Avalanche Warning

Boy, one more cave-in by the Republicans and we'll have to alert the National Forestry Service:

House Republican leaders, acknowledging that ethics disputes are taking a heavy toll on the party's image, decided yesterday to rescind a controversial rule change that led to the three-month shutdown of the ethics committee, according to officials who participated in the talks.

Republicans touched off a political uproar in January by changing a rule that had required the ethics committee to continue considering a complaint against a House member if there was a deadlock between the committee's five Republicans and five Democrats. The January change reversed this, calling for automatic dismissal of an ethics complaint when a deadlock occurs.

There's more to it than that. Republicans under Tom DeLay also packed the Ethics Committee with ideologues, all of whom have either received money from his PAC or given money to his legal defense fund. This virtually assured a deadlock in cases involving DeLay. So when Republican flacks tried to innocently say "DeLay is offering an investigation, but the Democrats don't want it," you know where you can shove that.

The GOP didn't get to where they are by being stupid. They know (at least some of them do) how big a drag DeLay is on their hopes to cling to power. The sooner he's off the front page, the better, as far as they're concerned. Of course Democrats don't want that, but as members of the reality-based community, we do hope for a fair system of ethics oversight for Congressmen. So an investigation into DeLay will certainly plow forward once the ethics rules are restored.

With all of these political sinking ships, from Social Security to the nuclear option to this, for the first time in a long while, it's actually a good time to be a Democrat. But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, as they say, and we must continue to push back against this shortsighted agenda for our country.