By the New Standard, Clinton Must Resign

President Clinton has to be a little uneasy watching Rep. David Bonior (D-Mich.) pursue his irresponsible and mean-spirited attack on Speaker Newt Gingrich. The House Ethics Committee, in its investigation into charges that Gingrich used tax deductible contributions to support his televised college course, did not find any violation of tax law or any effort to intentionally mislead the committee. Yet Bonior is continuing his relentless effort to demonize the speaker and politicize the ethics process in the House of Representatives. Unless bipartisan ethics reforms can be enacted to end such abuse, a new standard will be established by which the president’s own behavior will be judged.

If this new “Gingrich standard” set by Bonior is allowed to hold, the president would have no choice but to resign his office because of his role in helping the Democratic National Committee raise $1.5 million in illegal campaign contributions from foreign interests. In the case of Gingrich, we know that he made a mistake, but there is no evidence thus far that any law was broken. But Clinton has admitted that some of the money raised by his campaign operatives was illegal or improper and that he allowed many of these large contributors to benefit from access to the White House.

If successful, the ramifications of Bonior’s partisan and reckless attack on Gingrich go beyond how we should judge the behavior of the speaker or the president. Under the Gingrich standard, few if any members of Congress would be qualified to be speaker--not because of any unethical behavior, but because the ethics rules that members must abide by are vague, inconsistent and voluminous, making enforcement subject to abuse and easy to politicize. In the case of Gingrich, the Democrats have filed 73 ethics charges against him since 1994, and the Ethics Committee dismissed 72 of them. In 1989, Democrats filed 467 allegations against Gingrich, and the Ethics Committee dismissed all of them. No public official could withstand that kind of scrutiny.

Democrats will come to regret the day that Bonior failed to back off on his partisan assault after it became apparent that the speaker had done nothing wrong. That’s because many Democrats are engaged in the same kind of so-called “party-building” activities. Take, for example, the Democratic Leadership Council and its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. The DLC boasts one in 10 Democratic legislators as members, and it uses GOPAC, a political organization that supports Republican candidates, as its model for developing a farm team of “new Democrats” at the state and local level. The DLC established the Progressive Foundation, a nonprofit, tax exempt research and educational affiliate that is considered nonpartisan even though it operates out of the same building and shares staff with the DLC/PPI. Under Bonior’s Gingrich standard, any House Democrat involved in DLC/PPI party-building activities is unethical and unfit to serve in any leadership capacity in the House.

It is clear that the House’s code of conduct regulations, established in 1967, and the procedures for investigating alleged wrongdoing need reform. Self enforcement can never succeed in a political institution if members are allowed to abuse the process for partisan gain. To prevent the type of political abuse and interference such as that by Bonior, the bipartisan Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress in 1993 recommended the use of independent fact-finders for ethics investigations. As noted in the committee’s report: “Allowing outside individuals to be used in the process should enhance the public’s confidence in Congress. The public believes that internal self-discipline presents inherent conflicts for members who have difficulty judging their peers. Members would be better insulated from charges that they are inclined to protect colleagues and contrarily, from pressure to deliver excessively harsh punishments.”

Regrettably, the Democratic leadership that controlled the House at that time did not permit a vote on the joint committee’s recommendations. Throughout the 104th Congress, Democrats continued to resist a bipartisan review of the ethics process. Bonior and his allies have charted a course of vilification that not only will damage the speaker, but also will intensify scrutiny on the president and undermine the voters’ mandate that we work in a bipartisan fashion.