This past week saw a cascade of signs of a House that has lost its ethical moorings. The most prominent was the series of stories about Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), who managed to get a ton of earmarks for nonprofit organizations and programs for his economically depressed district--and set up a series of business deals with people who benefited directly from the earmarks, profiting handsomely from the deals himself.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

Next came the stories about Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.): complaints from several staffers that he called on them to babysit his kids, run errands and work on his wife’s campaign, all illegitimate under the rules and the law.

Third was the new story by The Associated Press' intrepid John Solomon and Sharon Theimer about Jack Abramoff’s e-mails, showing his and his team’s aggressive and straightforward effort to use campaign donations to Republicans to get votes for his clients in the House and Senate. In other words, to use campaign funds for bribes.

Finally, we have the comment by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) spokeswoman putting down the creation of an Office of Public Integrity inside the chamber, saying most House Democrats think the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (ethics) ought to be able to do the work on its own.

Let me get to the conclusion first before I elaborate: When it comes to ethics, most House Members of both parties have their heads set so far up their posterior orifices they are unlikely ever to see the sun shine again.

Start with Mollohan, the ranking member on the ethics committee, who has been a positive force in at least trying to give the panel a pulse and make it functional. I don’t begrudge any Member for working aggressively to improve the economic circumstances of his or her district, even via earmarks. And Mollohan has a very depressed district. It may well be that each of his business deals with West Virginia friends was a perfectly reasonable and above-board legal matter. I doubt that Mollohan is another former Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.)--that he conspired with those benefiting from federal largesse to get his share both by direct payments and through creative channels for bribes. But that is not the core point. It is exceedingly rash, foolish and ethically insensitive for any Member of Congress to engage in profit-making business deals with those who are getting government largesse directed their way through the direct efforts of said lawmaker. Period. It is especially rash, foolish and ethically insensitive for the RANKING MEMBER OF THE ETHICS COMMITTEE to do so.

As for Conyers, we are dealing at this stage with allegations, but allegations that come from more than one staff member, and from high-ranking staffers, reducing the odds that this is a “disgruntled former employee” kind of case. Whether it is or is not, the allegations and similar ones have been around for a while.

So where is the ethics committee on this one? Where has it been in the past? The answer appears to be the usual one: It is nowhere to be found. The reality is that there is no ethics committee, and there hasn’t been one since Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) got bounced from the chairmanship by Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in a futile effort to protect Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) from further embarrassment or punishment. Even then, the committee was far more reactive than proactive; in the absence of another lawmaker insisting on action or serious investigation in this kind of case, it likely would have sat without action.

As for the Abramoff e-mails, they come as no shock to anyone who has followed the case, but underscore the breadth and depth of the corruption involved here, including by Members and staff. Oddly enough, on occasion after occasion, campaign contributions from the Abramoff team would be followed in short order by lawmakers’ official actions in accord with his wishes. This was going on for years and years before indictments came down. Where was the ethics committee before it had the shaky excuse that it can’t interfere with a Justice Department investigation? You know the answer.

And now comes Jennifer Crider, speaking for the Minority Leader, making clear that the allergy to an effective ethics process is bipartisan--something we learned about the Senate last month with the embarrassingly lopsided bipartisan vote to kill an independent component to the ethics process.

Here I could ask the rhetorical question: “What will it take for these guardians of the public trust to realize that they can’t go on with a sham of a process when the signs of unethical behavior and corruption are all around?” I hesitate to do so, because the answer clearly seems to be that even signs of mass murder by Members would not change their shortsighted, selfish insular reactions here.

The odds are that the Rules Committee will report out the Republicans’ version of a lobbying/ethics reform package under a highly restrictive rule, barring most amendments that would toughen the process. Perhaps Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is right: A wave of indictments will force the Senate, and then the House, to revisit the issue. If that is what it takes for lawmakers to step up to the plate and confront their responsibilities here, so be it. But that is pathetic.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.