In Washington, Watchdogs Bear Watching
By BRODY MULLINS, The Wall Street Journal
May 10, 2005
Amid the many attacks on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, some of the loudest come from an organization called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. To the average listener, that sounds like a nonpartisan group interested only in good government.
But it isn't that simple.
The "Citizens" behind the group have strong partisan ties. Board members of the group, including former Clinton White House pollster Mark Penn, have contributed $340,000 to Democratic causes in the past four years and $6,000 to Republicans. Melanie Sloan, executive director of the group, is a former aide to Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.
Details like that don't typically appear when news organizations quote Ms. Sloan's attacks on Mr. DeLay, as they have done some 140 times in the past two years. And that is a big source of frustration for congressional Republicans, who grouse that attention to such groups represents a third source of hostile fire on top of daily fusillades from overt Democratic partisans and from the media.
"These groups are run by former Democratic Hill staffers or candidates, they are being funded by liberal heavy-hitters like George Soros and they are constantly attacking House Republicans as part of a well-organized political strategy," says DeLay spokesman Dan Allen.
Indeed, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is hardly alone when it comes to government "watchdogs" in Washington. Since 1999, directors at the most-active government watchdogs have contributed more than $1 million to Democratic campaigns, and just a few thousand to Republican coffers.
Ms. Sloan has pursued the House Republican leader in her two years at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. "Since I started, the main thing I wanted to do was to go after Tom DeLay," she says. "DeLay is my top target."
A former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ms. Sloan engineered an ethics complaint against Mr. DeLay in the House, asked the Internal Revenue Service to audit a pair of Mr. DeLay's fund-raising committees and sued the Federal Election Commission to obtain more information about possible financial ties between Mr. DeLay and a Kansas utility. She also urged the Justice Department to investigate Mr. DeLay for his role in promising fund-raising help to a family member of Nick Smith, at the time a Republican House representative from Michigan, in exchange for Mr. Smith's vote on Medicare legislation.
Her strategy has raised questions among some of her counterparts. She "uses different approaches and tactics at times than others do," says Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, a Washington group that aims to curb the sway of money on politics. Mr. Wertheimer says he hasn't decided "whether at times some of these tactics are helpful, or may be counterproductive."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was founded two years ago by Norm Eisen, a lawyer, and Louis Mayberg, the head of the Bethesda, Md., mutual-fund firm ProFunds. Both say they worried that too many decisions by politicians in Washington were based on contributions. Once the founders hired Ms. Sloan, the organization's made Mr. DeLay a priority.
In 2003 Ms. Sloan drafted a sharply worded ethics complaint about Mr. DeLay's fund-raising and political activities and asked a retiring Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Chris Bell (D., Texas), to file it with the House Ethics panel. She says she drafted the complaint because Mr. Bell had no lawyer in his office.
When the Ethics Committee was slow to take up the complaint, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics badgered the panel's leadership by running newspaper advertisements in their home districts. Eventually the committee acted, admonishing Mr. DeLay but also criticizing Mr. Bell for running afoul of the chamber's rules for decorum, by the severe characterization of Mr. DeLay in the complaint. The House Rules Committee has yet to act on Mr. DeLay's request that the panel hold Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in contempt for its role in the matter ...
... The most recent House ethics investigation into Mr. DeLay has barely gotten off the ground, since House Republicans agreed to abandon recent rules changes to end a partisan stalemate over the ethics panel's organization. But Ms. Sloan already is declaring victory, of a sort.
"One of the main things that we wanted to do was get people focused on Tom DeLay and ethics," she says. "People are paying attention. We have won that battle."
