Washington – The Colorado lawmaker replaced as leader of the House ethics committee after it rebuked the House’s No. 2 Republican suspects that congressional corruption will continue despite reform efforts.
“You never can make enough rules to stop people who really are intent on breaking the rules,” Rep. Joel Hefley, a Colorado Springs Republican, said Wednesday. “We will make a flurry to convince the American public that we’re making these sweeping changes that are going to solve the problem.
“To me, that’s show and tell and may not amount to anything,” he said. “Those who are intent on violating the rules will figure a way to violate the rules.”
The House ethics committee under Hefley’s chairmanship in 2004 admonished then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, three times, a move that some believe cost Hefley the chairmanship. The 10-term congressman was removed as committee chief a short time later. Republican leaders said Hefley’s term of service was over.
Also Wednesday, Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., joined two other senators in calling for an independent committee to recommend changes to improve ethics “compliance and enforcement” in Congress.
Hefley plans to introduce his own reforms, including a ban on accepting any gift from a lobbyist.
From his seat chairing the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for four years, Hefley said, he saw the inevitability of Congress’ current ethics problems. While most lawmakers follow the rules, he said, the same people consistently either broke or bent the rules.
“You knew it was going on,” he said. “You knew about some of it. You certainly knew that you didn’t know about all of it.”
Punishments included making people pay for trips that they should not have taken, he said. Those paybacks are not made public, and Hefley did not say which lawmakers fell into such trouble.
That lack of disclosure is one of the problems that make it hard to stop corruption, said Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks money in politics.
Hefley “saw the same people over and over again, which means that the enforcement process is broken,” Noble said.
