Remember all the talk about the new Office of Congressional Ethics and how it was going to change the way ethics issues were handled in the House?   We do.  We're still waiting.  We had very low expectations in the first place.

John Bresnahan from Politico took a look at has, or more accurately, hasn't happened on the ethics front in the House: 

But while the new Office of Congressional Ethics is finally in operation — a year after the House authorized it and more than two years after Pelosi was sworn in as speaker — the office has little to show for its work and is encumbered by layers of secrecy. It may be July at the earliest before the office reveals whether it has actually recommended any cases to the House ethics committee, and the specifics of its investigations will remain shrouded from public view.

The slow pace in getting the outside ethics office geared up also shows a larger problem House and Senate Democrats have on the ethics front — especially with troubled lawmakers such as Reps. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) — and that has party strategists privately concerned about a backlash in 2010.

“Republicans are getting some traction on the ethics issue,” admitted one Democratic insider. “What they are saying is getting play outside the Beltway.”

 That this new entity isn't working isn't a surprise to CREW:

“It was a bad setup in the first place,” said Melanie Sloan, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group. “I think they were set up to fail. I think the way the [OCE] was created, and the strictures on it, make it impossible to be effective.”

CREW has been skeptical from the beginning.  Here's Melanie's statement from last March:

We are skeptical of the latest so-called ethics reform measure. Given the pathetic performance of the Ethics Committee over the past decade we have advocated for the creation of a new, independent ethics office. Nevertheless, without subpoena power or the ability to consider complaints filed by anyone other than members of Congress, this new office, like the Ethics Committee itself, promises to be nothing more than a paper tiger. Rather than providing for the vigorous enforcement of ethics rules, the House merely has created a new layer of bureaucracy to insulate members from the consequences of their unethical activities. When the American public realizes there are no teeth behind this latest reform effort, confidence in Congress will be further eroded, the cynics will claim victory and we will be no closer to the goal of a cleaner Congress than we were at the beginning of the "cleanest Congress in history. "

Paper tiger seems like an apt descriptor.