REDISCOVERING ETHICS

After more than a year of inactivity, the House Ethics Committee has gotten back to its job of investigating the behavior of the chambers members. The committee announced last week it was launching investigations of two representatives, a Republican and a Demo-crat. Although it is encouraging that the committee has decided not to remain irrelevant, the timing of the announcement days before an unprecedented FBI raid on the Democrat’s congressional office raises questions.

Last week, the committee announced it was launching investigations of Reps. Bob Ney, an Ohio Republican, and William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat. In an affidavit unsealed Sunday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation accused Rep. Jefferson of taking bribes from a Kentucky businessman to help a small technology company win contracts with federal agencies and with businesses and governments in West Africa.

According to the affidavit, he was taped taking $100,000 from an FBI informant and FBI officials found $90,000 in plastic containers and wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer at Rep. Jefferson’s home in an August search.

On Saturday, the FBI raided Rep. Jefferson’s office on the Hill, the first time the bureau had ever taken such a step. Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress raised concerns that the raid violated the constitutional separation of powers.

“Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert said. “Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years.”

The spectacular nature of this unprecedented step in an investigation by the Justice Department has had at least one effect: It has pushed the problems of Rep. Ney out of the spotlight. Rep. Ney is being investigated on accusations he accepted gifts, travel and campaign contributions from lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The committee will look at any relationship between these gifts and Rep. Ney’s actions in Congress. He is also the subject of a federal corruption inquiry.

Congressional leaders, Republican and Democrat, were right to doubt the necessity of the search of Rep. Jefferson’s office. Now they should go a step further and invite Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose department oversees the FBI, to explain why the raid was necessary when there was already plenty of evidence of serious wrongdoing.