DOJ Warns Congress

In what is not necessarily good news, the Department of Justice has warned Congress that they need to get the Ethics committee up and running, or they will clean house. From Time:

The Justice Department has a message for Congress: clean up your house or else we may have to do it for you. A senior federal law enforcement official told TIME that the paralyzed and often lax House ethics committee has created a vacuum that prosecutors won't hesitate to fill. The House’s internal mechanism for keeping corruption in check is "broken," says the official.

Sounds promising, doesn't it? It isn't. It all boils down to overturning the intent of the voter. What the DOJ is really saying here is look, if you don't start to deal with your problem, a lot of you are going to jail, and we don't want to do that, so you better get the ethics committee running so we can hand these investigations off to you and be done with it.

With the current scandals being almost entirely republican scandals, it would be a bad thing for us if the DOJ drops their investigations in return for the Ethics Committee to do the heavy lifting, which will probably not get done. For what it's forth, the Ethic Committee really doesn't like to overturn the intent of the voter.

This was always the danger as the depth of the Abramoff investigation began to reveal itself.