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The Senate Ethics Committee has emerged as the tougher policeman of congressional behavior than its House counterpart, the Standards of Official Conduct Committee, which has become embroiled in a fracas over ethics enforcement in the lower chamber.
While the Senate has adopted guidelines that some experts say exceed even what is called for in the ethics reforms Congress passed last year, the House has interpreted the law more literally. As a result, government watchdog groups say, the House has opened wide loopholes in ethics rules.
The philosophical differences between the chambers burst from behind closed doors last month when the Senate unveiled tighter limits on parties at political conventions honoring members of Congress organized by lobbyists and special-interest groups. The Senate issued guidelines prohibiting lobbyists from hosting parties that honor a delegation of lawmakers, breaking with rules set out earlier by the House. The House allows lobbyists to honor groups of lawmakers but prohibits honoring individual lawmakers with parties.
The split highlighted what ethics lawyers had noticed for months: that the Senate was taking consistently stricter stances on behavior that fell into the new law’s murky zone.
“There’s a difference of approach between the House and the Senate,” said Stefan Passantino, head of the political law team at McKenna, Long & Aldridge. “The Senate has taken a tougher stance on interpretation issues. The House is taking a very literal interpretation of the law, which some people are claiming opens loopholes.
“The Senate is taking a larger view of what the intent of the bill is and is passing guidelines that go beyond the literal text,” said Passantino, who emphasized that he thinks neither approach is wrong. “They’re just different.”
The Senate and House have also taken different approaches to rules governing travel, lawmakers’ attendance at charity events, and accepting items as small as a cup of coffee, say ethics lawyers. While the differences between the guidelines may seem subtle to most people, they have a significant effect on which behavior is acceptable in the House but forbidden — or at least questionable — in the Senate.
For example, the Senate committee has told lobbyists that it will not approve a longstanding practice that companies use to ensure that specific lawmakers sit with them at lavish charity events. The House has not attempted to dissuade special-interest groups from suggesting to event sponsors whom they should invite or how to arrange seating.
The Senate has also raised questions over whether lobbyists may attend certain events with lawmakers, such as an industry convention in Las Vegas.
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