Op-Ed: Is Pelosi double dealing with ethics?

A partisan Democratic Party has lost its way in a swamp of rotting campaign pledges promising ethical government that are sunk in the odoriferous sludge of scandals.

Three-and-one-half years of Democratic reign in congress that oversaw the near total collapse of our economy, is also rife with the stench of bad ethics. While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for the heads of Republicans with a never-ending spate of congressional investigations, she has again displayed her lack of fundamental ethics as well as her partisan political nature by allowing Rep.Chuck Rangel to keep his chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee despite continuing ethics problems. Rangel failed to disclose at least $800,000 in assets and income since 2002. The latest partisan Pelosi misdeed comes amid an ongoing House ethics investigation into other questionable acts by the New York congressman, including his failure to report income from and pay taxes on a villa in the Dominican Republic and his ties to a real-estate developer who leased him four rent-stabilized apartments in New York. Rangle, who is one of the Democrats central to writing federal tax policies, has summed up his unethical behavior and history of not paying his own taxes as “accounting mistakes and simple oversights.” It seems that in the Pelosi view, those Democrats who wish to raise our taxes are not just exempt from her wrath, but will be retained as chief taxmen within her congressional regime. Many Americans are questioning whether this meets the ethics standard Pelosi talked about when Democrats took control of the House and she bragged about ending a “culture of corruption” in Washington. Rangel is far from being Pelosi’s only ethics problem. The ethics panel is currently looking into several Democrats, including another with close ties to Pelosi. Democratic Representative and Pelosi friend , Jack Murtha, chairman of the key Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, is also under investigation. According to a recent Newsweek article by Holly Bailey, in June, the ethics committee announced it was “looking into ties between lawmakers and the PMA Group, a lobbying firm with ties to Murtha, whose clients received millions of dollars in defense earmarks in recent years. Several of those contracts were inserted into bills by Murtha, who has denied wrongdoing.” While Pelosi is quite blind to unethical behavior on her side of the aisle, many remember the repeated demands by Pelosi and other Democratic leaders for DeLay to be ousted when he was under an ethics cloud for his ties to corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff and questionable fundraising tactics. ‘Ethically unfit,’ Pelosi said of DeLay back in 2004 as quoted in the Newsweek article.