By Dennis Camire, Gannett News Service, June 19, 2008

19 Jun 2008 // House members tread a minefield of rules as they juggle their official duties while campaigning for re-election, and a misstep can have serious repercussions, both legally and politically.

Lawmakers are generally prohibited from using any congressional resources -- from money and telephones to office supplies and congressional staff time -- on their political campaigns. But exceptions are many and the potential for missteps abound.

"The line is fuzzy because everything you do on Capitol Hill has political implications," said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist with Claremont McKenna College in California.

The issue surfaced last month when a watchdog group asked the House ethics committee to investigate whether members of Congress improperly used government-paid staff time and materials for their campaigns.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington was responding to published reports that a former staff member for Reps. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii; Jane Harman, D-Calif., and others was providing the Justice Department with information about such misuse.

Laura I. Flores, 47, of Arlington, Va., pleaded guilty in January to embezzling $169,000 from House office accounts but received a reduced sentence of six months in prison and two years of supervised probation in return for her cooperation in the investigation. The Justice Department probe centers on House members using official resources and staff for political campaigns, according to unidentified sources in Washington Post reports.

To back up its call for an ethics committee investigation, the watchdog group said such violations were growing, citing similar allegations made in the past two years by former staffers for Reps. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.; David Scott, D-Ga., and Gary Miller, R-Calif. No outcome of the group's request has been made public.

Violations of rules and standards governing use of official staff and resources in political campaigns don't often rise to criminal levels.

It's more likely the House ethics committee will either dismiss the complaint after an investigation or issue a letter of admonishment to the lawmaker. In some cases the committee goes further and bans a lawmaker's staff from working on a campaign for a period of time and requires more education for staffers on how to separate official and campaign work.

For example, congressional staffers are not allowed to contribute money directly to their boss' re-election effort, but they can donate their time.

The work must be done during the staffers' free time, according to guidance from the House ethics committee. If they spend too much time on campaign work, staffers are supposed to take part-time status at reduced pay or take time off without pay.

Pitney, a former staffer for Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., said one way House members can guard against violating the rules is to have clear office policies dealing with how much vacation or other leave time they have.

"Those policies aren't uniform and that's part of the difficulty in Congress," said Pitney, who also was a congressional fellow for then-Rep. Dick Cheney, R-Wyo., and former Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y. "That leads to questions of whether people are getting time off to work in campaigns or they are actually using their own time."

Bob Dye, who worked for former Rep. Cecil Heftel, D-Hawaii, said Heftel guarded against going over the line by not having Washington staff work on his campaign.

Dye said staffers generally try to make sure they and their bosses abide by the rules.

"When you work for a politician, your employment is dependent pretty much upon his re-election," he said. "You don't want him to lose votes by doing some dumb thing."

To stay inside House ethics guidelines, Abercrombie said he splits his campaign and official office functions completely and uses a separate accountant to handle his campaign and two senior staffers to oversee his congressional operating account.

As someone who once advised House members at the Congressional Management Foundation, Brad Fitch said he found that most lawmakers go to great lengths to adhere to the laws and rules governing official staff and resources. Their senior staffers do as well, said Fitch, now head of the Washington research group Knowlegis.

"The member also should be a good manager and monitor the situation to check on the amount of time the employees are using," he said. "You have to make sure the people doing it are performing the work and being paid for the work they are doing in the campaign and not being subsidized by their government payroll."