Frank Pallone: “as we prepare to return to our districts for the Memorial Day work period, I think it is important for us to take a look…”

“as we prepare to return to our districts for the Memorial Day work period, I think it is important for us to take a look at where we are today and how exactly we got here in the Congress. I think, for the most part, and certainly a lot of recent polls indicate it, the American people are fed up with the Congress, that the approval rate of Congress is at its lowest point in 10 years, and it leads me to wonder how did we get to this place? I think we have to take a look back at the first 5 months of the 109th Congress this year to get some answers. Earlier this year, the Republican leadership went ahead and changed the way the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct does its business. In the past, whenever ethics changes were being considered, they were addressed in a bipartisan fashion with both Democrats and Republicans at the table, and that is the only way ethics reform can honestly be addressed. But the Republican leadership ignored that protocol and strong-armed enough of their Members to pass new and weakened ethics rules, without any support from our Democratic colleagues. Mr. Speaker, I think the American people understood that these new ethics rules were basically a blatant attempt by the majority to protect one of their Republican leaders. These new rules allowed either party, Democrat or Republican, to protect its own Members.…”