Pursuant to my previous post on this topic, here’s the transcript from today’s Meet the Press:

REP. BLUNT: Well, the three changes we made, I think, have been blown totally out of proportion in terms of their impact on the Ethics Committee. It’s no more difficult to file an ethics charge than it ever was. The three changes were made–one was you should be able to have your own counsel, that the Ethics Committee shouldn’t be able to decide who your counsel were. Two were, you should at least know you were being investigated before the Ethics Committee publicly criticizes you, which happened to one of our members last year. And three was that it would take a majority to move forward with an investigation after–I think it’s 45 days and then a virtual automatic 45-day extension. You’ve got 90 days where one party can decide, “We want to continue to investigate.”

But there’s a reason that the Ethics Committee is divided equally. It’s the only committee divided equally, because the reason is it would take a member from the other party always to move forward. Fifteen years ago–Barney mentioned 15 years ago–that’s what the rule was 15 years ago: It took somebody from the other party to decide to move forward. Only in 1997 in a package of ethics changes, really without much thought, was it decided, “OK, we’re going to have this one area where a majority doesn’t have to make a decision and half of the committee can just keep a member perpetually under investigation.”

For those who think that this ethics rule thing is no big deal, consider what Blount is saying here: that the rules that the Democrats had in place back before the Republican Revolution of ‘94, were better. Indeed: that the change made by the Reps in ‘97 were made “without much thought.”

This entire line of reasoning is at least a partial, yet significant, repudiation of the Republicans who came into the House in 1995 and argued that the Democrats had allowed the rules to overly favor the majority, and therefore changed them, presumably to further the general level of ethical behavior and oversight in the House.

Blount, a member of House Leadership, is now arguing that the way things were back in the day when the Majority was considered too powerful and ethically challenged, are the way that they should be now.

As noted below, I found myself in the odd position of agreeing with Barney Frank, who said:

REP. FRANK: I want to respond because there’s a very central point there. Mr. Blunt says that’s the way the rules were until 1997, because there’s a pattern here. The Republicans took power in 1995 on the grounds that things were terribly corrupt and badly run and they were going to change things. And it is true, initially, they changed them. And, again, this is very critical. What–the difference is this: Should you be able, by simply holding your own party loyalists in line, to stop an ethics investigation? That’s what the rule now says. The Republicans came to power and they changed the rule. He said it was done with very little thought.

I must say, Mr. Blunt, that’s rather dismissive of your Republican revolution. You say that in 1997–the Republicans came to power in ‘95 and fairly shortly after that they changed the rule.

But this is the pattern they’ve had. They changed the rules because they said they were unfair. Now, that they’ve been in power for a while, these rules are inconvenient.

This all appears to be quite correct.