(CNSNews.com) - A U.S. House of Representatives panel serving as a watchdog of lawmakers' ethics is led by the House member holding the record for taking the most free travel, while another panel member was implicated in the recent flap over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

But the House ethics committee could see changes under proposals that would impose more independent oversight and look more closely at congressional misdeeds.

The proposal will establish an independent body that will take ethics complaints from other House members as well as outside of Congress, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who was recently briefed on the plan on Capitol Hill, said in an interview.

The current rules only allow other members to file complaints against one another. The independent body would review complaints then make a recommendation to the full House committee on Standards of Official Conduct, better known as the ethics committee.

The independent body - made up of two members appointed by the House speaker and two appointed by the House minority leader - would make a recommendation to the existing House ethics committee within 45 days of receiving the complaint after a preliminary investigation.

The House committee would notify the complainant of the status of their complaint within 45 days, thus making the process more public, Fitton said.

Judicial Watch and other government watchdog groups from both the right and left have lobbied Congress to replace the current ethics structure with an office of public integrity to investigate charges of misconduct.

In accordance with the Constitution, any proposal for an independent investigative agency would still leave it up to the House members to decide on a penalty.

The formal recommendation for the new body will be announced sometime in June, said Alison Mills, spokeswoman for Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), who is the chairman of the House Special Taskforce on Ethics Enforcement. The task force was appointed earlier this year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Mills, however, declined to confirm any details of the proposal until it is formally announced, other than to say, "the task force is in the final stages of delivering a plan sometime in June."

The ranking Republican on the task force, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, supports the concept "as long as an independent entity enhances the integrity of the institution of Congress as a whole," his spokesman Christine McCarty said.

The current plan may not go far enough in doing that, said Meredith McGehee, policy director for Campaign Legal Center.

She fears the independent body will act as little more than a screening panel to forward matters on to a committee perceived as having a mutual agreement between Republicans and Democrats to not aggressively investigate matters.

One recently criticized ethics committee case concerned the Rep. Mark Foley matter, in which the panel investigated whether House leaders could have prevented the sex scandal involving House pages.

Another was the case in which the committee probed whether Rep. John Conyers ordered his staff to baby-sit his children and work on Michigan political campaigns while on the clock.

In both cases, wrongdoing was found, but no penalty was imposed.

The panel should have subpoena power, McGehee said, as a district attorney would, while the ethics committee would act as a judge after hearing the evidence.

"If it just screens complaints, it's a lost opportunity," McGehee told Cybercast News Service. "I've heard a general description but only nuance about the power of inquiry."

But Fitton is very pleased with the new plan.

"Once an independent panel is installed, they will practically and politically have to have more responsibility than just vetting," Fitton said. "It's not everything we wanted, but the cup is three-fifths full. Once the ball is rolling it will be difficult for Congress to ignore the recommendations of the body."

Others oppose the creation of an independent panel.

"The founders said Congress should police itself" on ethics rules, Don Wolfensberger, director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, said in an interview. "The courts can take care of people who break the law. Any independent body should not take over any part of that."

'Inherent conflicts'

The problem is that Congress has proven that it can't police itself, good government advocates say, after a year when several lawmakers were investigated, indicted, convicted and resigned from office amid corruption scandals.

While Fitton doesn't think House members on the ethics panel with their own questionable past should be disqualified from sitting in judgment of other members, he does believe it can cast a shadow on the process.

"You always have inherent conflicts when the House sits in judgment of their colleagues," Fitton said. "That's why the investigative and fact finding stages need to have as little political interference as possible."

The chairwoman of the House Ethics Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) is the top traveler in the House since 2000, according to a report by PoliticalMoneyline.com last summer.

Included in her 74 trips was a trip to Las Vegas sponsored by the United Steel Workers of America and a speech in Barbados sponsored by the National Bar Association. Her spokeswoman Nicole Williams declined to say whether this impeded her ability to judge her colleagues.

Instead, she referred to a previous statement by Tubbs Jones, in which she said, "It is important to travel so that I can better understand the issues that come before Congress. Therefore, I make no apologies for the trips that I have taken during my tenure in Congress."

The ranking Republican on the ethics committee, Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, was named in the matter involving eight U.S. attorney firings when John McKay, a former federal prosecutor in Seattle, reportedly alleged he was pressured by Hastings' chief of staff in the voter fraud probe of the ultra-close 2004 Washington governor's race.

The Hastings' aide said in press accounts that he did nothing improper.

Though Hastings' spokesperson Jessica Gleason declined to comment for this story, she referred to a previous statement by Hastings that said, "It was a simple inquiry and nothing more - and it was the only call to any federal official from my office on this subject either during or after the recount ordeal."

No one alleged that laws were broken in the matter, but Democrats have used the U.S. attorney firings as a rallying cry to charge that the Bush administration is politicizing the Justice Department.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) also came under fire last year for not returning $30,000 in campaign contributions from Americans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (ARMPAC), a PAC run by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who resigned from the House after he was indicted by a Texas grand jury for money laundering.

Kline's spokesman Troy Young declined to comment on whether this could impede his standing as a member of the ethics committee.

Wolfensberger said a member's past scandal has no bearing on his or her ability to judge another, unless the matters are somehow related.

"It's only a problem if a particular member did not recuse themselves in a particular case," he said. "Then it could raise questions."

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