Ethics panel in partisan deadlock

[deminks]

Washington -- With the House ethics panel locked in a tense stalemate, the majority leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, accused Democrats on Tuesday of deliberately stalling an investigation of him in order to drag it into the midterm elections next year.

A leading Democrat swiftly responded by demanding that Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., recuse himself as the ethics chairman, saying he had shown ineffectual leadership and had potential conflicts of interest.

Republicans on the ethics panel would like to have two co-directors, one Democrat and one Republican. Democrats are demanding a sole nonpartisan staff director. The dispute has left the panel deadlocked for weeks, and several members and their aides said Tuesday that they did not expect even to resume negotiations before next week.

But Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., the ranking member of her party on the Rules Committee, accused Republicans of breaking with tradition by trying to put a Republican in the staff job. Hastings, she said, "is trying to unilaterally replace the nonpartisan professional staff with his handpicked team of Republican operatives."

(snip)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/15/MNG1MD8K5E1.DTL&feed=rss.news

[LightningFlash]

1. This needs to be sent everywhere.

Spread the word about Doc Hastings obstruction.

They shouldn't be conflicting with the rules like this. It's time to end the rhetoric and assign a non-partisan special prosecutor, and seriously get underneath this cesspool.