Meese Vs. Wright: There Is a Difference

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In a city awash in scandal, Republicans take comfort in the fact that the sleaze issue has gone bipartisan now that the dealings of House Speaker Jim Wright are under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. By the end of the month, Attorney General Edwin Meese is likely to be skewered in a report from Independent Counsel James McKay declaring that the nation's top law- enforcement officer may have violated Government regulations regarding favoritism and the appearance of impropriety. The G.O.P. response will be to rebut Meese with Wright. Vice President George Bush gave a preview last month: "You talk about Meese. How about talking about what Common Cause ((a public-interest lobby)) raised about the Speaker?"

This line, however, assumes not only that both men are equally guilty or innocent but also that the charges against them are equally grave. And they are not. The accusations against Wright, though serious, are not quite so weighty as those against Meese, and Wright has by far the better defense.

To be sure, there are similarities. Both men have been accused of using their office to benefit friends and acquaintances: Meese's former personal lawyer E. Robert Wallach and, in Wright's case, oilmen and investors in the Speaker's home state of Texas. And though the personalities of the genial California-bred Attorney General and the peppery Texas Speaker differ, they are alike in one way. Says Ted Van Dyk, a Washington lobbyist who knows the two: "Both apparently wear blinders" that prevent them from seeing appearances of impropriety in their actions.

But the similarities end there. Unlike Meese, Wright has convincingly refuted one of the allegations against him. He supposedly stood to gain personally from lobbying the Interior Department in 1979 to try to win leases for Texas Oil & Gas Corp. Though Wright was said to own stock in the company, he did not: he had an interest in a gas well drilled by Texas Oil, but the operations of that well were not affected by the lease controversy. Georgia ! Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich, Wright's chief accuser, has conceded that this charge was based on inaccurate press clippings.

Wright admits that he put pressure on the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in 1986 to soften regulatory proceedings against a Dallas real estate syndicator and some Texas savings and loan associations. He says, however, he was merely "acting as an ombudsman" for the constituents he represents, which is not just a right but a duty for a Congressman. Wright seems to have been rather incurious about the constituents he went to bat for -- one has since been charged with helping to defraud the S and L he headed of $40 million. Nonetheless, Wright has a defense unavailable to Meese. As a top White House aide and later as Attorney General, Meese had no constituents; he "represents" the entire nation. By no stretch of the imagination could his attempts to help Wallach push the building of an Iraqi oil pipeline and win Government contracts for the scandal-scarred Wedtech company be considered part of his duty.

In some other respects, however, Wright is no more easily defended than Meese. One allegation is that Wright, who was then House majority leader, threatened in 1986 to block legislation injecting desperately needed cash into the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, the agency that insures depositors in thrift institutions, until one regulatory case was decided to his satisfaction. If true -- and Wright denies it -- such an attempt to hold up urgent legislation would constitute a blatant abuse of his office.

Moreover, Wright received an unheard-of royalty of 55% (normal would be 10% to 15%) on sales of an alleged book, a thin and uninteresting collection of random thoughts published by a Fort Worth printer and longtime Wright pal. Some of the buyers have candidly admitted that they bought the book in bulk as a way to make donations to Wright that would have been legally forbidden in any other form.

Wright's only defense has been that he did not break any House rule, and that might be true. House limits on members' outside income specifically exclude book royalties, and a rule against accepting speaking or writing fees "in excess of the usual and customary value for such services" may not apply to book writing. But at best this is a technical defense for what seems an obvious and unwarranted attempt to evade House rules regulating members' outside income. In any case, simply avoiding the commission of an indictable offense is no qualification for either Speaker of the House or Attorney General: Wright and Meese are alike in failing to live up to the standards their important offices should entail.