Melissa Hart & The Ethics Committee (Follow the Money)

Now that the Ethics Committee's been working on the aftermath of the Foley scandal/coverup, I thought it might be a good idea to peer into Congresswoman Melissa Hart's financial ties to the possible subjects of that ethics probe.

In case you've been under a rock for the past few weeks, the Foley Scandal/Coverup involves (at the very least) Speaker of the House Hastert and Majority Leader John Boehner.

Each, it turns out, has a PAC and each has given Ethics Committee Member Hart some serious campaign cash.

Dennis Hastert has a PAC called "Keep Our Majority" and in 2006, it gave $5,000 to Melissa Hart.

In 2002, the PAC gave her $5,000 as well.

And way back in 2000, the PAC gave her $9,999 (why couldn't they just round it up to $10,000?).

From Hastert's PAC there's a total of $19,999.

John Boehner's PAC is called "Freedom Project" and in 2006, the PAC gave Hart $9,499. In 2004, she received $5,711 and in 2000, Melissa Hart received an even $10,000 from Boehner's PAC.

From John Boehner's PAC, there's a total of $25,442

So, over the last few years Melissa Hart received $45,441 from the PACs associated with two of the possible subjects of the Ethics Committee probe.

And you remember how and why Hart was installed on the committee in the first place, right? I wrote about it here. Here's what the Washington Post said at the time:

WE HAVE, it seems, once again underestimated the speaker of the House and the lengths to which he is willing to go to neuter the ethics process and protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). When it looked in December as if J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was prepared to dump the inconveniently activist chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), we published an editorial headlined "Ousting the Umpire." It turns out we didn't give the speaker enough credit for thinking big. On Wednesday -- and we're sure it was mere coincidence that it happened to be the day of the State of the Union address -- Mr. Hastert finally announced the new lineup for the ethics panel in the 109th Congress. Not only did he can Mr. Hefley, as expected; he also purged the two most recalcitrant -- we would say responsible -- other Republican committee members, Reps. Kenny Hulshof (R-Mo.) and Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio).

Further down the editorial, there's this:

Mr. LaTourette was similarly unconvinced. "I think clearly he changed the makeup of the committee because people were for whatever reason not happy with the committee," Mr. LaTourette told the Hill newspaper.

Ok. So a little more than a year and a half ago, Dennis Hastert purges the Ethics Committee to protect Tom Delay because "people" weren't happy with how the committee had been acting up until that point. They obviously wanted a committee they could be happy with and so Melissa Hart (and some other party loyalists) each gets a phone call.

Now she's on the committee and may have to investigate the guy got her the gig and who also gave her campaigns about $20 grand. Other than the $25 grand she's received from the Majority Leader, how much more campaign cash has she gotten from the people the committee may be investigating?

If this is just politics as usual in DC, then it's easy to understand why so many people have sich a high opinion about politics in general and Congress in particular.

I would think that Melissa Hart owes her constituency an clear explanation about her place in all this - 45,441 explanations, at least.