Political Quotes

“I am pleased to rise to recommend to the House the work product of a very hardworking task force on ethics rules reform. Mr. Chairman, in the aftermath of Watergate, the House felt compelled to engage and apply certain rules of conduct to enforce the provisions of the Constitution that say that the Members of the House will police its own Members. They were known as the ethics rules, administered by the Committee on the Standards of Official Conduct. Those rules evolved with time, and were revised as recently as 1989, roughly 8 years ago, and have, by and large, worked pretty well over the years. In the last Congress, it was felt by many Members on both sides of the aisle that there had been a partisan breakdown; that regardless of individual cases, the fact was that Members of the House were engaging in the war of politics by utilizing the rules of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to their own purposes.”