After spending weeks screeching about the alleged ethical abuses of Republican Whip Tom DeLay, Congressional Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi suddenly came down with a case of laryngitis when several Democrats were found to have the same problems as DeLay in their travel arrangements. The GOP now wants Pelosi to back the same investigations for these Democrats as she demanded for DeLay, and calls her silence "hypocritical":

House Republicans called Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a hypocrite yesterday for not demanding investigations into new ethics questions that have arisen about the travel of her fellow Democrats.

"She demanded an investigation into [Majority Leader] Tom DeLay, but hasn't said a word about these Democrats who have done the same thing," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican. "If she doesn't call for investigations into her fellow Democrats, then it's clear she's being a hypocrite."

Republicans are wondering why the California representative won't ask for investigations into Democratic Reps. Norm Dicks of Washington, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, James E. Clyburn of South Carolina and Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, all of whom face questions about accepting travel paid for by lobbyists.

"As we expressed in earlier letters, Madame Leader, it appears more and more that your repeated calls for an investigation of Mr. DeLay are more driven by politics than by any real concern for the House rules," Mr. McHenry, with two other Republicans, wrote in a letter to Mrs. Pelosi yesterday.

Pelosi and the other House Democrats celebrated what they saw as a key political victory when the GOP rolled back rules changes for ethics investigations. They thought that Democratic efforts to paint Republicans as corrupt had worked and that they had a clear path to railroad DeLay out of the GOP leadership, if not Congress altogether. However, the Republicans apparently used their time wisely and did some investigations of their own -- and hit pay dirt on a number of Pelosi's colleagues.

Now the Democrats have been hoisted upon their own petard. They can't very well claim the moral high ground on ethics if they give their own members a pass. Either they will have to drop the efforts against DeLay, or they will have to sacrifice a number of their own representatives to pursue the GOP leader. With the number of people who fall under the bar Pelosi set increasing by the day, the House itself will lose interest in the whole thing ... and Pelosi may find herself out of leadership herself.

Expect this whole ethics issue to quietly go away, replaced by other issues that don't risk the Pyrrhic victory that now stares Pelosi in the face.

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