Despite the fact that the Republicans are talking about reform, they are not doing anything about it. Newly elected Republican leader, Rep. John Boehner, has a long list of scandals associated with his service in congress:
TDHS---excerpts:
1. John Boehner voted with Tom DeLay 95% of the time between Jan. 1 2004 and March 31 2005.
2. John Boehner voted to weaken the ethics rules in a move that many say served only to protect Tom DeLay.
3. When Republicans realized it was "impossible to win the communications battle" over the gutted ethics rules, Boehner flip-flopped and voted to put the old rules back into place.
4. When Democrats offered a solution to clean up the House by strengthening ethics rules, John Boehner voted twice to make sure it never even came to an up or down vote.
Bloomberg: excerpts-
1. The top donor to Boehner's leadership PAC in 2003-2004 was SLM Corp., the Reston, Virginia-based student-loan company better known as Sallie Mae. SLM contributed $65,170 to Boehner's Freedom Project, more than twice as much as the second-biggest donor, New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The money came as the House Education and Workforce Committee, which Boehner chairs, prepared to write new legislation governing student loans.
2. In 1995, Boehner handed out campaign checks from the tobacco industry to members on the House floor at a time when lawmakers were considering eliminating a tobacco subsidy.
Public Campaign: excerpts-Like Tom DeLay, John Boehner has close ties to K Street--Boehner played a key role in Tom DeLay's vaunted "K Street Project" to encourage lobbying firms to hire Republicans. In fact, beginning soon after the GOP took control of Congress in 1995, Boehner held weekly meetings with about a dozen of the most powerful lobbyists in the speaker’s suite in the Capitol. "He was a policy traffic cop for the business community,” said a colleague of Boehner’s of his role as chairman of the GOP conference. “He … translated business outreach into votes.”1 Across the span of his career, Boehner has raised nearly 95% of his money from business interests....
There is an expression that correctly describes the Republicans and their reform---"The more things change, the more they stay the same."