When the Democrats retook Congress in 2006, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promised the "to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history." So how's that promise working out? Let's start with four developments from the last week:» Over the weekend, it was revealed that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., had nominated his girlfriend to be a U.S. attorney in his home state. Baucus is a driving force behind the drive to adopt Obamacare in the Senate.
» On Friday, it was reported that the House Ethics Committee had opened an investigation of Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Staffers on Thompson's committee say he tried to regulate the credit card industry -- outside his panel's legislative purview -- to extort campaign donations from the companies facing regulation.
» Pelosi promised to make congressional office expendiavailable on the Internet. Concurrent with the appearance of the new Web site detailing the information, the amount of information previously available to the public has been significantly restricted. Pelosi then claimed falsely that this was a victory for transparency.
» Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Diane Feinstein, D-Cal., offered an amendment to a new press shield law that provides legal protections only to professional journalists employed by established mainstream media -- a blatant attempt to curb independent, often blog-based reporting like that of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe in their hidden-camera expose of ACORN.
Does that sound honest, open and ethical to you? And this is just what happened in the past week. Many other Democratic scandals remain unresolved.
Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., is still head of the House Ways and Means Committee -- which writes the nation's tax laws -- despite millions of dollars' worth of admitted tax evasion. And it's been exactly 500 days since Sen. Chris Dodd, D-C chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, promised to release the mortgage paperwork for his Capitol Hill town house. Dodd got a sweetheart mortgage deal from the CEO of failed subprime lender Countrywide he was supposed to be overseeing. That's just two more examples.
In 2006, when the Democrats were returned to power by voters, corruption among Republican leaders such as Reps. Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney and Mark Foley was understandably a major issue.
Democrats successfully argued in the campaign that GOP corruption was enough to turn over the reigns of power to a different party. If held to their own standards, what will Democrats' argument for remaining in power be in 2010?