Yesterday, the Senate opened their arms and hearts to Sen. Ted Stevens while vulnerable Republicans simultaneously emptied their campaign coffers of his contributions. In an age reversal, the 90-year old Robert Byrd took on the role of PeeWee from Eight Men Out, crying to Stevens, “Say it ain’t so.” According to Dana Milbank’s take, many other senators expressed condolences and embraced the disgraced senator.

Present at the moment of Stevens’ senatorial embrace were a few reminders of why this scene is so appalling. Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter, both cast out, particularly Craig, for personal failings that in no way involved them using their position as senator to enrich themselves. Sen. Craig’s use of a public restroom as a “closet” led fellow Republicans to force him to retire. Sen. Vitter, who slept with prostitutes, was initially shunned and subsequently welcomed back into the Republican conference. (more…)

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I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog deriding the Senate Ethics Committee - and the frivolous complaints leveled by Sen. John Ensign against the current ethics process - for failing to investigate Senators who have allegedly violated the trust of their office (or the law, in the case of Sen. Ted Stevens). Thanks to the recently passed ethics bill, S.1, we finally get some transparency in the Ethics Committee and some statistical information about the committee’s activities. The Committee is now required to issue an annual report of activity. Here are some highlights:

Number of alleged violations received in 2007 (from any source): 95 (not including the 16 carried over from 2006)

Number of alleged violations dismissed in 2007 (including 7 cases carried over from 2006): 86 (71 for lack of jurisdiction; 15 for failure to provide sufficient facts)

Number of alleged violations which resulted in a preliminary hearing: 16 (includes 9 matters carried over from 2006 and 5 matters that have carried into 2008)

Number of alleged violations that resulted in adjudicatory review: 0

Number of alleged violations dismissed for lack of substantial merit: 11 (includes 7 matters carried over from 2006)

Number of matters resulting in disciplinary action: 0

Looking at those numbers I can reach a few conclusions. The first thing people will jump to is that the Ethics Committee is still conducting 5 investigations that have carried over from either 2006 or 2007. We know that retiring Sen. Pete Domenici is under investigation for his role in the Attorney purge scandal and that the committee may be investigating Sen. Larry Craig, also retiring, for his role in a Minneapolis airport bathroom (although I don’t understand what Senate Rule he violated). We can determine that 2 of these cases have carried over from 2006 by doing the math. We know that 16 cases were carried over from 2006 and that 14 of these were dismissed - 7 dismissed out of hand and 7 dismissed after a preliminary hearing - leaving us with 2 cases carried from 2006 that are still proceeding into 2008. (If you want to speculate as to who these Senators - or Senate aides - are please do so in the comments.)

The next thing to take from this report is that the Ethics Committee is very careful about which alleged violations it moves forward with. Despite the claims by Sen. Ensign that the Ethics Committee receives complaints on napkins and written in crayon and that this is damaging to Senators, we know now that of the 111 alleged violations received in 2007 and carried over from 2006, 86 were dismissed out of hand for lack of jurisdiction and for failure to provide sufficient facts. The Committee is only carrying over 5 cases from 2007, 2 of which we have determined are from 2006. Thus we can state that of the 111 alleged violations received or carried over, 5 have led to on-going investigations, a rate of 4.5%. It doesn’t sound like the Committee is having difficulty sifting through these complaints and it certainly doesn’t mean that every allegation submitted amounts to anything substantive.

I’ve included the most relevant information from the Committee’s first annual report on their activity in this post, but check the rest out for your self.

Despite the clear loopholes in the ethics bill’s lobbying and gift restrictions, the transparency provisions are beginning to funnel more information into the arms of the public. As more committees update their rules to comply with S.1, and we begin to receive the new reports and visit the Web site mandated under S.1, we will realize that the true legacy of the ethics bill will be the greater public access to information, allowing better citizen oversight and informed decision making, granted by the bill’s transparency provisions.

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Among millions of MySpace pages there are two pages that deserve a special note. That’s because they promote the DJ sounds of two sitting U.S. Senators who just happen to be involved in high profile corruption/sex scandals. According to his profile, Sen. Ted Stevens left his Appropriations chairmanship to start “DJing mashup sets both in my homestate of Alaska, around my adopted home of Washington DC, and in New York City.” Sen. Larry Craig on the other hand is more straightforward in his profile simply stating, “I am not gay.” Sen. Craig’s remix mash-up of his now infamous “I am not gay” speech with the Pete Shelley (of the Buzzcocks) track “Homosapien” also does not cut corners.

These hilarious social “netmocking” pages highlight how political stories and scandals can transcend the typical Hill rags and Alaska Daily News reporting into a social site with millions of users through innovative humor and a little bit of clever production. I’m not a huge MySpace/Facebook person but I don’t think I’ve ever seen fake politician pages made with such a clear focus while promoting the anonymous creators’ music. It probably doesn’t mark some great new trend in Web 2.0 or the Internet, but it is funny.

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Quick addition: USA Today reached the same opinion of Stevens today as well. 

According to public records and officials in Alaska, The Hill reports that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) "has quietly steered millions of federal dollars to a sportfishing industry group founded by Bob Penney, a longtime friend who helped the Alaska Republican profit from a lucrative land deal." While the FBI, and possibly a jury, will decide if Stevens has abused his official position it is clear enough that the senior Senator has acted in a manner that is unethical for a United States Senator and a powerful committee chairman (yesterday I wrote that Stevens is the Appropriations ranking member, he is actually ranking member on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, the second ranking member on Appropriations, and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member).

Despite the mounting evidence against Stevens he continues to have the support of the Republican leadership and has not been stripped of his committee assignments. Sen. Larry Craig was stripped of his committee assignments and forced to resign (although he is now reconsidering) because he engaged in potentially lewd conduct that was not of the party sanctioned variety. What is more important, sexual, or potentially sexual, behavior or the betrayal of trust and abuse of official, elected positions to gain money and aid your rich buddies? I’ve seen this scale before and I know which way it should be tilting.

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Over the past week or two I’ve learned two things: do not tap your foot in the bathroom and that prudery is more prevalent on Capitol Hill than a true ethical fiber. Apparently it is more worrying that a Senator may be a deeply closeted gay man than it is that another Senator is deeply tied into a massive FBI-led corruption investigation or that a senior congressman is being investigated for perhaps the shadiest earmark ever. I read this article by Norm Ornstein today and couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. With so many corruption scandals, not just tawdry sex scandals, “Who believes that the ethics committee will act proactively to investigate allegedly scandalous behavior before stories garner headlines or result in announcements by prosecutors that Senators are targets or subjects of investigations?”

Washington is currently awash in cases of alleged ethical misconduct. From Rep. William Jefferson to Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young there are over a dozen members who could have their cases investigated by a congressional ethics committee. As you can see from this video compilation created by Josh Marshall there is more than the enough for the ethics committees to choose from.

Of course, neither ethics committee actually does any investigating of ethics unless pushed by other members and even then it is unclear what can push an investigation to become meaningful. The one case, of all the cases that actually involve impropriety in the official actions of a Member, immediately referred to the Senate Ethics Committee was the case of Sen. Larry Craig. Personally, I can’t think of a single thing that Craig has done in violation of Senate Rules and therefore I don’t know why this case, as opposed to bribery investigations, is being referred to the Ethics Committee; although I can guess.

Sexual prudery rules on Capitol Hill, while true ethical misconduct goes unnoticed. Craig had his committee seats stripped within days after he was caught tapping his foot in a men’s bathroom. Sen. Stevens, under investigation for accepting bribes from Alaska oil execs, is still the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the Senate. Rep. Young, under investigation for trading earmarks for campaign contributions among other things, is still the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee and the second-ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the very committee from which he inserted various earmarks that have caught the attention of the FBI.

From Fanne Fox to Larry Craig, Capitol Hill has been equally appalled and enthralled by political sex scandals. Maybe it’s time they get their priorities straight and focus on the real unethical muck going on behind doors in Congress and not bathroom doors in Minneapolis. It’s time for congressmen to stop pointing their noses up and instead point them down into some papers and get to investigating the actual problems in their own house.

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