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The House ethics committee changed (by a vote of the House) its rules recently from requiring an investigation if there's a 50:50 vote split to requiring a 51% majority to launch an investigation. Because the committee is required to have equal representation of the parties, the 51% majority means that an investigation can't be launched unless at least one Republican agrees with the Dems, or one Dem with Republicans on anything that's a partisan issue.
The Democrats have chosen to simply shut down the ethics committee altogether in protest over the rule change.
Basically, they are accusing the GOP of making this change in order to shield DeLay from further investigation.
One might say that the Dems were trying to force embarrassing investigations of Majority Leader DeLay. But consider that the make up the committee was recently changed by the House Speaker (Hastert) to replace two GOP members with Reps who are considered stronger party loyalists.
It's all a bunch of maneuvering, of course. Ugly party politics.
But the bottom line question is whether or not the people are better served by a system that allows the minority party to force investigations or by a system that allows the majority party to block them?
Maybe a different system is required.
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quote:But the bottom line question is whether or not the people are better served by a system that allows the minority party to force investigations or by a system that allows the majority party to block them?
I'm very torn on this. I can see strong arguments both ways.
However, if the new rule is better, perhaps waiting until the majority leader isn't under (edit: potential) investigation would be a better time to implement this.
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