House Rules

It's tough being poor. Not just welfare poor, but working poor. The people who labor 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, earning, say, $7.50 an hour behind the counter of a mini-mart, and then cleaning offices at night. At 50 hours a week, that's $375, or $19,500 a year, with no vacation. Now, figure in a few kids and subtract rent at $600 a month for some place half decent, and you have nearly half the take-home pay going for housing. That is a hard road. To stay on it, working people deserve help.

The House Judiciary Committee approved a fourth and final article of impeachment calling for the removal of the President yesterday. And in a crucial move, Republican leaders then announced they would block a floor vote on a milder censure alternative, leaving President Clinton in a precarious position with an impeachment vote by the full House just days away. Incoming House Speaker Robert L. Livingston of Louisiana and current Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia said they would not permit a vote on censure - a written reprimand favored by some Democrats and many in the public.

Cloning sheep was remarkable enough. But legislators? One would have been forgiven for considering that possibility yesterday while pondering the attendance roll call of the state House of Representatives. The mystery: Rep. Connie Williams, a Montgomery County Democrat who took office in January, was recorded as voting on three resolutions that came up while the House was in session from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Yet she was 100 miles away in her district, attending a student meeting at Lower Merion High School.

A dramatic early-morning fire that lit up the sky over the Blue Route at Plush Mill Road, destroying a surgeon's $400,000 Tudor-style house Jan. 19, has been declared arson. Township Police Chief Francis J. Corbett said yesterday that local and state police investigators found two points of origin of the fire: on the first floor and in the basement, both in the west end of the house. "We don't know yet who set the fire or what accelerant was used, but we're certain it was arson," Corbett said.

His conservative message aside, Newt Gingrich rose to power on the strength of two convictions: Politics is war, and Democrats cheat. He once insisted that his crusade against the Democrats "has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. " He once charged that the Democrats were trying "to destroy honest institutions. " He saw himself as a champion of "honesty and integrity. " He once warned that "dishonesty and deception . . . alienate citizens from their country.

Republicans rallied around beleaguered House Speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday, downplaying his confessed violations of House rules and predicting he would be reelected as speaker next month. But his fate will remain clouded until the House ethics committee determines his punishment. Moving swiftly to influence public opinion about Gingrich, whose popularity among voters was already low, the GOP also began a campaign to discredit his chief antagonist, House Minority Whip David E. Bonior (D., Mich.

In a remarkable admission, House Speaker Newt Gingrich agreed yesterday with a House ethics subcommittee that he had repeatedly violated House rules and then denied doing so. Republican leaders in the House rallied around their leader yesterday, saying that Gingrich's sins were technical and relatively minor. They predicted he would win reelection as House speaker when the 105th Congress convenes Jan. 7. But Democrats called on Gingrich to step down from his leadership post, saying he may have violated the federal tax code.

A lawyer who helped dethrone former House Speaker Jim Wright on ethics charges told a federal court jury yesterday that U.S. Rep. Joseph McDade's conduct in allegedly accepting gratuities from defense contractors violated House ethics rules. William Kunkle, former special deputy counsel to the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct during the probe that resulted in the resignation of Wright, a Texas Democrat, in 1989, told the jury about House rules he said were written in 1977.

Three or four decades ago, many kinds of families called public housing developments home. Bus drivers and nurses lived near families struggling on public assistance. They took pride in making their projects safe; they shared tips on how to get ahead, and most wanted to buy their own homes as fast as possible. It wasn't utopia, but it wasn't chaos either. Then came the changes in housing policies that made only the poorest of the poor eligible for public housing. Experts like federal housing chief Henry G. Cisneros say the rot in public housing began then.

In 1994, the campaign of State Rep. Joseph R. Pitts gave $6,600 to the campaign of Debra Cruel, a Dauphin County woman who was also running for the state House. Although contributing such a sum was legal according to Pennsylvania campaign finance laws, it would have been a violation under the federal election code. As the race for the 16th U.S. House District seat being vacated by Robert S. Walker gathers steam, the candidates and their campaigns have to learn a whole new set of election finance laws.