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.

Mr. CURTIS. I think a great deal of them are. I do not know that it is 99 percent, but some of them were. According to the Parliamentarian some bore on House matters.

At least that is the basis for his ruling, and I have always felt that this was a proper thing, when a bill came over from the Senate with nongermane material or material that a House legislative committee had never had an opportunity to zero in on, that proper procedure did indicate that it should come into the Rules Committee for the Rules Committee to determine whether this material was of such a nature that it should be referred back to the legislative committee for study. In this instance, of course, the Rules Committee is the legislative committee to look into this.

I would hope, though, that the Rules Committee would tend to limit themselves to the area of these kinds of amendments rather than to reduplicate the work that we tried to do and hopefully we did do over a period of 2 years. Because, if the Rules Committee attempted to do that, I am afraid we would never have seen the MonroneyMadden-Curtis bill this year.

Mr. MADDEN. I think the procedure over there in the Senate, although it was on the floor for 3 weeks, about, was interrupted constantly, and the major part of the amendments adopted over there were from one Senator, who had about 50 amendments, and I do not think there were more than one or two of his amendments adopted.

Mr. CURTIS. Yes. Now, if I could discuss some of the substance of this issue as I see it, and why, at least I as a member of this committee felt that you needed a separate and permanent committee.

First, I have jotted down five areas that bear on this question of ethics. One is elections themselves. Here, very clearly, the House Administration Committee has a lot of expertise and has been in this area for some time, but notably they have never really developed a code of ethics in respect to elections.

I think they could as far as elections are concerned, the ethics part of elections could be handled by the House Administration Committee. But it then moves into the area of financing of elections, and this gets somewhat out of the normal jurisdiction of the House Administration Committee. It moves on over into a second item that we have to establish a code of ethics on; namely, ethics in relation to lobbyists, and how Congressmen relate themselves to them. This involves this question of how do lobbyist groups-and this is a proper thing in my judgment-how do they contribute campaign funds in a proper way, and what would be improper.

This is one of the areas where we need the ethics spelled out, because a lot of us know there is a gray area here. We would like to conform to what is a considered judgment of the correct ethics, but no one really knows what these ethics should be.

So when we get into this lobbying relationship, I think we move out of the area of the House Administration's expertise in the past. They have had little dealing with this aspect.

Note what we have in the Monroney-Madden-Curtis bill respecting tightening up procedures as far as the lobbyists themselves are concerned. To my regret, we did not zero in on the question of relationships of Congressmen to procedures of lobbyists, particularly in this financing thing, but in our studies and discussions we certainly did

contemplate and did discuss the fact that an ethics committee would be concerned about this. This would be one of the areas that there would be developing ethics.

Now, a third area, the use of Government money, whether it be the committees of Congress using money, or whether it is the use of money of the Congressman's personal staff.

Here, again, I think the House Administration Committee, of course, has developed some expertise and to a large degree can handle this, and yet here is the area where you get into things like counterpart funds which I think has been so loose over a period of years that it is just a very, very bad situation and needs a new and deep look-see.

The House Administration Committee has had the opportunity to have developed some codes of ethics here and has not. This is not to say that I am trying to cast any personal blame. It is only comment on a fact, and an area that needs considerable study to again find out, well, what should the proper standards be.

Then I come to an area which is one of our most serious areas of ethics for Congressmen, which the House Administration Committee does not deal with, and really to get them into this kind of business I think would really divert their efforts from what are the big areas that they presently have jurisdiction over.

I am referring to conflict of interest, the relationship of a Congressman who, in my judgment ought to be part of his community-if he is a lawyer, I think that it is perfectly proper that he do practice law. If he is an insurance salesman, or whatever, but there is no question of the areas of possible conflict of interest that arise, whether a man is in the real estate business or whatever.

Again, here is an area where most all Congressmen would like to abide by a good code of ethics if one had been developed. We have none, no way to guide us to say what should we be doing and what should we not be doing.

This is an area that I think would require an independent committee, and is a subject matter with which the House Administration Committee has not dealt in the past.

The fifth area, the House Administration Committee itself refused to go further in it last year. This is the area of party financing, political party financing, apart from the financing the individual Congressmen's campaigns. The presidential fund, or as has been properly raised here, as I heard, the method of the Republican congressional campaign committee having these dinners to raise funds.

This, as we all know, ties into lobbying. There is not any question this is one of the major areas where you go to try to raise funds. It tends to be from those people who have an interest in what Congress is doing down here. But the House Administration Committee at the time last year when the presidential fund campaign issue rightly came into their jurisdiction, or the subject was brought in through a different kind of investigation. Then the House Administration Committee refused to go into the subject matter and to develop it further, or to broaden it, and I think they probably were right.

I would have liked to have seen them really zero in and come out with what kind of standards should be established in this area, but I am only pointing up arguments that I think indicate the need for an independent committee.