The Iceberg’s Tip Fails to Puncture Newt

You’ve got to feel for those two Republican members of the House Ethics Committee who now admit that they were “persuaded” by their leadership to issue a statement supporting Newt Gingrich’s reelection as speaker. It must have been awkward, given Gingrich’s confession that he lied to them: “In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the committee.”

Also, there is the embarrassment of rendering judgment before the full Ethics Committee has considered the matter, let alone released the special counsel’s report. Even Gingrich, after being confronted with that report, confessed that he “brought down on the people’s House a controversy which could weaken the faith people have in their government.” But evidently not the faith that Republicans have in their speaker.

Given the odds that Gingrich would retain power over everything from the size of their office space to serving up their district’s most delectable pork, this abject betrayal of responsibility was predictable. Heck, most good Democrats would do the same, which is why the very notion of a House Ethics Committee is an oxymoron.

In the time-honored practice of Congress, ethics investigations have aimed at exonerating members of charges the leadership thought best left unexamined but which had somehow slipped into public view. That was the sacred tradition until Gingrich, then an ornery backbencher, went after Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in a manner that broke centuries of respect for civility, if not honesty, among the honorable gentlemen. As Wright warned after being forced to resign, “Gingrich is like an arsonist who torches the building without supposing that the flames could consume his own bedroom.”

But Gingrich evidently assumed that a double standard would protect him from the abrogation of the very rules he used to destroy Wright. His is the familiar arrogance of the true believer who insists that the end--his rise to power--justifies whatever means are necessary.

As the new speaker, Gingrich appointed four Republican allies to the Ethics Committee who were compromised by having received money from him, including the chairwoman, Nancy L. Johnson ofConnecticut, who previously worked with GOPAC, Gingrich’s political action committee, the focus of the ethics violations. For two years she stonewalled investigations into the score of charges against Gingrich, managing to quash all but one. Finally, in exchange for committee Democrats agreeing to drop investigation of far more serious charges against Gingrich, Johnson reluctantly appointed a special counsel to look only into the use of tax exempt funds to pay for Gingrich’s nationally televised and highly politicized college course.

This was hardly the most egregious of the charges against Gingrich. Certainly the role of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Donald G. Jones in influencing the all-important Telecommunications Act had more serious consequences.

One of Murdoch’s companies threw a $4.5-million book advance Gingrich’s way while Congress debated measures impacting Murdoch’s profits. Jones, a major GOPAC contributor and cable TV investor, bragged of operating out of the speaker’s office for eight months and boasted that he influenced “actions on national strategic directives on huge matters.” For an outsider with business before Congress to have that sort of access is a clear violation of House rules, yet the special counsel was not permitted to investigate.

Nor was the special counsel jempowered to examine the dozens of violations of the election code by GOPAC, as charged by the Federal Election Commission. It is a continuing scandal that the entire range of ethical and electoral violations leveled against the speaker have not been turned over to the special counsel, as has been done in the Whitewater investigation.

But limited as he was to the one complaint relating to Gingrich’s college course, former federal prosecutor James M. Cole nailed the speaker for misusing tax-exempt funds. Worse yet, when confronted with the facts, the speaker submitted false information to the committee and, shades of Watergate, once again the cover-up proved to be more serious than the crime.

Even if Gingrich holds onto his speakership, his is now a deeply compromised leadership, all the more so when it comes to pressing ethical charges against the Clinton White House. One would think that even Gingrich would find it difficult to ever again appear shocked over someone else’s dissembling, but that underestimates the arrogance of the man. As one who walked out on his wife when she had cancer and then made a career of preaching family values, he will no doubt find a way to sustain his skewed sense of moral outrage.