We hope Dems do better on ethics reform

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Giddy with midterm election victory euphoria, Democrats, particularly in the House of Representatives, are loudly trumpeting plans for a better world, not the least ambitious of which is ethics reform and limiting the excesses of lobbying.

We desperately wish success in this endeavor to future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of course, but pardon us if we don’t cheer just yet. We’ve heard that song before.

There were similar lofty pronouncements made when Democratic winners flooded in to fill the political vacuum created by the Watergate scandals, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace in 1974.

History repeated itself a dozen years ago when Republicans engineered a sweep of both houses of Congress. They, too, saw themselves as reformers who would save us from the Democratic leadership’s excesses of power.

And just a few months ago, after the Jack Abramoff lobbyist scandals broke and Republican congressmen started taking up residence in prison or hiring lawyers to stay out of jail, the GOP leadership in Congress took up tough-sounding ethics reform measures.

But nothing substantive happened. The hearty reform stew was watered down to a very thin gruel, indeed.

So GOP senators and congressmen ventured onto re-election battlegrounds with no armor at all against an electorate disgusted by corruption and hypocrisy with no end in sight.

Now does the song sound familiar?

There’s only so much a new Democratic leader can accomplish with a slim majority and a Republican president who will be taking his veto pen out of mothballs.

But what Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues can do is something Republicans, now to their chagrin, foolishly failed to do — use their new broom to sweep lobbyist excesses out of the House.

During the campaign season, Pelosi leaned heavily on the so-called Republican “culture of corruption,” and she vowed that if her party took control in January, the first order of business on Day One would be ethics reform.

Lobbyists won’t like the changes she has in mind. Neither will a lot of members of Congress grown accustomed to perks lobbyists have been eager to bestow all these years — with no strings attached, of course.

Pelosi intends to change the chamber’s rules to reflect the provisions of her Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006, which would prohibit House members from accepting gifts and travel from lobbyists or from organizations that employ lobbyists.

The act sounds promising, and has already been test-fired in the House, where it lost by only three votes.

Pelosi would prohibit congressmen and their staff members from using corporate jets for travel taken as part of their official duties, and would prevent them from taking anything of value from lobbyists, including meals, tickets and entertainment (including, of course, Tom DeLay-type golf resort trips to Scotland).-

The bill would crack down on lobbyists directly by creating an Office of Public Integrity that would scrutinize their periodic filings.

The new rules would apply as soon as they were approved by a simple House majority.

Similar reform in the Senate would be tougher, even though the future Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid declared that ethics reform “will be a priority,” since a two-thirds majority is needed to modify Senate rules.

But if the measure is successful in the House, and the public finally gets a whiff of true reform, perhaps senators will have to follow suit.

The Pelosi bill is sure to face opposition, and at least some of its provisions will probably be weakened before it comes to a vote, but it is a great way to begin the healing.