Smogbank on the Hill

THE CONGRESS

The most persuasive defense offered by Connecticut's Thomas Dodd in fighting Senate censure was that his colleagues judged him by standards that are unwritten and unresolved. Having rejected that argument by condemning Dodd, the Senate nonetheless is under considerable public pressure to produce an ethics code that provides explicit guidelines for members' behavior--and to do it soon. "Such a code is mandatory," says Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. "We all suffered." Predicts perennial Watchdog John Williams of Delaware: "We'll do it before we go home." Many Senators realize that the Dodd affair and other cases have cast a moral smogbank over Capitol Hill. Utah's Wallace Bennett, an austere Mormon, received a letter from a constituent 1,800 miles away, saying: "We can smell you clear out here."

Inside Joke. Yet Bennett, senior Republican on the Standards and Conduct Committee, which investigated Dodd and which must now draft a code, maintains that it is "a terribly difficult assignment. I'm not even sure that it's possible." History supports his skepticism. Previous scandals, while firing reformist zeal, have resulted in little action. The Senate ethics committee itself is a monument to congressional distaste for self-regulation. Created by a 1964 resolution, the committee had no members for a full year and was virtually moribund until the Dodd investigation. The ten-point platitude adopted in 1958 as a code for the entire federal establishment is little more than an inside joke. One of the toothless injunctions requires "a full day's labor for a full day's pay."

For a code to have real impact, it must provide the machinery for scrutinizing members' private incomes and criteria for judging the legitimacy of non-Government earnings. There is widespread resistance in Congress to any such reform, in part because many members fear that their financial affairs could become grist for their political opponents and for muckrakers. There is also the practical problem of deciding how far to go in demanding the disclosure of private income. Should Congress, for example, have the right to delve into the accounts of members' relatives? Without that right, it would have a hard time policing the affairs of transgressors who might use their kin as a cover for questionable dealings.

Evaporating Indignation? Then there is the question of uniformity in House and Senate rules. Acting admittedly in different circumstances, the House barred Adam Clayton Powell from membership, while Dodd retains both his seat and his seniority.*The Powell case prompted creation of a House ethics committee, which is also supposed to formulate a code of conduct. Mansfield thinks that "the Senate must go ahead on its own. Let the House tend to its own business." Republican Leader Everett Dirksen believes a common document should cover both Houses.

Whichever view prevails, the time may have passed when Congressmen could give lip service to ethical reform while waiting for public indignation to evaporate. Having already suffered through the humiliations of Dodd and Powell, Congress now faces an investigation of Missouri's Senator Edward Vaughan Long, whose financial connections with Jimmy Hoffa's chief counsel were recently disclosed by LIFE. "We cannot," says Williams, "let those charges go unanswered."

*Powell last week repeated his charge of racial discrimination, saying, "Powell is black and Dodd is white." He offered to accept censure similar to Dodd's as the price of admission to the House, but his proposition fell on stony ground.

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