Ethics Committee Reshaped to Accommodate Ethics of House Majority Leader

Here's another sign of the deterioration of our government's system of checks and balances. House Majority Leader Tom Delay didn't care for the rebukes he received from the House Ethics Committee last year so this year, his GOP buddies stacked the deck in his favor:

House Republican leaders responded to those rebukes this year by dumping the Republican ethics committee chairman along with two GOP committee members who voted to admonish DeLay.

Two of the new GOP members have contributed to DeLay's legal defense funds, and one of them raised money for a Texas political committee that could be investigated by the ethics committee in the future.

[4/12/05 Update]
Damn, links to the AP are becoming useless over time so we had to dig up a related but older story here.