Have We Gone Too Far?

By MARGARET CARLSON

The House of Representatives last Wednesday was part theater, part courtroom and part confessional. As his wife Betty wept in the visitors' gallery, Speaker Jim Wright played defense attorney, arguing away each charge against him; thespian, wiping his brow and lowering his voice to a whisper; and penitent: "Are there things I would do differently? Oh, boy." As the minutes ticked away -- Wright took more than an hour -- some began to wonder whether he was giving a resignation speech or making another plea for forgiveness. Finally the words that had caught in his throat for so long passed his lips: "Let me give you back this job you gave to me."

While that was the announcement the House had been anticipating for days, the packed chamber saved its applause for the moment when the Speaker, the first ever to be forced from office by allegations of misconduct, begged for an end to the hostilities in Congress. Fist clenched, he thundered, "Both political parties must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end."

The atmosphere in Congress had truly turned poisonous in the week since Wright's position crumbled and majority whip Tony Coelho resigned rather than face similar investigations into his advantageous insider acquisition of a $100,000 junk bond. Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who first leveled the charges against Wright, crowed over his victory and declared that at least ten other Democrats were guilty of similar violations.

Was ethics becoming a tool for character assassination? Pennsylvania Congressman William Gray, the leading candidate to replace Coelho, had to ask Attorney General Dick Thornburgh to investigate the source of an apparently unfounded rumor that the FBI was looking into whether he had a no-show employee on his payroll. Majority leader Tom Foley, the likely successor to Wright, was asked to assure a group of conservative Democrats that nothing in his background would embarrass them.

Voices in Congress and around Washington denounced an ethics reign of terror that is destroying reputations and perhaps driving good people from government. "It's genuinely frightening -- worrisome," says Thomas Mann, a congressional observer for the Brookings Institution. "The intensive moralizing has painted the House as utterly corrupt. It damages the institution and the environment of the Washington community."

The spasm of mudslinging was painful and messy, and certainly contained a measure of revenge for the earlier Democratic assaults on such Republicans as John Tower and Ronald Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese. The atmosphere also suffered from the fact that minority whip Gingrich was leading the ethics charge. Gingrich early on admitted that an investigation of the Speaker was the G.O.P.'s chance to undo three decades of Democratic dominance in Congress.

While tattletales are no more appealing on Capitol Hill than in grammar school and scattered enforcement always seems unfair, it would be a mistake to conclude that Wright and Coelho are victims of a deranged political environment dominated by vengeful Republicans and gooey do-gooders. Although Coelho characterized himself as a martyr, resigning to save his family and Congress, he was actually getting out to save his neck. The $100,000 deal involving one of Michael Milken's junk bonds promised to be every bit as serious as Wright's transgressions. And the investigations have the same salutary effect as the state trooper's pulling over a speeder: everyone slows down for a while.

If anything, these few morality trials do not go nearly far enough. The real scandal in Congress is not what's illegal; it is what's legal: the blatant, shameless greasing of congressional palms that violates good sense, good taste and good government. Capitol Hill is polluted by money -- campaign money, speech-giving money, outside money from investments, and money substitutes like all-expenses-paid vacations and gifts. Fred Wertheimer, president of the public-interest lobby Common Cause, is looked upon these days as an ethics ayatullah, but he is not overstating by much when he says, "Our nation faces a crisis in the way we govern ourselves. Our nation's capital is addicted to special-interest influence money. Members of Congress are living professionally and personally off these funds."

Much of what Congress does legally would put Executive Branch members behind bars. If White House chief of staff John Sununu, for example, were to take himself and his eight children to Disneyland at the expense of the coal industry so it could talk to him about the disadvantages of clean-air legislation, he would probably be accused of accepting a bribe. Yet industry- sponsored trips are a major form of recreation for some members of Congress and their staffs.

In January, 27 members of Congress, some with wives and children, left the cold of Washington for the sun of the California desert courtesy of the tobacco industry. Off they flew, at about $1,000 per round-trip ticket, and stayed at the luxurious Hyatt Grand Champions Resort, where suites go for $300 a night, the greens fees are prepaid, and meals are included. In addition to expenses, most legislators got spending money -- $1,000 to $2,000 -- for participating in one of three 90-minute panel discussions that ended at 11:30 a.m. each day so members could tee off at noon.

The delegation at the Hyatt was hardly unique. Just across the way, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dan Rostenkowski was playing in a Bob Hope celebrity golf tournament and managing to squeeze in speeches to five special- interest groups. And just after New Year's Day, 18 Senators and their wives were flown to Scottsdale, Ariz., to play in a charity tennis tournament with executives of Dow Chemical, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and Motorola. The next weekend another group of Senators was schussing down the slopes in Park City, Utah, courtesy of American Express, Delta Airlines and U S West.

Congressional rules state that lobbyists cannot give members gifts worth more than $100. But the rule is offset by a loophole that allows legislators to accept airfare, hotel rooms and meals if attending a legislative conference, visiting a company plant or taking part in a celebrity golf or tennis tournament. A spouse or an aide can go along; children somehow slip in. Common Cause found that in 1987 Congressmen took eleven years' worth of free vacations courtesy of this proviso.

Congressmen can also take in cash directly by giving speeches for honorariums -- a misnomer, since little honor is involved. Consider the $2,000 the Oshkosh Truck Corp. paid each of six members of the House Armed Services Committee on April 1, 1987, for coming to breakfast. The eggs had barely been digested when, a few hours later, an Armed Services subcommittee voted to purchase 500 more trucks from Oshkosh than the Army wanted.

Members of the House and Senate took in more than $9 million in honorariums last year. The more powerful the legislators, the more invitations come their way. Freshman Representatives without a good committee assignment hardly get invited at all, but Dan Rostenkowski, whose committee writes the tax bills, collected the most money of all, $222,500. Jim Wright so easily surpassed the $34,500 that legislators are allowed to keep for personal use that he allegedly used sales of his book to get around the limit.

Members can also easily talk their way around the $100 cap on gifts from a - lobbyist. Former Tennessee Congressman Bill Boner argued successfully that a camper given to him by the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association was not a gift because he used it on a fact-finding trip. Senator Orrin Hatch received a $7,500 gem-encrusted gold ring inscribed WITH LOVE FROM ALI after the Utah Republican introduced a bill to allow Muhammad Ali and others similarly situated to sue the Government over wrongful draft-evasion convictions. Hatch laughed off any notion that the ring was tied to the bill. "((Ali)) said he would beat me up if I didn't take it."

But $7,500 rings and $2,000 for a plant walk-through almost seem laughable next to the huge sums that can be amassed through campaign contributions. Even though more than 90% of congressional incumbents are re-elected, almost all against token opposition, a bulging campaign treasury is useful to have anyway: it scares away potential challengers, and members elected before 1980 can keep the money when they leave, as a kind of IRA with no strings attached.

The very best part about campaign contributions is that they don't have to be spent on campaigns. Colorado's Democratic Senator Tim Wirth used his campaign fund to fly himself and his wife to the 1987 Super Bowl. Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii used $14,053 for restaurant meals -- some of which, according to receipts submitted, curiously took place at Circuit City, an electronics-equipment store. North Carolina's Democratic Congressman Charles Rose bought a Jeep. South Dakota's Democratic Senator Larry Pressler had a Canada goose stuffed for $225.75, because he felt it would promote goose hunting in his state.

Like honorariums, campaign money follows power. Of the $172.4 million in political action committee contributions in 1988, fully 70% went to incumbents. Nor did the money stop flowing when the election was over: $2.4 million went to incumbents after last Nov. 9. Senate Finance chairman Lloyd Bentsen collected the most PAC money -- $2.4 million -- demonstrating that he didn't really need to organize that $10,000 breakfast club. Richard Gephardt, Tom Foley's probable replacement as Democratic majority leader, led House members with $610,107. Agriculture Committee member Bill Emerson followed with $579,478, Tom Foley with $575,086, and minority leader Robert Michel with $555,340. Banking Committee member David Dreier, New York's Stephen Solarz and the ever prosperous Dan Rostenkowski all have more than $1 million in their campaign treasuries.

, Perhaps the worst part of the current culture is the amount of time and attention elected officials lavish not on the general public but on people who can lavish money on them. Members of Congress take to calling their contributors friends. The confusion makes for some convoluted rationalizations. A friend, the reasoning goes, can cut a member in on a lucrative investment, treat him to a luxurious vacation and supply him with cash, not because he has an interest in a one-line amendment to a bill that will save his industry millions of dollars, but because he is, well, a friend. Perhaps Tony Coelho really believed it when he said that junk-bond wizard Michael Milken "is constantly thinking about what can be done to make this a better world." Now under indictment, Milken faces the prospect of doing his thinking in prison.

Eventually a legislator finds it easier to understand the plight of the constituent-friend who would be hurt by a bill cracking down on reckless savings and loan executives than the plight of a constituent he does not know -- Joe Sixpack faithfully depositing his weekly savings into a 5% passbook account. When friends of Wright and Coelho who were heading up failing S & Ls came under investigation for fraud, the Democratic leaders were not only willing to take their calls and visits but to stall legislation and a federal investigation that would have cracked down on these people.

As more and more thrift executives got into trouble in 1987 and 1988, S & L PACs simply stepped up their campaign giving; by the time Washington finally got around to addressing the S & L crisis this year, the cost of a bailout had swollen to an outrageous $158 billion or more over the next eleven years. Over the past three elections, according to the Wall Street Journal, the S & Ls gave $4.5 million to the members of Congress willing to protect them. House Banking Committee member Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican who refuses to take PAC money, believes this may be the disgrace that brings down the current congressional establishment. "We're looking at an eleven-figure fraud story that's bigger than Teapot Dome," he says.

The public may be paying for the S & L fraud well into the next century. Even so, it seems unable to make the connection between such outrages and a permanent government that too often is up for sale to private interests. The notion that public service might require some sacrifice has become a quaint relic. Working in government, instead, has come to be seen as a way to enrich ! oneself. Public officials remain endlessly capable of rationalizing the trading of their office for private gain: we don't get paid enough; everybody does it; we could make much more in the private sector.

Oddly enough, though, few legislators voluntarily leave for private life. Congressmen routinely run for re-election; Capitol Hill salaries are no secret to politicians who spend years -- and a great deal of money -- trying to get into the club. What goes unmentioned in all the caterwauling about the sacrifices of public service is the joy it offers. Public officials lead interesting lives: they all have the opportunity to make a difference; some even make history. Compared with underappreciated professions like teaching and nursing, where doing well takes a backseat to doing good, Congressmen are handsomely paid. The days of politicians like Lyndon Johnson amassing a fortune may be over, but few people leave public service poorer than when they entered it.

It does not follow, however, that public servants should be paid a pittance. Yet right now the public seems to take the attitude that giving legislators money only encourages them. In a poll last week for TIME/CNN, more than 55% of 506 people surveyed did not feel that Congressmen should be required to give up all outside income, nor that they should get a raise in exchange for it.

The 51% increase proposed last January may have seemed like a pay grab, with elected officials trying to hide behind the judges and bureaucrats who would have received comparable raises and who are not in such bad odor with the public. But a reasonable pay raise keyed to automatic cost of living increases -- in exchange for a total loophole-proof ban on honorariums, gifts and free trips -- looks like a bargain when put up against, say, the average $14 billion annual cost of the S & L bailout. Some degree of public financing of campaigns might also help cut the umbilical cord between Congress and special interests, but last year campaign-reform efforts bogged down in partisan fighting and constitutional questions. This year the issue is hopelessly deadlocked.

In the 15 years since the Watergate scandal, repeated efforts at reform have failed because they do not reach the systemic problem. Public officials are now required to file endless financial-disclosure reports, limit the private contributions they accept and wait longer and longer periods of time before they are allowed to lobby their former colleagues. But disclosure works for Congress only if constituents have the opportunity to pore through the voluminous reports and then vote based on what they find there. This welter of regulations has done almost nothing to choke off the cash flow.

Instead, the upshot of this codification has been to replace a social standard of behavior with a purely legal one. Congressmen picking up checks at a golf resort no longer have to worry about whether their conduct is outrageous, only whether it is criminal. Jim Wright and Tony Coelho are leaving Capitol Hill convinced that they were operating within House rules. But under the glare of publicity last week, Congress was being held to a long- overdue higher standard. In the future, proposed Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, the measure of conduct should be, "What reflects credit on this institution?"

Common Cause's Wertheimer argues that six people in Washington have the power to reverse the current cycle: the President, the new Speaker and the majority and minority leaders of the Senate and House. Together they could pull Congress behind them, putting through effective reforms and purifying the Capitol's polluted atmosphere. Until then, cynics may be justified in thinking there are only two kinds of Congressmen: those who get rich, and those who get caught.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Nancy Traver/ Washington