Hastert to Move to End Ethics Impasse, Aides Say

Sometime this week, the most powerful man in the House of Representatives is expected to take the rare and politically painful step of acknowledging he made a mistake.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is convinced that he must act quickly to end a messy impasse with House Democrats that has paralyzed the chamber’s ethics committee, his aides said.

Intensifying the standoff’s political fallout is that it has continued as questions have mounted about the conduct of the House’s second-most-powerful man, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Hastert is expected to move to limit the damage. Aides said he would probably allow a floor vote to rescind rule changes for the ethics committee that he had pushed through the chamber on a party-line vote in January and might offer a new package to replace them.

Democrats have contended that the rule changes made it virtually impossible for the committee to open and conduct investigations.

Senior GOP aides said a reversal by Hastert on the rule changes would be politically costly in the short term. But the aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it would rob Democrats of a potent political weapon by resurrecting the House ethics process.

Some GOP lawmakers agree.

“I said to him, ‘You’re the only one who can resolve this thing,’ ” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), recounting a conversation he had with Hastert last week. “He knows that. He knows it is in his lap.”

LaHood said he also told a senior Hastert aide: “You have to pivot, you have to eat some crow, you’ve got to get it behind you.”

Hastert, however, is expected to face some resistance today when, aides said, he plans to put his proposal before his GOP colleagues at their weekly strategy session.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he intended to urge caution.

“I’m going to be very, very cautious about making any amendments to the rules that we already approved that were done for the right reasons,” King said.

Such concessions to one’s political opponents, King said, “often just attract another political attack. We’re seeking to negotiate with people whose motive is political assassination.”

Hastert’s dilemma underscores the potential for political overreach that the GOP has faced since strengthening its majorities in the House and Senate and winning reelection for President Bush.

Less than six months after their impressive victories, Republicans have found that some of their most high-profile stances have failed to win strong public support in the polls: Bush’s plan to restructure Social Security, Congress’ intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, and the determination among Senate Republicans to end the Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees.

Still, the only moves Republicans have retreated from publicly have been rule changes widely interpreted as efforts to shelter DeLay.

Republicans have insisted that the changes were meant to protect DeLay from what many GOP stalwarts view as politically motivated investigations into his travels, association with lobbyists and fundraising.

In January, however, House Republicans repealed a party rule they had recently adopted that would have allowed DeLay -- or any Republican in leadership -- to keep his position, even if indicted.

The rule triggered unfavorable editorials and criticism from congressional watchdog groups, who viewed it as an attempt to shield DeLay from possible prosecution by a Texas district attorney who had indicted fundraisers with ties to the majority leader. By January, DeLay recommended that Republicans rescind the rule.

At the same time, Hastert pushed through three changes to the way the ethics committee initiated and carried out investigations. The changes were made without consulting members of the committee.

“Why did they do it that way? Because they could,” said one exasperated GOP congressman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Democrats quickly retaliated, refusing to allow the ethics committee to organize unless the rules were rescinded. Democrats contended that it was better for the House to have no ethics process than one that, they said, made it so much harder to conduct investigations of members.

One of the rules requires a majority vote to start an investigation -- a potentially significant obstacle on a panel with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.

Faced with the Democratic revolt, Hastert last week allowed the committee’s chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), to propose a compromise. Hastings offered a partial rewriting of the rules in the form of a memorandum of understanding between him and Rep. Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat, coupled with a Republican promise to set up a committee to investigate questions about DeLay’s conduct.

Mollohan rejected the offer, insisting on a formal repeal of all the rule changes.

That left Hastert with little room to maneuver, analysts said.

“Hastert is facing a very sensitive environment where he is resolving a very difficult public situation,” said David Winston, a Republican pollster. “There are moments when he probably feels like he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

LaHood said many Republican lawmakers were frustrated at the prospect of being asked -- for the second time this year -- to roll back a vote that had proved politically unpopular.

“People fell on their sword” when they rescinded the rule in January concerning possible indictments of GOP leaders, LaHood said. “Now it’s the same thing.”

He and others are concerned about negative publicity that the rule changes involving the ethics committee have generated, LaHood said.

“My hometown [newspaper] in Peoria has written three editorials about this -- every editorial writer in the country is writing about this,” he said.

Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) said he was disturbed by the leadership’s handling of the issue.

Last week Jones became a cosponsor of a Democratic resolution that would have essentially rescinded the rule changes.

Jones said a handful of colleagues privately congratulated him for his action. And he said it was an easy choice for him to become a cosponsor of the resolution. It has not to come up for a vote.

“If you’re going to have the confidence of the American people, then the ethics committee needs to be independent,” he said. “This is about the integrity of the House. We need to go back to the [previous] rules, as written. Then we start the committee functioning and we start moving forward.”

Asked whether he feared the political embarrassment of so public a retreat, Jones said he did not. “When you do what’s right,” he said, “it is not embarrassing -- whether you are the speaker of the House or a little foot soldier like me.”

Mollohan said he would welcome a move by Hastert to cancel the rules.

“But the test,” he said, “is that this has to be bipartisan. If you want to constitute the ethics committee, you have to do it through a bipartisan effort.”