By a 402-1 vote, the House ethics committee was urged to continue its investigation of Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY), even though the congressman has resigned. But did the committee ever hang up its cleats?

That depends on whom you talk to. Some media reports declared the Massa investigation over. But Politico quoted a senior Democratic aide who insisted that the committee had never ended its probe into Massa's alleged misbehavior.

Rep. Massa resigned earlier this week amid charges of having improper physical contact with at least four aides. The congressman acknowledged behaving inappropriately, but he insisted that there was nothing sexual about the contact.

It will be interesting to see what the fallout is from the House ethics committee's recent report admonishing Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY). In admonishing Rep. Rangel, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, the ethics panel held him responsible for something the panel said one of his staffers knew about the details of a trip.

Will other members be held accountable for things they don't know about? Rob Walker, an attorney and ex-staffer for the ethics committee told Roll Call:

"I think the (ethics) committee needs to clarify what the standard is for holding Members responsible for the actions of their staff.

"I don’t think the principles enunciated in the subcommittee report are crystal clear enough to give Members sufficient guidance as to when they would be held accountable and when they would not be."

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan told Roll Call she doesn't believe the committee meant to establish a new standard because doing so, she said:

"... would have to mean that the ethics committee would have to start investigating Members for staff misconduct."

Not likely.

It has been confirmed that the House ethics committee is probing the ties between two congressmen and PMA Group, the now-defunct lobbying firm that was raided by the FBI last year. Those two members are Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN) and Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS).

TPMMuckraker reports:

The investigations concern earmarks won by the lawmakers for PMA, and whether they came in return for campaign contributions. Visclosky's former chief of staff, as well as office records, were subpoenaed last year by the FBI. That led to Visclosky temporarily stepping down as chair of an appropriations subcommittee last year.

Only Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) has received more in campaign contributions from PMA and its employees than has Visclosky.

Tiahrt, like Visclosky, serves on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee.

As 2009 draws to a close, CREW is looking back at what quickly became a busy year for ethical lapses in our federal government. Today, CREW released its list of the Top Ten Ethics Scandals of 2009 – a roundup of the year’s most outrageous government scandals.

The unranked list includes:

Believe us – we had a plethora of scandals to choose from.

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, explained CREW’s hopes for the new year:

It would be nice if 2010 proved to be the year politicians put Americans’ interests above their own, but I won’t hold my breath.

Click here (PDF) to read CREW’s Top Ten Ethics Scandals of 2009.

Nathan Deal is wearing three hats at the moment – U.S. Representative, Republican candidate for Georgia Governor, and the owner of a lucrative auto-salvage business that has become the subject of two House ethics investigations.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Monday that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and the House ethics committee both have inquired about Rep. Deal’s role as owner of Recovery Systems, Inc., which – through a no-bid-contract – has earned the representative a considerable amount of money. CREW asked the OCE to investigate Rep. Deal in August 2009, after the AJC broke the story that he had illegally and unethically intervened in Georgia state politics to preserve his company’s profitable agreement with the state.

Rep. Deal himself has acknowledged the ethics probe, but (predictably) denies any wrongdoing. And in an online chat on his gubernatorial campaign website, he had some choice words about CREW:

"On the subject of CREW, who filed the complaint," Deal wrote, "this is the same liberal organization that continues to attack the Bush administration. As a former Bush administration officials (sic) said they litigate for sport and distort the facts.'"

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, easily rebuffed the congressman:

"Given the hot water in which Rep. Deal finds himself, it is no wonder he is trying to change the subject," Sloan said. "It is not CREW investigating the congressman, however, it’s the House ethics committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics.”

Rep. Deal is trying to distract the public from his ethics-probe woes by attacking the organization that merely brought the AJC’s scoop to the attention of Congress’s internal ethics watchdog. We don’t view holding our elected representatives accountable to ethics laws as “litigating for sport” and we will not be dissuaded from our mission.

We believe Rep. Deal broke the law. Plain and simple. Do Georgians really want this man to run their state?

It isn't every week that the House ethics committee reviews a barroom brawl. But that's exactly what the panel did recently.

In this case, the committee reviewed the conviction of a House aide on an assault charge. After its review, the committee decided not to formally investigate the matter.

As Roll Call explains:

Under a House resolution adopted in 2007, whenever a Member is “indicted or otherwise formally charged with criminal conduct,” a 30-day clock starts in which the ethics panel is required to either empanel an investigative subcommittee or issue a report detailing its decision not to do so.

... [the ethics committee] expanded the resolution to include not only House Members but aides and officers as well.

We’ll see. According to today’s Roll Call:

The House ethics committee is considering a new tactic as it looks to enforce mandatory training for each of the chamber’s more than 10,500 aides: public shame.

Ethics Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Thursday that in recent months she and the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), have sought out fellow Members whose staffs had not completed training to urge them to do so before a year-end deadline.

... Under House rules first adopted in 2007, every House aide is required to complete one ethics training course annually, with additional training mandated for new employees and senior staff — defined as aides who are paid a rate of at least $117,787 in 2009.

... only a fraction of the more than 10,500 House employees (had) fulfilled the annual training requirement by June 30. According to the report, just 2,861 aides had completed the training.

... the ethics committee has recently raised the specter of naming the House offices where aides fail to complete the training on time, an option that the committee has not previously employed.

While Lofgren said last week that completion statistics have improved significantly since late June, new data were not immediately available.

Based on that June 30 report, only 27 percent of House staff had completed the mandated ethics training.

On the one hand, it’s good to hear that the completion stats are better now (although it would be nice to see the actual numbers). On the other hand, the June stats reveal that House members were not making ethics awareness a priority.

It's sad to observe that perhaps the most high-profile ethics news in the U.S. House of Representatives this autumn has had nothing to do with actually enforcing ethics rules. Instead, the big ethics "news" has been the House ethics committee report that recently was leaked to the media.

Now, only a few weeks after this leak, a bill has been introduced in Congress to ban federal employees from using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications. Because the ethics committee report was leaked through a P2P application, several House members are eager to ban P2P apps.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see the House move as swiftly on ethics enforcement as it is on the P2P issue?

The best that could be said of Congress is that it has a spotty record of policing the ethical behavior of its members. Unfortunately, recent efforts to improve enforcement may be in danger.

This editorial in today’s New York Times voices concern that the House Ethics Committee might "try and neuter" the semi-autonomous Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). The committee recently issued a report that blasted the OCE, and this scathing document prompted the Times to offer the ethics committee this advice:

This investment of resources would be far better focused on members' behavior rather than the agency created by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to help the ethics committee shed its well-deserved reputation for inertia and evasion.

The House Ethics Committee has failed to police members of Congress for decades now. An effort to change the system resulted in creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). But, House Ethics doesn't like OCE. Why? Eliza Newlin Carney explains:

The ethics committee's real beef with the OCE, while cloaked in technical jargon, appears to boil down to two complaints: The OCE is being too transparent and too hard on members. Given the Standards Committee's long history of papering over and dropping ethics complaints, this should argue in favor of the OCE's work, not against it.

And while the leaked activity report conveys the initial impression of an ethics committee hard at work, that document dates to July -- which also means that the panel's been investigating dozens of lawmakers for several months with no action.

The committee recently announced that it will investigate alleged ethics violations by California Reps. Maxine Waters (D) and Laura Richardson (D), as recommended by the OCE. It's also busy with ongoing probes involving Reps. John Murtha, D-Pa., and Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., among dozens of others. All this should be more than enough to keep the ethics committee busy -- without wasting time sniping at the OCE for doing its job.

Unfortunately, the House Ethics Committee seems to think its job is protecting members, not policing them.