Despite pictures and audio clips of corporate sponsorship, House Dems may exonerate Bennie Thompson's travel

The National Legal and Policy Center comments on a Roll Call report that the House Ethics Committee may clear Bennie Thompson and others who attended a carribean junket with corporate sponsors in violation of House Ethics rules.

If this is true, we are not surprised. When we provided photographs and audio recordings from the trip at the request of the Committee in May, we made clear that our willingness to do so was not an endorsement of the Ethics Committee process, which has again proven to be a joke.

Rep. G. K. Butterfield (D-NC), a member of the CBC, who was appointed just days after the CBC publicly objected to the probe, heads the investigation of the trip. He went on the same trip in a previous year.

Because the violations of House Rules by Rangel and Co. were so clear-cut, the Committee maintains its reputation for ineffectiveness. The Rules against corporate sponsorship of multi-day Congressional travel and hospitality were tightened at the behest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself in the wake of the Jack Abramoff golf trip to Scotland. The new Rules apparently do not trump partisan and racial double standards.

If it will not do anything about five members of Congress taking a junket to sunny St. Maarten, courtesy of Citigroup and other corporations, how is it ever going to deal the complicated cases of John Murtha’s “pay to play” empire and Charles Rangel’s tax evasion and hiding of assets?

The answer is that it can’t and probably will not.