In the third week of June the Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee fired his committee’s staff. The Republican Speaker of the House had already replaced two members of the Ethics Committee who joined the majority in "admonishing" House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in three previous investigations. The ill-disguised goal of these and past maneuvers is to pack or hamstring the ethics panel before it again punishes DeLay and vote-sellers like California Republican Randy Cunningham, whose financial shenanigans embarrass their party’s pretensions to honesty and virtue.

New Hampshire’s First District congressman, Jeb Bradley, has always done DeLay’s bidding in this disgraceful saga. Bradley has accepted thousands of dollars directly from DeLay’s political action committees. That—along with DeLay’s notoriously vengeful treatment of turncoats—impairs any illusion that honorable motives inspire Bradley’s persistence protection of his boss.

Those same factors account for Bradley’s 92-percent obedience to DeLay’s instructions on House votes. Seldom do I even achieve 50-percent concurrence on all political questions with anyone, including my closest associates. How people can come to 75-percent agreement is beyond me, even (or perhaps especially) if they are married. A record of 92-percent loyalty surpasses the limits of probability, sinking deep into the range of truckling compliance: Bradley cannot be doing much less than kowtowing to DeLay at every important turn.

Fear of DeLay’s wrath easily explains Bradley’s disturbing equivocation on the subject of Social Security. Overall, Bradley’s critics might find a better analogy than waffle-top hats if they reverted to wearing dog collars with leashes attached.

The campaign for morality in government has brought us the most instinctively dishonest (and, for that reason, the most secretive) regime since Richard Nixon’s presidency. The party that most loudly espouses "values" always seems ready to elect candidates with the shadiest past, now including the first American president with a criminal record. The sheer underhandedness of the Republican party has become so obvious that soon they’ll have to float a flag-protection amendment just to distract attention from themselves.

Under Republican domination corruption has so permeated government that Congress and many state legislatures now treat ethics as an obsolete annoyance. Last fall congressional Republicans went so far as to eliminate one of their own ethics rules so DeLay would not have to resign if his name was added to the indictments of his Texas accomplices. Once it became evident that DeLay would not be indicted imminently, those same Republicans (including Bradley) sanctimoniously restored the ethics rule, but they also imposed a new one giving effective control of the House Ethics Committee to its Republicans members. All Republicans on the Ethics Committee now have economic ties to DeLay, and they have collectively accepted at least a quarter of a million dollars in the same DeLay PAC funds that help explain Jeb Bradley’s behavior.

In the New Hampshire House of Representatives even Speaker Gene Chandler’s shameless solicitation of cash contributions could not convince a majority of his comrades to expel him. The legislature’s refusal to eject Chandler raises the suspicion that a majority of the state’s representatives did not feel sufficiently blameless themselves: after all, the permissive laws regarding political panhandling by our legislators eliminate the most effective impediments to bribery.

How many New Hampshire legislators use the gaping holes in the state’s anti-corruption statutes to beg money from interested constituents and lobbyists, then suddenly "forget" to report the money they stash in various accounts, all the while hoping fervently that no one ever illuminates the overlap between their voting records and their secret bank accounts? The number must be substantial if 15 dozen Republicans and 11 Democrats could feel so much sympathy for Chandler.

One might well ask whether our honorable legislators deliberately designed those gaping holes for their own convenience, tacitly winking as they composed their assigned portions of that legislation. Earlier we might have considered such collusion impossible, but it seems perfectly credible in an institution that demonstrates so little regard for its own reputation. Besides, we have already seen such coordinated chicanery from congressmen like Jeb Bradley, who vote themselves lucrative pay, pensions, and perks without blushing, and then circulate among lobbyists and corporate pimps like DeLay with hands outstretched.

At a breakfast gathering forty-five months ago I remarked, mostly in jest, that this country might have been better off if the terrorists who intended to destroy the U.S. Capitol building had caught Congress in full session. The comment shocked some of my companions, who were still suffering from the emotionalism of the moment, but recent polls would indicate that most Americans now share at least the spirit of that opinion.