The House is quietly attempting to revive a plan to tackle corruption in Congress by creating an outside commission that would independently monitor the conduct of members, but the group may not be as independent as an earlier proposal envisioned.
The effort to bring the plan back to life comes nearly three months after skittish House Democrats forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to kill a proposal to form an independent ethics commission that could receive ethics complaints from anybody, not just members of Congress.
The plan appealed to watchdog groups that believe Congress does a poor job at policing itself because few members ever file complaints. But lawmakers feared it would open a floodgate of politically motivated ethics complaints.
A group of House lawmakers headed by Rep. Michael E. Capuano, D-Mass., is now weighing the idea of an independent ethics commission that would follow the tradition of accepting complaints only from members of the House. The commission could initiate investigations based on complaints made by watchdog groups but would not be compelled to do so.
“Rep. Capuano continues to work on a set of recommendations relative to the establishment of an independent ethics enforcement entity,” said his spokeswoman, Alison Mills.
According to sources familiar with the preliminary discussions, the commission would not have subpoena power but could request it from the House ethics committee, a bipartisan panel comprising 10 lawmakers who now monitor the conduct of House members and mete out punishment to offenders. The commission would have to finish an investigation within a set period of time, rather than leaving it open indefinitely, as the House ethics committee is allowed to do.
The new plan will likely attract more support in the House, but not from the outside groups that have long demanded the ability to file formal ethics complaints.
“Any independent ethics committee has to allow for outside ethics groups to file in order for it to be worthwhile,” said Naomi Seligman-Steiner, spokeswoman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of several watchdog groups clamoring for an independent commission. “They might be between a rock and a hard place, but they did promise the American public in the last election they would fix this.”
The watchdog groups, though, played a role in sinking the earlier plan that would have allowed them to file complaints because they opposed a requirement that would have compelled them to disclose their donors beforehand.
