Kudos for Nancy Pelosi

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi deserves praise for depoliticizing the House ethics process. Yesterday Pelosi called for an ethics committee investigation of her Democratic colleague Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, who has been accused of taking bribes.

Some Republicans will be inclined to dismiss this on the grounds that she had little choice–that it was an easy call. That's probably right. But I think it should be considered in light of the fact that after Alan Mollohan stepped down as ranking Democrat on the ethics committee—a move that Pelosi or other Democratic leaders may well have urged on him—Pelosi replaced him with her California colleague Howard Berman. Berman has served in that usually thankless position before. In my judgment, Berman is an absolute straight shooter who can be counted on to decide ethics issues on the facts and the rules, without regard to partisan fallout.

Both the Republican and the Democratic leaders in the House have played politics with the ethics process before—the Republicans in pushing out ethics committee chairman Joel Hefley after the 2004 election, the Democrats in responding by stalling ethics committee actions altogether. The Republican Conference took a step back from partisanship by abandoning efforts to repeal its rule requiring indicted members of the leadership to step down from their leadership positions. There was an intellectually respectable argument for repeal, I think; Republicans anticipated an indictment of then Majority Leader Tom DeLay on baseless grounds by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle—correctly, as it turned out. (I won't get into the argument here as to whether Earle's indictment was baseless, but I think the argument for that is very strong.) But even if you agree with that argument, and even if you think (as I do) that DeLay was the victim of an injustice, the repeal of the rule was politically unsustainable; even without the rule, DeLay would surely have had to step down. Now by appointing Berman, the Democratic leaders have also taken a step back from partisanship. They could have chosen a partisan hit man; instead, they appointed a member who I believe is respected on both sides of the aisle for his fairness and intellectual honesty. Pelosi and her colleagues in the Democratic leadership deserve credit for this.