The House ethics committee dropped a political depth charge Thursday when it released the names of 303 current and former lawmakers who overdrew their accounts at the now-closed House bank.
Already the scandal has killed several political careers, and the disclosure is sure to affect the November elections.
Challengers have been handed a potent, made-for-TV issue: portraying bad checks as the emblem of all that is wrong with Congress.
As the report was released, the Capitol became a swirl of excuses and explanations. The contention from Democrats, whose leadership oversaw the bank and whose House majority stands to suffer most because of it, was this: It wasn`t really a bank. No taxpayer money was directly lost. The ”bank” was an anachronism, a mom-and-pop operation gone awry.
Republicans, who had launched a full-throttle assault demanding that voluminous information be released, were noticeably more subdued, realizing that any incumbent named was vulnerable.
Public interest groups such as Common Cause called for voters to keep a sense of proportion, to judge members individually about whether abuses have occurred. For instance, the committee found that some overdrafts were the result of bookkeeping errors by the bank staff.
The ethics panel, formally the Standards of Official Conduct Committee, earlier had released the names of 22 members who it said abused the bank by
”repeatedly and routinely” overdrawing their accounts by several thousand dollars a month. Some overdrafts were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.) topped Thursday`s list with 851 overdrafts, followed by Rep. Gerry Sikorski (D-Minn.) with 697, and Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), the Ethics Committee chairman, with 551.
Stokes had withdrawn from the investigation on the ground he knew he had some overdrafts.
The scandal also swept up five senators who had served in the House and four members of the Bush Cabinet, including Labor Secretary Lynn Martin and Agriculture Secretary Ed Madigan, both of Illinois.
Many members thought they were clean because they had been issued letters saying that they had not overdrawn their accounts when in fact they had. Among the Illinois delegation, only Democratic Rep. Charles Hayes of Chicago was labeled an abuser. Thursday`s disclosure indicated that most others had written fewer than 10 overdrafts.
Rep. Daniel Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had none.
Though the committee`s release of the list for now ends Congress` direct involvement in the probe, a Justice Department-appointed special counsel, former federal appeals Judge Malcolm Wilkey, is conducting an independent fact-finding inquiry to determine if crimes were committed. Wilkey has said that he hopes to have his investigation completed in about three months.
The scandal unfolded last fall after a General Accounting Office report found overdrafts and abuses of the bank by some bank employees. The House voted to close the bank in December. Jack Russ, who as House sergeant-at-arms ran the bank, resigned in March, and the House voted last week have financial operations overseen in the future by a professional staff.
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It ignited a outcry over the perks and privileges enjoyed by members of Congress, as well as those of the White House and the Cabinet, and led to the elimination of several practices.