The growing GOP split
Topic: Dittohead Dogma
Other view: Republicans rebel against DC gang
Environmental stance and ethics issues trouble 'elders'
By Pete McCloskey -- Special To The Bee
Published 2:15 am PDT Friday, April 22, 2005

Several weeks ago, a group of lifelong Republicans, all of us of Social Security age, decided to rebel. We had been increasingly concerned by the party's drift away from traditional Republican principles such as balanced budgets, environmental protection and no governmental intrusion into individual rights such as freedom of choice.
What triggered our decision to launch a quiet revolt, however, was the unfolding scandal involving allegations about fund-raising activities and abuse of power by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, conduct for which he had been properly admonished by the Republican-led House ethics committee under rules initiated by Republicans when they took control of the House in l994. In January, the Republican leadership, including two Northern California Republicans, U.S. Reps. John Doolittle and Richard Pombo, forced through a rules change to protect DeLay from further investigation by the ethics committee. Doolittle had benefited from the same questionable fund-raising activities of one Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who had furnished a luxury box at an athletic event to Doolittle and foreign travel costs for DeLay and Doolittle.

Abramoff took in more than $82 million from Indian tribes, for which he is now under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Two of DeLay's closest aides have been indicted, and DeLay has been admonished three times by the House ethics committee.

Doolittle's political action committee has paid commissions to his wife's special-events business, and his wife's business records were subpoenaed last summer in connection with a grand jury investigation of Abramoff.

DeLay and Pombo both paid family members from their political funds for campaign work.

We wondered, "What manner of men are these whose wives and families take money for assisting in campaigns where there is no real opposition?"

Faced with growing public knowledge of their activities, DeLay, Doolittle and Pombo led an effort to emasculate the ethics committee through a rules change that required a bipartisan vote of the evenly divided 10-member committee to even investigate an ethics charge.

This led three of the elders - former Republican U.S. Reps. Jim Johnson of Colorado, Paul Findley of Illinois and me - to write to House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Jan. 3l and again on March l7, suggesting that the former rules be reinstituted.

We got no response but learned that DeLay, Doolittle, Pombo and the House leadership had decided to remove from the committee its chairman, Joel Hefley, R-Colo., and to replace two other members with three men, each of whom had either given funds or received them from DeLay. This was too much.

We asked other former members who had served under impeccably honest leaders such as Gerry Ford and Bob Dole to join us, this time in an open letter to the House leaders. On April l4, seven other former House members from six states joined us in a letter that was the subject of a news story in the New York Times last week.

There has been no affirmative response, and it appears there will be none. The abandonment of an effective process to determine ethics complaints will continue. So, the revolt will continue.

It isn't a question of conservatives vs. moderates. The most conservative Republicans adhere to the principles of a balanced budget, honesty and accountability, the trademarks of the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln.

Thirty-five years ago, on Earth Day l970, young people rose up in rebellion across the nation and started a movement that turned out of office five Republican incumbents who had demonstrated contempt for environmental values. It is no secret that the DeLay Republicans, and particularly Doolittle and Pombo, are of this view today. Given their way, these congressmen would dam the American and Yuba rivers, stop protection of the slowly returning salmon runs on the Klamath and Sacramento rivers, allow roads in wilderness areas, and support an increase in logging in our national forests and snowmobiles in our national parks. Perhaps worst of all, they would continue to support the administration's appointment of lobbyists from the coal, oil, utility and timber industries to run the very agencies that regulate their former employers, suppressing and rejecting the scientific opinions of their professional staffs.

It is the hope of their elders that the young people of Earth Day 2005 will rise up in revolt, as their parents did 35 years ago. It is they and their children who will enjoy the priceless wilderness of the Sierra Nevada in future years, not us elders to whom backpacking along the John Muir Trail has meant so much.

The need to save the remaining beauty of Northern California will be at that greatest of American institutions, the ballot box, in 2006. We would be honored to have those of similar views join the revolt.


About the writer:
Former U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey was co-chairman of the first Earth Day on April 22, l970. As a member of the House Fish and Wildlife Conservation Subcommittee, he co-sponsored the National Environmental Protection Act and the Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection acts. Reach him at P.O. Box 3, Rumsey, CA 95679.