Tying Up Loose Ends

From the author's Roll Call column, Heard on the Hill.

In the irony-on-steroids category, guess who was defending his graduate thesis on Congressional ethics Monday? Cover your eyes and guess, then sit down for the answer.

It was Michael Scanlon. Yes, that Michael Scanlon, the one who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. His topic, as Scanlon himself confirmed, was an "evaluative history of the House ethics process."

Scanlon defended his thesis at Johns Hopkins University's Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C. Our informant, a House Democratic aide and a fellow student in the advanced government program who also was defending his thesis on Monday evening, still is trying to lift his jaw off the floor.

"It was all I could do not to break into hysterics," he said.

Our source says Scanlon got up and gave a roughly one-sentence introduction of his thesis before taking questions from the four faculty members and nine other students in the room. He says Scanlon talked about the House ethics committee and argued that the "system now is not broken, but functioning in the same manner it has since its creation."

Scanlon essentially argued that the House ethics process is "political in nature" and that Members were never expected to do a very good job at policing each other, the source says.

No one in the class, other than our source, seemed to recognize Scanlon. At least none of them asked about Abramoff or referenced any current corruption investigation. Instead the question-and-answer session focused on the case of the late Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.), who was famously expelled from the House in 1967 because of ethics violations. (Powell won a Supreme Court battle in 1969, which returned him to Congress, though without seniority or back pay.)

Contacted by HOH, Scanlon said his thesis on House ethics did, indeed, focus on the Powell case, which he called "a fascinating situation." Asked why he was now getting his master's degree at such a precarious moment in his life (precarious being an understatement), he said he actually finished classes at Hopkins six years ago but never got around to arguing his thesis.

"It was just a loose end in my life," he said.

At least he's doing it now. Scanlon (who was freed on $5 million bond) faces up to five years in prison and has agreed to pay $19.7 million in restitution to the tribes he defrauded while he continues to cooperate with investigators.

The good news is: He passed his thesis review! Scanlon says he's just waiting for his diploma, while awaiting sentencing.