I think she was committee staff. Whether she did anything or not is something else, but at least she was physically present, which met the statute.

Mr. LATTA. From what I read, she went fishing and she was still on the payroll up until very recently, until Mr. Pepper's committee got into this thing. My question is, when you found out she has gone fishing, and I put that in quotes, why did you not do something about that?

Mr. BURLESON. Well, it may have been a long fishing trip. [Laughter.]

But the statute says the employee shall be in the Member's office here in Washington or in his district or in the State.

So if she were here 1 day she could meet the statutory requirement, technically speaking.

Mr. LATTA. You mean 1 day during a month would qualify?

Mr. BURLESON. As far as the law is concerned, it does, and our attention was called to that by the General Accounting Office when we made inquiry as to the reimbursement of these funds.

But it did meet the statute. We assume technically, if she walked in the door 1 day a month, or 1 day a year, it technically meets the requirement.

Mr. LATTA. Have you given any thought to tightening that up?

Mr. BURLESON. Yes, we have. I introduced this resolution that would carry a penalty. Under the present statute there is no penalty. We should make a penalty for a violation. I think that should be a part of any reform legislation.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. O'Neill?
Mr. O'NEILL. No questions.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Young?

Mr. YOUNG. Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Burleson, one thing that worries me a great deal is that it seems to me if this committee, and if the House in turn, places the authority and responsibility with your committee, which obviously you are not seeking, and that is understandable, I am just afraid that your committee will have taken on an enormous responsibility, one that no committee in this Congress has ever faced before.

Ever since we have been having these hearings we have seen your committee maligned, either in the press or out of the press, by statements that the committee either cannot or will not do its job, putting an X on you before you ever start.

I do not know how you go about doing all these things, and my frank opinion is that I think this business of the corruption of Congress is grossly overrrated.

I think first of all you may be seeking something that is not necessarily there, and secondly, it has been brought out clearly around this table here by the testimony and by the questions, the great task of setting up a code of conduct that, in effect, is a keeper of a man's conscience which is the difficulty.

So I think it would be the most courageous thing in the world and, if you can, do something with it. I said the other day, and I am not going to belabor the point, that the quickest way to take something away from the American people is to make it bipartisan. If the House

wanted to sweep this under the rug, it would make a bipartisan committee to deal with it.

Then you would have no partisan responsibility for it. If this is as great a problem throughout the country, and I am satisfied it is, then it should be such an issue that Presidents rise and fall on, Congresses rise and fall on, something that the American people can get to, if they want to.

They are not going to do it with a bipartisan thing, because if you vote one party out and the other in you have more of the same. We have seen that in foreign aid.

I think under your plan you have sort of a compromise that might meet both ends and your subcommittee being a nonpartisan committee will act sort of as a trial court, and then your main committee, the parent committee, being a partisan committee, will still have to assume partisan responsibility for what it passes on to the House.

So we might be accomplishing both of these things. My disposition now, for many reasons, is to go ahead and establish this authority and responsibility with certain injunctions for your committee to follow.

We can create a special committee by the snap of a finger if we desire to do it, and we can do that at any time. My present disposition is to do that, and I just wish you a great deal of luck in what you are taking on.

That is all, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BURLESON. Mr. Chairman, if I may comment briefly, this is something we would have to consider eventually, and maybe now: If it is the judgment of this committee that this matter should be placed in the House Administration Committee, we should be given a period of time, to come up with guidelines to define our intentions. Members of Congress should present their ideas as to what limitations should be placed around this thing and how to close some ends and build some fences and say, "This is the area in which you operate."

I think it is along the lines, John, that you are talking about. Let us not have the gates wide open permitting all sorts of tangents.

If we have the time to hear every Member of Congress who wants to come before that committee, with their ideas as to what should be done, what limitations, what authority, and measure of control, and all this sort of thing, and then come back to your committee for whatever change in the rules is necessary.

The CHAIRMAN. I would like to make an observation. We are committed, and the committee agreed to hear the Ways and Means Committee this morning.

We are perfectly willing to stay here, or we can go ahead as we are proceeding to do. It is what you want to do, but I am just going to suggest that if there is going to be further extensive questioning of this witness that possibly we had better cease this particular operation now and hear this other bill and then come back tomorrow.

The Chair is very much in hopes that we can wind up these hearings tomorrow on the Ethics Committee.

Mr. Pepper, did you have some questions?

Mr. PEPPER. I have some questions, Mr. Chairman, but in view of the desire to hear the Ways and Means Committee here, and other witnesses, I will defer until tomorrow. I think that would be best.

The CHAIRMAN. We would like to have the chairman of the House Administration Committee back again, and that goes for you, too, Mr. Goodell, as we had not finished with you yet.

Mr. GOODELL. Mr. Chairman, due to the death of a good friend and campaign manager, I will be at his funeral tomorrow and will not be here. But I will be back, if you do not finish tomorrow, at your convenience.

The CHAIRMAN. We hope to finish tomorrow. We understand your problem.

Mr. Burleson, we will excuse you.

(Whereupon, at 12 o'clock noon, the committee proceeded to the consideration of other business.)

(The following was submitted for the record:)

STATEMENT BY THE HONORABLE THOMAS J. MESKILL BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE

ON RULES

Mr. Chairman, I welcome this opportunity to testify before your distinguished Committee and compliment the Committee on moving so swiftly to act on proposals to create a Select Committee on Standards and Ethics.

I am the sponsor of H. Res. 166, similar in most respects to the legislation now before you. It is different in two respects, however, in that it incorporates features which I strongly urge the Committee to include in any bill it reports to the House.

My bill, like the others, continues the Select Committee on Standards and Ethics and gives it the assignment of drafting both a Code of Ethics for Members of the House, and the machinery for enforcing it. My bill has a deadline of December 31, 1967, for these tasks to be completed and reported to the House. I think this deadline is more than ample, but nonetheless needed, to assure the country that we intend to take prompt action.

Secondly, my bill would give to the Select Committee the specific power to recommend either censure or expulsion of any Member found in violation of the Code and the censure or discharge of any employee of the House found in violation of the Code.

This specific power is not provided in the other bills I have seen relating to this area.

In addition, I wish to second the proposal made earlier by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bennett) that the Standards and Ethics Committee be made a permanent, standing Committee of the House. This problem of ethics in the Congress will always be with us and it is only good sense to provide permanent machinery for dealing with it.

There is no doubt that this machinery is needed. Allegations concerning a few Members and a few employees during recent years have cast a cloud of suspicion over all Members and employees. It is a poisonous cloud which erodes public trust in the country's elected representatives as surely as air pollution corrodes everything it touches. We all see the suspicion reflected in the press, radio and television commentary. We hear it from our constituents. Only Congress can remove this cloud from itself. Let us do so promptly.

CREATING A SELECT COMMITTEE ON STANDARDS AND

CONDUCT

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15, 1967

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON RULES,
Washington, D.C.

The committee met at 10:44 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room H-313, the Capitol, Hon. William M. Colmer (chairman of the committee) presiding.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order.

Mr. Curtis, the committee will be glad to hear from you on House Resolution 18, or whatever other version you care to talk about.

STATEMENT OF HON. THOMAS B. CURTIS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MISSOURI

Mr. CURTIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and let me say that I am here as the ranking House Republican of the Joint Committee on Organization of Congress, which I emphasize is one of these bipartisan committees that someone suggested never produce any results.

It is composed to six Members of the House, three Republicans and three Democrats, and six Members of the Senate, three Democrats and three Republicans.

This committee has, as you know, issued a unanimous report and we have what I would like to call the Monroney-Madden-Curtis bill. It includes every member of the committee. We have all introduced this bill.

In this bill one of the features, of course, is the establishment of an ethics committee, and this was the subject of considerable study of this committee over a period of a couple of years. I am very happy to see Mr. Madden is in judgment on our own handiwork here, and I am happy to be here to support his position on it, or, rather, the committee's position and the position in the bill that this should be a new, independent, and permanent committee.

We talked about, of course, the possibility of using some of our existing structure, whether it be the House Administration Committee or whatever, although I will say the House Administration Committee was the most logical if we were to use any of our structure.

I would like to say this, that this committee would immediately have the function of establishing a code of ethics. This is one of our great needs because, indeed, who can say what the ethics are, and on these questions of ethics, what is ethical and what is not, we need some certainty.

I would suggest, too, that any code of ethics over a period of years needs changing, no matter how well it is conceived when it is first set up. Experience shows in certain areas it needs to be changed.

Second, and I was pleased to be present during some of the testimony to hear the questioning of Mr. Bolling and his statement, there is need to have the mechanism, practical mechanism, to enforce the code once it is established.

Then let me interject a third thing, which is part of this mechanism, and also calls attention to one of the great weaknesses in the present congressional structure on ethics and a whole lot of other things.

It is the fact that we do not have an independent audit of the congressional books. GAO does not audit the congressional expenditures. The GAO should audit the congressional books. They are an arm of the Congress, but nonetheless they are an independent organization by structure, inasmuch as the Comptroller General is appointed for 14 years.

This would serve the function of an independent audit. I think whatever is done that this ought to be done just as quickly as possible. Why it has not been done over the years is just inconceivable. It is the only large institution in the country, Congress, that does not have independent audit of its books.

The executive department, of course, does.

This has led, I think, to a great deal of, let us say the misunderstanding, perhaps, of how money is spent in the Congress, whether it is spent by the individual Congressman as part of his office allowances or part of the money that is allotted him, the stationery fund, or the manner in which the committees spend their money, or the manner in which counterpart funds are spent, and so on.

So I would urge that this third aspect be incorporated into this. Now, we could wait, of course, but I would not urge that we wait, for the Monroney bill, the Monroney-Madden-Curtis bill, to reach the floor. That bill has been referred, of course, to this Committee on Rules and in my judgment rightly so, if I may comment.

We had hoped that originally that bill would go directly to the floor of the House under a rule granted by the Rules Committee, but there were so many amendments put on that bill in the Senate which our committee, of course, did not consider and the House has never had an opportunity to consider, that I think very properly the Parliamentarian sent it here, to this committee.

This is not true, of course, of this specific area on ethics; here I would think it would be very wise under the circumstances for this committee to report out the bill, and I would urge the bill that would create a permanent committee-not a select committee that the gentleman from Florida, Mr. Bennett, is talking about. I would hope the rule for debate would be broad enough, of course, so that amendments to this could be considered on the floor and that we move as promptly as we can on this.

I think this is exceedingly serious. The integrity of the Congress under the present climate is very much involved.

Mr. MADDEN. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. CURTIS. Yes.

Mr. MADDEN. You referred to the amendments offered on this in the Senate. I think that 99 percent of those amendments were pertaining to the Senate's procedures.