The very conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal seems to be saying that the GOP needs to clean its unethical house, actually its House and Senate:

As Republicans learned in 2006, voters don't take kindly to behavior that has so far sent two Representatives to jail, caused the indictment of a third and inspired a wave of investigations into shady dealings. FBI searches of the homes of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and California Congressman John Doolittle have only made it harder for the GOP to campaign as a party that would clean up a status quo in Washington that voters clearly dislike.

In his exit interview with the Journal last week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove remarked that his main mistake during the 2006 campaign was not acting more vigorously to remove candidates tainted by corruption. Now is not too soon for Republicans to get the house cleaning done for 2008.

Acknowledgment -- or spin -- from the top political adviser to George Bush on why Republicans lost the elections in 2006.  Karl Rove places the blame squarely on the GOP's ethical problems according to Robert Novak.  That's quite a statement from someone wrapped up in a major ethics scandal.  Rove was just subpoenaed by the Senate over the U.S. Attorneys scandal:

Karl Rove, President Bush's political lieutenant, told a closed-door meeting of 2008 Republican House candidates and their aides Tuesday that it was less the war in Iraq than corruption in Congress that caused their party's defeat in the 2006 elections. 

Rove's clear advice to the candidates is to distance themselves from the culture of Washington. Specifically, Republican candidates are urged to make clear they have no connection with disgraced congressmen such as Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley. In effect, Rove was rebutting the complaint inside the party that Bush is responsible for Republican miseries by invading Iraq.

Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News (which we learned from the Associated Press) that Republicans paid a price -- "a terrible price" -- in the 2006 elections for the ethics scandals that plagued the party:

Asked about the Democratic takeover of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, Mrs. Cheney said scandals cost the GOP many votes.

"I think Iraq was part of it, but I also think that you had some extraordinary ethical failures," she said. "They were bipartisan, but I do think the Republicans paid a great price for that."

She noted the cases of former Republican congressman Mark Foley, who resigned over sexually explicit messages sent to male pages, and Randy Cunningham, who pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from defense contractors.

"I think those exacted a terrible price," she said.

A winner has yet to be determined in Florida's 13 Congressional District. Serious concerns have been raised about the undervote in Sarasota County. Legal actions have begun, the latest of which prevents an audit of voting machines until each side has their own expert:

A circuit court judge Tuesday temporarily delayed a state audit of touch-screen voting machines used in the contest for the seat Rep. Katherine Harris gave up to make her failed Senate run.

Sarasota Circuit Judge Deno Economou delayed the audit until both candidates can get their own experts involved in the investigation.

The order does not halt an ongoing recount in the congressional race to replace Harris.

Electronic voting machines in Sarasota County reported 18,382 people - about one in eight voters - did not vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings, but made choices in other races. That rate was much higher than other counties in the district.

This election will drag out for awhile.

From Rich Lowry, prominent conservative commentator and editor of the National Review:

The “culture of corruption” was real. That phrase was a much-contested talking point during the past two years, with Democrats touting it as an accurate description of the degraded ethical state of the congressional GOP and Republicans dismissing it as a smear.

Democrats were much closer to the truth. Voters took a good whiff of the odor emanating from Washington and some of their Republican representatives, and recoiled. One-third of Republican losses in the House came in congressional districts where the party had been tainted, to varying degrees, by scandal.

Those seats were in Arizona’s 5th, California’s 11th, Florida’s 16th, New York’s 20th, North Carolina’s 11th, Pennsylvania’s 7th and 10th, Ohio’s 18^th, and Texas’ 22nd congressional districts.

Drawing from these races, the GOP’s message to its ranks should be (taking them in order): If you want to take questionable Native American-tribe money, get entangled with a shady lobbyist, do favors for a client of a shady lobbyist, hit on teenage pages, have domestic-disturbance calls at your house, take bribes, funnel contracts to your lobbyist daughter, allegedly choke your mistress, or run a congressional office infested with self-enriching charlatans — please, go find some other party.

More analysis on how the culture of corruption impacted election results this year. Two top Democrats believe the ethics issue was a factor:

"Every member or district that had an issue related to the professional conduct of that member switched and became Democratic," Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who headed the Democrats' congressional campaign efforts, said today. "That was eight seats — half of the 15 you needed."

Former Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe said Republicans miscalculated in deciding not to respond to the scandals by passing ethics legislation.

House Republicans blocked efforts to ban lobbyist-paid meals and to prevent lawmakers from accepting cut-rate charter flights on corporate jets. The only measure to be enacted identified lawmakers who obtained funding for local projects known as earmarks. That rule expires when Congress adjourns in January.

Melanie Sloan points out that ethics were an issue the last time the House changed hands in 1994:

in Washington, said Republicans had failed to heed the lesson of the 1994 campaign.

In that year, Republicans swept Democrats from power in Congress by questioning their ethics.

"The voters have sent Congress the message that they will not tolerate corruption,"said.

One would think that members of Congress would know that votes will not tolerate corruption. But, clearly, they don't. Don't worry, though. CREW will constantly remind them.

Another major newspaper outlines the role of scandals in the loss of the House by the GOP:

Many of the candidates in trouble were linked to Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist who pleaded guilty in January to felonies including bribing a member of Congress, or to former congressman Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned in September after being confronted about sexually explicit computer messages and improper e-mails sent to teenage boys serving as Congressional pages.

Democrats took three seats vacated as a result of scandal: those of Foley; former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who resigned his Texas seat in June after a fundraising scandal; and former Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Ney, who resigned last week after pleading guilty to corruption in the Abramoff scandal.

Voters held the Republican Party responsible for the ethical failings, said David Rohde, a political scientist at Duke University. "It's not just individuals who transgressed themselves, but it's the party that's in control that has failed on a whole bunch of grounds," he said.

In surveys of voters as they left polling places Tuesday, 41% said the issue of corruption in government was extremely important in deciding their vote — more than any other issue, including terrorism and the economy. Those voters favored Democrats by 60% to 38%.

The reach of scandal was reminiscent of 1994, when Democrats lost control of Congress after bouncing checks at the House bank, and 1974, when Republicans lost 48 House seats after Watergate.

An e-mail from the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) obtained by National Journal's Hotline On Call blames ethics and corruption for losing House seats:

The Scandal Factor Was Costly. We lost several seats by the self-inflicted route: AZ-05, CA-11, FL-16, NY-20, NC-11, OH-18, PA-07, PA-10, and TX-22. Note that with the exception of PA-07, all of these are fairly reliable Republican districts.

Of the districts listed by the NRCC, Pombo (CA-11), Sweeney (NY-20), Taylor (NC-11), Weldon (PA-07) and Sherwood (PA-10) were all named as among the most corrupt members of Congress in CREW's "Beyond DeLay." OH-18 and TX-22 had been represented by disgraced members Bob Ney and Tom DeLay respectively.