Under House and Senate rules, lobbyists like Schroeder can give to political campaigns but are banned from giving money to the legal defense funds of sitting members of Congress. These poorly monitored funds are used by lawmakers to fight election recounts, lawsuits and ethics investigations. But oversight is weak, or nonexistent, and violations regularly occur.

A report by the Center for Public Integrity, released Thursday, finds that five sitting members of Congress, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, have broken the lobbyist rule in recent years. These revelations come on the heels of a string of scandals involving House members who broke congressional rules and accepted all-expenses-paid trips to vacation spots in Scotland and Miami from lobbyists and lobbying firms. “Members just don’t seem to understand that the rules apply to them and they have to follow them,” said Melanie Sloan, the executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

At the root of the problem, say ethics watchdogs, is the lack of independent monitoring of congressional ethics. Senators and House members regulate themselves through ethics committees, which are often hamstrung by backroom deals and partisan squabbling. With few exceptions, the House and Senate ethics committees have been largely dormant for the past decade. And there are clear penalties for those politicians who choose to scold their peers. After the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct “admonished” DeLay last year for a string of ethical lapses, the Republican leadership replaced the committee’s chairman and rewrote the rules to limit future investigations. “The enforcement has been so lax over the years that many members are not taking it seriously,” said Larry Noble, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who runs the Center for Responsive Politics. “The ethics committees are just not considered aggressive watchdogs.”

At the same time, the ethics rules often focus on narrow technical issues, while excusing the broader, more corrupting conflicts of interests, Noble says. DeLay’s legal fund, for example, has legally accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporations whose legislative agenda the majority leader supports. “I call it the fig leaf rule,” Noble said. “The lobbyist can’t contribute to the fund, but the corporation can.”

Late last year, Houston lawyer Brent Perry, who manages DeLay’s legal defense fund, returned two checks after the liberal watchdog group Public Citizen flagged them as unethical. Perry declined to return checks from the personal bank accounts of two other lobbyists, Robert C. Odle Jr., and Jeff Fedorchak. The checks had been signed by the lobbyists’ wives, though the money came from a joint bank account. “I don’t think that they made a good-faith effort to live up to the spirit of the law, and it is highly questionable if they lived up to the letter of the law,” said Conor Kenny, a coauthor of the Public Citizen report.

The new Center for Public Integrity report reveals two additional lobbyist contributions to DeLay’s fund — $1,000 from former Rep. David O. Martin of New York and $500 from John H. Forehand III, who represents several Texas clients, including Dos Republicas Resources, a mining company. Fund manager Perry, who was vacationing this week, said he would check out the donations when he returns to his office. “We have tried to police this the right way,” he said. “We have not gone out seeking lobbyist contributions.” When reached by phone on Tuesday, Martin, a lobbyist for the military contractor United Defense and AT&T, declined to comment on the matter. “I’m headed out of town,” he said.

Minority Leader Reid violated the rules in 1999 by accepting a $3,000 check from Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, who now represents insurance and natural gas pipeline companies. The check arrived while Reid was engaged in an electoral recount battle. “He and Senator Reid have been friends for over 30 years,” Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said of Barnes. “Neither Senator Reid, nor anyone on staff, were aware that he had registered as a lobbyist.” She said Reid had notified the ethics committee of the problem and was prepared to return the money if necessary.

Two other senior Republican members of Congress, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, also appear to have violated ethics rules. In 1997, Hyde took $1,000 from Jeremiah Marsh, a former Illinois-based lobbyist. Hatch accepted $3,000 in 1996 from Tom Landin, a former in-house lobbyist for Saint-Gobain, a multinational plastics manufacturer. The House has a six-year statute of limitations for ethics violations, excusing Hyde of any wrongdoing, but the Senate does not. Neither Hyde nor Hatch returned calls for comment.

In recent years McDermott, the House member from Washington state, has raised more than $400,000 to help fight a civil lawsuit that was filed against him by Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio. The lawsuit claims that McDermott illegally leaked to the press a recording of a 1996 cellphone conversation between Boehner and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the phone call, Gingrich discussed a plan to rebut ethics charges against him, despite his agreement to not orchestrate a response to the charges. “That all happened while I was there,” Schroeder said, explaining why she wrote her check. “That was a pretty awful, brutal thing.”

In addition to Schroeder, three other lobbyists have given between $500 and $1,000 to McDermott’s legal defense fund. They are David Springer, a former congressional staffer who lobbies at Venable; Emanuel (Manny) Rouvelas, who runs the lobby practice at Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds; and former Rep. Ronnie Flippo of Alabama, who lobbies at his own firm, Flippo and Associates.

Salon asked McDermott’s office about the unethical contributions on Monday. By Wednesday, a spokesman for McDermott said the House member had returned three of the four contributions, including the one from Schroeder. They were still searching for a copy of the check written by Flippo. “It’s good to have you guys note it instead of the ethics committee,” said Bill Perry, the lawyer who manages McDermott’s campaign accounts.

However, the chances that the committee would discover such a violation are nearly zero. In both the House and the Senate, the committees tend to limit their investigations to complaints from other members of Congress. In recent months, despite months of front-page stories about congressional ethics violations, no member of the House or Senate has filed a complaint calling for a broader investigation. Watchdogs expect the issue to fade from public view. “Nobody has anything to worry about,” says Sloan, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “because ethics committees don’t do anything.”

McHenry has been one of the most completely shameless of House Republicans since his arrival in Congress, in 2005, when he immediately and publicly endorsed Tom DeLay’s brilliant plan to exempt himself from ethics rules as his connections to Jack Abramoff began to end his career. But he was born to be cheerfully corrupt: He’s a product of the College Republicans, an organization that trains little Lee Atwaters, Karl Roves and Grover Norquists in the arts of scorched-earth campaigning and wholly irresponsible “governing” on behalf of the monied interests that bought you your job. The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly.

After the College Republicans, and a failed state legislature race, McHenry moved on to truly insidious conservative astroturfing/push-polling/communications firm DCI, then worked for Rove, then took a political appointment in the Bush administration, then moved to the district he now represents, where he started a real estate company that did not actually buy or sell any real estate, so that he could run for Congress as “a small businessman.”

Once in the United States House of Representatives, McHenry personally intervened in a wild and bloody College Republican National Committee chair election, on behalf of a personal friend of his who’d become slightly toxic after he sent fundraising letters attempting to trick “elderly people with dementia” into donating to the CRNC. And he was successful! The horrible kid won, against all odds:

In other phone calls, McHenry was more blunt: “He told me, and several of my friends that we were done in politics if we didn’t support him,” another College Republican chapter president told me. (McHenry has admitted that he and Deans made the calls but denied that they threatened anyone’s career). Over the course of two weeks, after a couple of a dozen calls, McHenry prevailed upon those in the North Carolina delegation to change their votes, removing three votes from Davidson’s column and putting them in Gourley’s. Gourley ended up winning by six votes; had North Carolina voted the other way, Davidson might have won.

Another of McHenry’s first acts in Congress, Wallace-Wells writes, was to champion a bill that was specifically written to rip off a large portion of his constituents, by making it “much harder for government to regulate or block the conversion of credit unions into banks …” He is a close ally of major consumer financial institutions with a plum assignment to the Committee on Financial Services, which is great for raising money.

It’s only natural that Elizabeth Warren, whose mission is to protect consumers from unethical and predatory practices by these institutions, is Patrick McHenry’s enemy. You can complain on his Facebook wall all you like, but the Republican from North Carolina is incapable of feeling embarrassment.

And his treatment of Warren will only make him a bigger conservative hero and an even more attractive investment opportunity for major banks.

The charges arose after DeLay set up a PAC to funnel corporate money, which is barred in Texas elections, to candidates for the state legislature. The group raised $190,000 and funneled it through the national Republican Party, which then distributed the money to several state-level candidates in Texas.

To learn more about the case that brought DeLay down, I spoke with Lou Dubose, who co-authored “The Hammer,” a biography of DeLay. The former editor of the Texas Observer and the current editor of the Washington Spectator newsletter, Dubose covered the trial gavel to gavel in Austin. He was in the courtroom on Monday when DeLay gave a lengthy presentencing speech accusing prosecutors of having political motivations and claiming he had $10 million in legal bills. 

I asked Dubose whether DeLay, who is planning an appeal, will ever see the inside of a jail cell, and whether the former majority leader appears humbled by the ordeal of the trial.  The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you ever think that you would see this happen?

I really didn’t. This was a working class jury, and I think that made a huge difference.

What was the dynamic with the jury — why did that make a difference?

Gary Cobb, the assistant DA who tried the case, really dragged out the $50,000 checks and the flights on corporate jets with the same persons who had written the checks to DeLay’s PAC. The sort of life that Tom DeLay lived at the expense of the corporate lobby — I think that really made an impact. By their clothes and what we know about them, it was a real working-class jury.

Oddly enough, Tom DeLay spent the entire duration of the three-week trial in a motor home rather than the Four Seasons. He drove his motor coach over here and checked into a motor home park in south Austin, a long way from where he was playing golf at Saint Andrews in Scotland. Then there was also the fact of the way the DeLays dressed, the fact that Reverend Rick Scarborough was sitting behind them. There was a lot of bling there that these people on the jury didn’t have.

Was it possible to tell where the $190,000 ended up? Did it just go to the state GOP?

The money came back, and it went to the candidates in Texas for whom it was designated. The backstory, of course, is that the Republicans controlled everything in Texas but the statehouse. Therefore they could not control redistricting. So DeLay set this organization up in 2001 for the 2002 election and they had to win a majority in the house. They moved this $190,000 up to D.C. because they were specifically raising corporate money, which was easier to raise. They sent it to Washington with specific instructions to send it back to these designated candidates. The candidates got the checks in the exact amount of $190,000.

And DeLay personally raised the money?

Well, that was the question. He stayed in the background but the state proved that he was aware that that transaction had happened. He was probably involved in directing it, although they didn’t have direct testimony on that. They put the three men who did the money-laundering in a room together in Sugar Land, Texas, in DeLay’s district, before the transaction was made.

Remarkably, at one point in the trial, DeLay went out and talked to Laylan Copelin of the Austin American-Statesman, who is a really terrific reporter. And Laylan asked him if he could have stopped the transaction. And DeLay said, “I could have stopped it, but why would I?”

And that was used in the trial?

In the middle of the trial, the state called Laylan Copelin as a witness — really bizarre. He’d been sitting there most of the trial; two weeks into the trial they call him as a witness because of what DeLay had said. His story ran, and two days later he was on the stand testifying as to what he had been told.

So I think DeLay proved to be a terrible client for a storied criminal defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin. That said, the state did an incredible job putting on a case that had to be by nature largely circumstantial.

Do you think he will ever spend a day in jail?

No. Simply because the Court of Criminal Appeals is an elected court, it’s all Republican, it’s highly political. It’s known as a prosecutors’ court, but in this case I would bet that they’re going to rule for the defendant. The Third Court of Appeals, where the appeal will start, is also a Republican court.

What are the issues in the appeal?

These courts are going to have to find a creative way of setting Tom DeLay free. One argument that they once made that they might try to revive is that money-laundering didn’t apply to checks, it applied to cash. This involved checks. The problem with that at the appellate level is that there have been a number of convictions based on money laundering with checks. So are you going to overturn all these prior convictions in order to save Tom DeLay?

What is DeLay doing these days?

You know, nothing. He is struggling to remain relevant. DeLay was always the star at CPAC, the annual conservative conference in Washington. But he hasn’t been allowed to speak there. Two years ago at CPAC, he was trolling for interviews. At the last CPAC convention, he was shunned.

He’s become a pariah to the Republican Party, and I don’t quite understand why. The true believers hold him responsible, rightly, for the Bush Medicare prescription drug bill, which DeLay pushed through. But he’s of no use to them anymore, and he’s not wanted. So most of what he does is struggle to remain relevant, and he’s not. Dick DeGuerin, in his closing argument, said “This prosecution has rendered my client unemployable.” And to my knowledge, he’s not employed.

His media statements have been defiant, but has he changed?

I don’t think so. That’s what’s remarkable. This is the same Tom DeLay that I saw every day for a year and a half when I followed him in Washington. It seemed to me that it never occurred to him that he no longer had the power that he once exercised. He had no regrets — he’s the same guy, except that he’s driving in a motor home instead of sleeping in the Four Seasons.

“This is an abuse of power. It’s a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I’m very disappointed in the outcome,” DeLay told reporters outside the courtroom. He remains free on bond, and his sentencing was tentatively set to begin on Dec. 20.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname “the Hammer,” used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

DeLay and his attorneys maintained the former Houston-area congressman did nothing wrong as no corporate funds went to Texas candidates and the money swap was legal.

The verdict came after a three-week trial in which prosecutors presented more than 30 witnesses and volumes of e-mails and other documents. DeLay’s attorneys presented five witnesses.

Prosecutors said DeLay conspired with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee, or RNC. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates. Under Texas law, corporate money can’t go directly to political campaigns.

Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004 — and strengthened DeLay’s political power.

DeLay’s attorneys argued the money swap resulted in the seven candidates getting donations from individuals, which they could legally use in Texas.

They also said DeLay only lent his name to the PAC and had little involvement in how it was run. Prosecutors, who presented mostly circumstantial evidence, didn’t prove he committed a crime, they said.

DeLay has chosen to have Senior Judge Pat Priest sentence him. He faces five years to life in prison on the money laundering charge and two to 20 years on the conspiracy charge. He also would be eligible for probation.

The 2005 criminal charges in Texas, as well as a separate federal investigation of DeLay’s ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ended his 22-year political career representing suburban Houston. The Justice Department probe into DeLay’s ties to Abramoff ended without any charges filed against DeLay.

Ellis and Colyandro, who face lesser charges, will be tried later.

Except for a 2009 appearance on ABC’s hit television show “Dancing With the Stars,” DeLay has been out of the spotlight since resigning from Congress in 2006. He now runs a consulting firm based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.