In the current issue of Newsweek, columnist Jon Alter surveys the era of Republican House rule and rightly concludes that “historians will regard [it] as the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives.”

As Alter and others explain, the issue is less the presence of almost laughably corrupt members such as Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.), who was on the take from various defense contractors and muscled the Pentagon into accepting subpar goods and services in exchange for their gifts of fancy houses and other payoffs. The problem is that Tom DeLay and his chief lieutenants have (with the assistance of virtually every member of the Republican caucus) turned the House into what Alter aptly calls a “ruthless shakedown machine.”

For the most part, the House of DeLay is built on beams and pillars that manage to be deeply corrupt while also being legal. But as he and his cronies now find themselves the targets of a growing list of indictments (most to come not out of Texas but from the Justice Department itself), it is clear that the 2006 election will be fought largely on the issue of ethics, corruption and influence peddling.

But are the Democrats up to the challenge?

I don’t just mean are the Dems willing to go to the mats with the Republicans on ethics, though that’s a good question too. I mean, are the Democrats going to fight the coming election cycle on the basis of ethics and insiderism in such a way that the House would actually be a significantly cleaner, less corrupt place if they were to win back the majority?

Sure, public corruption will never be vanquished in American politics. No piece of legislation or tough prosecutor will ever solve the dicey temptations of money, interest and political power. But you don’t have to be a wild-eyed idealist to believe in the power of reformism to improve measurably the way politics works. Regular waves of reformism are as important to the ship of state as it is for great tanker ships to have the barnacles and other encrustations regularly scraped from their hulls.

Out-of-power parties have a natural, self-serving interest in reform when the in parties are tied to endemic corruption. But their genuine commitment to reform may be close to nil. Republicans fought their way into the majority in the early 1990s on a reformist agenda, but they rapidly imposed a level of workaday corruption and influence peddling that put anything the Democrats had managed to shame.

Today, there are certainly many senior Democrats in the House who’d be happy to clamp down on the more egregious excesses of DeLayism. But more than a few of them probably wouldn’t want to clamp down or clean the place up too much because then they wouldn’t get back all the perks they’ve been hoping to get back now for more than a decade.

So let’s consider a few standards that reformers might look for from the Dems to see if the coming political push on ethics is real or just more politics as usual.

First, why is the Democratic leadership in the House still preventing its members for submitting ethics complaints against corrupt Republican members? Can it really be that even Duke Cunningham hasn’t crossed the line?

Presumably, as the conventional wisdom suggests, the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to spark an ethics war that could lead to problems or even end the careers of some members of its own caucus.

But that’s not good enough.

In purely political terms, the cost of an ethics war can’t possibly be as bad for Democrats as it would be for Republicans — and for a simple reason: political corruption and influence-peddling are mainly about access to power. And the Democrats in today’s House simply don’t have any. Even if every member of the Democratic caucus were as ethically challenged as the current crop of Republicans, they just don’t have it in their power to be as corrupt. So whatever the Republicans can threaten to bring out against the Dems can’t possibly be as bad as what the Dems can bring out about them.

I’m not saying that Democrats need to spend their time airing their own dirty laundry. But any serious effort to overturn the GOP majority by pushing a serious reform agenda inevitably will upend a few Democrats too. We’ll know the Dems are serious when they realize that fact and are willing to take that risk.

Second, what rules and reforms will Democrats pledge to put in place if they return to power? It’s not enough not to be as bad as Tom DeLay. Power corrupts. And to fight DeLayism Dems have already been compelled to adopt some of his innovations. It’s not enough to decry DeLay’s corrupt and pledge not to be as bad. Actual changes in the way the House is governed and structured are necessary too. What will those changes be?

This is a moment when Democratic idealism can run in tandem when the Democrats’ political interests.

Let’s see if they’re up to the challenge.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column
appears in The Hill each week.
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