Bennie Thompson would hide ethics complaints from public

The Ethics Committee ordered Bennie Thompson to repay the cost of his Caribbean trips that were found to violate House Ethics Rules, but said they could not prove he knew corporate funding was behind it so they didn't punish him otherwise.

But we still don't know if there will be any decision on the other items pending against Thompson.

1) Allegation he used a House Homeland Security Committee hearing to shake down lobbyists for campaign contributions
2) Whether as Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, Thompson used the organization as a pass through to hide corporate sponsorships of congressional junket in Tunica
3) Is there anything wrong with corporate lobbyists paying a member of Thompson's staff money to throw a party that honors Thompson at which the lobbyist/sponsors will attend and get access to Thompson?

And if Bennie Thompson had his way, we might never know. Last week Peter Flaherty from the National Legal and Policy Center spoke on "On Deadline with Sid Salter" about the efforts of several accused or investigated congressmen to shut down some of the new ethics procedures to keep allegations and investigations from the public arena. Brian Perry wrote in the Madison County Journal that one of these congressmen was actually goodtime Bennie Thompson.

The national press is talking about this story as well, including the Washington Post.

The newly created Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog set up to review and, if warranted, forward ethics complaints to the official House ethics committee for further action, has taken its mission seriously. Too seriously, it seems, for the comfort of some lawmakers. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), joined by 19 other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, last week introduced a resolution that would essentially neuter the ethics board, making it more difficult for OCE to launch investigations and inform the public of its findings.

Ms. Fudge said in a statement that she acted to make the process fairer; OCE, she said, "is currently the accuser, judge and jury." It's not too hard to imagine other motivations for Ms. Fudge's concerns. Her chief of staff, Dawn Kelly Mobley, was admonished by the ethics committee for her role in helping a group of Black Caucus members improperly obtain an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean -- this when Ms. Mobley was the ethics lawyer for Ms. Fudge's predecessor, the late Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and Ms. Tubbs Jones was chairing the ethics committee. Four of the lawmakers who went on the Caribbean trip signed on to Ms. Fudge's resolution: Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Donald Payne (D-N.J.) and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.).

Undercutting OCE's authority would be backsliding. This change would have prevented release of OCE's findings in the Caribbean trip. That Ms. Fudge and friends fear their power to launch an investigation says less about the new ethics office than it does about the sponsors of this misguided resolution.