The House ethics committee is stacked against Weiner

The chairman of the House Ethics Committee this year is Rep. Josiah “Jo” Bonner, an Alabama Republican described by aides who have worked with him in the past as a family man and “Boy Scout.” Driven by a fundamental sense of right and wrong, the former Capitol Hill staffer made headlines during the ethics probe of Rep. Charlie Rangel by saying the New York Democrat Rangel had neither honor nor integrity, and adding, “Mr. Rangel should only look in the mirror if he wants to know who to blame.”…

Bonner’s Democratic counterpart on the committee is Rep. Linda Sanchez, one half of the first pair of sisters ever to serve in Congress together. Although Sanchez’s liberal California politics are the polar opposite of Bonner’s Christian conservatism, she is no more likely to see Weiner’s online exploits any more favorably.

The Berkeley- and UCLA-educated attorney not only spent a summer at the National Organization for Women working on sexual harassment issues, she recently authored a bill to update harassment laws to criminalize cyberbullying and cyberstalking. “The Internet should not be the last refuge of scoundrels,” Sanchez said when she introduced her bill…

An ethics investigation could cost the New York congressman hundreds of thousands of dollars, which he must raise apart from campaign or PAC funds. Rangel spent more than $2 million to defend himself during his two-year investigation and still showed up without a lawyer to the ethics committee trial against him because he said he had run out of money to pay for his defense.