Looks like Doc Hastings (Richard “Doc” Hastings for you haters out there) has something new to say about how he plans on running his House Ethics Committee, as found in the latest issue of the Washington DC Congressional beat newspaper “The Hill.”

Here’s what Doc Hastings had to say:

Doc Hastings: “I have stuck my head out of where the sun don’t shine just long enough to announce that I am now going to stick my head back into arsh.”

Hastings’s original offer was that he and at least three Republican colleagues on the committee would vote at the earliest opportunity to empanel an investigative subcommittee headed by Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Pa.) to “review allegations concerning travel and other actions by Mr. DeLay.”

“We are now set up at least at the top and there’s going to be regular order,” he added, referring to the recent hire of William O’Reilly, a partner at the Jones Day law firm in Washington, D.C., to serve in the position of chief counsel/staff director.

Doc Hastings starts from scratch, after “starting from scratch” in the staffing of the Ethics Committee that he was put in charge of for the purpose of… delaying to all eternity any Ethical spotlight of Tom DeLay… or anyone else in our funny little unethical Congress.

The ethics panel, which is responsible for upholding the ethics code in the House of Representatives, has been in chaos since panel members voted to admonish DeLay, R-Texas, twice last year.

Hastings had to start from scratch, but he has been extremely slow to take charge.

As good an explanation as any found right here:

They’re waiting to see how his trial goes next month. If he gets acquitted, then they’ll drop the whole ethics investigation into DeLay on the pretext that he was acquitted, so he did “nothing wrong.”

Which jibes with the fact that the House of Representatives is delaying the start of their next session, to give DeLay a bit of elbow room in his Texas court case to allow him back in as Majority Leader should he be acquitted.
(Isn’t Tom DeLay a bit busy right now, what with his Texas court case logged alongside the upcoming Supreme Court case to decide whether his redistricted Texas lines are constitutional under the Voting Rights Act?)

“There is no ethics enforcement in Congress today, and it’s inexcusable,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative monitor of government ethics.

“No matter what level of corruption the members of Congress engage in, the ethics committees do nothing,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a national embarrassment.”

Thank you, Judicial Watch. Thank you, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. To whomever runs against Doc Hastings in the Fourth Congressional District of Washington State in 2006 — you have your quotes to use in a tv and radio spot or two. And, yes, good luck.

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