Washington — Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is trying to get voters to hold the Republican Party responsible for the "culture of corruption" he sees in Washington, but Dean is getting virtually no help from fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives.

In the year since then-Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) filed a complaint that triggered the current ethics investigation of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), not one Democrat has initiated another complaint despite the pleas of outside watchdog groups.

EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR

House Democrats are victims of "a kind of mindset that too often creeps in in Washington —to get along, go along," Bell said in a telephone interview from his law office in Houston. "There's not a more adversarial act you can take in the House than an ethics complaint, and some people just don't have the stomach for it."

A lonesome battle

Indeed, at the DNC's executive committee meeting in Washington in early June, Dean publicly acknowledged that some congressional Democrats had urged him to tone down his "culture of corruption" rhetoric because they did not want to get caught up in the same ethics probe as DeLay. But Dean said he would not hold back.

"We have not spoken about moral values in this party for a long time," Dean said. "The truth is, we're Democrats because of our moral values. It's a moral value to make sure that kids don't go to bed hungry at night. ... It is a moral value not to go out on golf trips paid for by lobbyists."

Dean was alluding to the allegations that Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff paid travel expenses related to a trip to London and Scotland by DeLay in late May and early June of 2000 in violation of congressional ethics rules.

But in recent months, with Abramoff the subject of a criminal investigation, there have been media accounts and studies by watchdog groups that raise questions about the conduct of Democratic House members:

•?The Washington Post reported that Abramoff paid at least a portion of the expenses of Democratic Reps. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi in the mid-1990s.

•?The Associated Press reported that at least 43 House members and dozens of congressional aides failed to publicly report travel financed by special interests until DeLay's trips were scrutinized. Most notably, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland disclosed 12 trips, the oldest dating back to 1997.

•?The Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, in a study of public records of every congressional trip between January 2000 and mid-2004 sponsored by non-profit organizations, found that seven of the top 10 trip-takers were Democrats.

"Howard Dean is pretty much out there on his own [among Democrats] in trying to take on the 'culture of corruption,' " said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the nonpartisan group that drafted the complaint Bell filed against DeLay in June 2004.

"The Democrats [in the House] talk a good game, but that's all," she added.

"They're afraid to do anything that could blow back on them. They're all about the boys and girls club that Congress is."

No one eager to complain

Almost since the 109th Congress convened last January, Sloan's organization has been trying without success to get someone in Congress — Democrat or Republican — to initiate new ethics complaints, not against DeLay but two of his Republican colleagues: Bob Ney of Ohio and Duke Cunningham of California.

CREW wants the House ethics committee to look into Ney's ties to Abramoff, the same lobbyist whose relationship with DeLay prompted Bell's complaint to the committee.

CREW also wants the committee to look into the lucrative sale of Cunningham's San Diego home to a federal defense contractor.

Ney and Cunningham have both denied any wrongdoing, and both have indicated they are willing to answer any questions the ethics committee members may have — just as DeLay has done in Bell's complaint against him.

But until late last week, the ethics committee — its official name is the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct — had no staff to conduct investigations. That is partly because the House Republican leadership had changed some of the rules governing the panel, a move critics said was aimed at protecting DeLay.

Without that agreement, "there was no committee," said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and because there was no committee, "there was no way for Democrats to make any complaints" about any member's conduct.

The committee did, in fact, exist, despite its lack of a staff. And the rules of the House did not prohibit members from making formal complaints during the lengthy negotiations on how the committee would be staffed.

But Bell believes there has been a resumption of the unofficial ethics "truce" — Republican and Democratic leaders won't acknowledge it ever existed — between the parties that held for some seven years before his complaint against DeLay.

"Only in Washington does a 'truce' on ethics make sense," he said.