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Thursday, July 12, 2001

Asked whether Condit, D-Calif., should resign, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said this week that was a "personal decision" between Condit and the voters in his district. "I am not here to suggest I understand what Gary Condit's personal decisions ought to be," Armey said.

House Standards of Official Conduct Committee Chairman Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., "is not commenting" at all about Condit's conduct or on whether his committee might take a look at that conduct, spokeswoman Sarah Sheldon said. And when pressed, Condit's own party leaders, including Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., now offer only lukewarm statements of support.

One veteran Capitol Hill operative said lawmakers have little to gain from wading into Condit's affair with missing intern Chandra Levy, but said politics is also a consideration. "Democrats aren't talking about him because Democrats don't like him. He has never been a reliable vote," that operative said of the comparatively conservative Democrat. "Republicans aren't talking about him because anything they say would be suspect. Condit is a Democrat."

But that committee's trepidations, observers said, reflects a general distaste in Congress to go after colleagues, though the House Ethics Manual instructs members to "uphold the Constitution, laws, and legal regulations of the United States and of all governments therein and never be a party to their evasion."

An Unfunny 'Joke'

"The ethics committee is totally a joke," Congressional Accountability Project Director Gary Ruskin said. "It is totally political, and this is a totally political process."

In fact, that committee has taken aggressive steps in recent years to keep decisions about ethics investigations in the hands of fellow politicians, and in 1997 the House adopted new rules that critics said would derail most investigations entirely.

In the wake of a series of embarrassing investigations, the House voted in the fall of 1997 to adopt the House Ethics Reform Task Force Report. It prevents outside parties from petitioning Congress for any ethics investigation based on anything learned from the press, among other things.

But former lawmakers said it was still possible that that committee might get involved. "I would say that they are going with a presumption of innocence unless something else comes out," said Robert F. Drinan, a former House Democrat and editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. "I think the ethics committee is waiting wisely to see how this thing plays out."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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