroborate those results.

A poll released Saturday by Newsweek magazine indicated that nearly eight out of 10 Americans would probably not vote to reelect any representative who was among the worst abusers of the House bank, which was closed last October after the overdrafts were disclosed by the General Accounting Office.

A recent Los Angeles Times poll found that just 12% of the respondents still had a “great deal” of confidence in Congress, while 40% had only some confidence and 45% had little or none. The survey was conducted between Jan. 31 and Feb. 13--after initial reports of the overdrafts had circulated but before new disclosures that 355 current or former members of Congress had written bad checks over a 39-month period investigated by the House Ethics Committee.

On Friday, responding to a growing chorus of demands to unmask the bad-check writers, the House voted unanimously to release the list of all 296 current and 59 former members who overdrew their accounts. Democratic leaders had tried unsuccessfully to restrict disclosure to only the 24 worst offenders.

The Democratic leadership had argued that while members who clearly abused the free overdraft protection they received from the bank should be exposed, others who wrote an occasional overdraft through negligence or clerical error should not be tarred with the same brush.

Some members overdrew their accounts knowingly but did so with the knowledge that extending the overdraft protection to members had been the bank’s unwritten but common practice since at least 1951.

Some of the citizens interviewed by The Times said they were withholding their judgments about individual House members for now and would be inclined to forgive them if their overdrafts were only the result of an occasional mistake.

“I’d like to know more about it,” said Duane Barnhart, 45, a self-employed cartoonist interviewed as he was digging into a hamburger at a MacDonald’s restaurant in Phoenix. “I’d like to know the extenuating circumstances. . . . If it’s a problem with automatic deposits, that’s one thing.”

“It depends on what their attitude is, whether they apologize sincerely or just offer excuses,” said Lita Underwood, 70, of Los Angeles. “I had more faith in them before and now I have lost respect for them, and I would like a reason to regain that.”

But in most cases, the anger voiced by potential voters overwhelmed any tendency toward leniency. Moreover, the sense of outrage seemed to bear out the congressional leadership’s worst fear: that Americans suffering through a long recession are in no mood to forgive lawmakers who make more than $129,000 a year and enjoy perks and privileges but still do not balance their personal checkbooks.

“Our leaders are irresponsible and arrogant,” said Jeanette Schaevitz, a 70-year-old resident of Chevy Chase, Md. “The sloshing around of money and privilege is sickening, just sickening.”

“Make them pay for every bounced check and then get them out of Congress. They broke the law. Disclose every single one, even for one dollar. . . . I’m angry,” declared Cindy Romanelli, a paralegal from Philadelphia on vacation in Anaheim.

Although the names of the House members who overdrew their accounts are not scheduled to be released until later this month, the names of some, including most of the 24 most serious offenders, already have been leaked. And the list of lawmakers who have voluntarily confessed before their identities are released has grown to more than 120.

Most representatives spent the weekend in their districts, apologizing to voters or otherwise trying to explain the sloppy House banking procedures and other circumstances that caused them to overdraw their personal accounts.

But if the polls and interviews conducted in more than two dozen towns and cities across the country are any indication, most of the lawmakers will have their work cut out for them.

“They are mostly out for what they can get for themselves,” said Jerry Potosky, a retired civil servant from Washington, D.C. “I’m fed up with it. You vote and then you think: ‘What’s the use?’ They should just throw them all in jail.”

This story was prepared with contributions from Times staff writers Jonathan Gaw in Los Angeles, Vivien Lou Chen and Rose Kim in Orange County, researcher Tracy Shryer in Chicago, and special correspondents John Laidler in Boston, Garry Boulard in New Orleans, Laura Laughlin in Phoenix, Rhonda Hillbery in St. Paul, Minn., Stuart Wasserman in Portland, Ore., and Rose Ellen O’Connor in Washington.