ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 4, 1995                   TAG: 9501070072
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

104TH CONGRESS

WELCOME to the 104th Congress and its Republican leaders' noble intentions to clean house (and Senate) by reforming almost everything in sight: congressional staffs, special-interest caucuses, arcane rules that throttle the legislative process, congressional pensions and congressional privileges, including exemptions for federal lawmakers from laws that they've passed to govern the rest of us.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole have wrapped many of these reforms into their proposed Congressional Accountability Act and put it at the top of their agenda, which is fine as far as it goes.

But it doesn't go far enough.

Of all the insider reforms that the public has said it wants, none ranks higher than dismantling Congress' well-oiled money machine. Yet, for all the Republicans' talk about congressional accountability and integrity, there's not a word about getting Congress off the dole.

Campaign-finance reform, and a ban on lobbyists' gifts, junkets and other perks for members of Congress, have apparently been ruled out of order in Washington's Newt World Order.

OK, maybe that's not surprising, considering that Dole and Gingrich were leading obstructionists when Congress considered campaign-finance reform and bans on lobbyists' payola in the past. Perhaps it's especially not surprising since the money machine now appears to be in high gear, cranking it out for Republicans.

(According to The Wall Street Journal, $6 million in ``soft money,'' which goes to political-party entities instead of individual candidates, flowed to the Republican National Committee in October and November when big gains by the GOP seemed certain. That was about the time, some will recall, that Gingrich was warning high-roller political-action committees to ``get on board or face two of the coldest years in Washington.'')

Still, it is disappointing that Republican leaders seem not at all inclined to take on the most important of congressional reforms - curtailing the corrupting influence of special-interest money. For all of their plans to otherwise clean house, Congress won't pass the public's smell test while the new legislative leadership allows sacred cash cows to stink up the place.

To quote the 1990 verdict of one Washington insider: ``Congress is ... increasingly a system of corruption in which money politics is defeating and driving out citizen politics.''

The insider, incidentally, was Rep. Newt Gingrich. 


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