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The pitcher of this political [anti-earmarks] curveball is Rep. Jeff Flake , who introduced a resolution late Monday that calls for an ethics investigation into “the relationship between earmark requests already made by members and the source and timing of past campaign contributions.” Flake’s resolution qualifies as “privileged,” meaning it has priority status for floor consideration.

Flake, an Arizona Republican who has become the scourge of congressional earmarkers, cited numerous recent news stories about PMA’s campaign contributions, its ability to secure earmarks for clients and the FBI probe into whether it complied with the law in making donations.

The resolution, which the House must dispose of by Wednesday, would instruct the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, as the ethics panel is known, to report its findings within two months.

Congress has managed to avoid connecting the pay-to-play dots by looking the other way. This has been easy to do. House rules require members submitting earmark requests to certify that they have no “financial interest” in doing so. But the House ethics manual states: “A contribution to a member’s principal campaign committee or leadership PAC generally would not constitute the type of ‘financial interest’ referred to in the rule.”

Now, thanks to Rod Blagojevich and the PMA Group, perhaps the days of whistling past the Justice Department are behind us. If we think we can rely on Ethics Committee guidelines written by our colleagues to shield us from corruption investigations, we are drinking our own bathwater. We have little choice but to decouple earmarks from campaign contributions. This can be most easily done by clarifying that campaign contributions do in fact constitute “financial interest.” I’ve introduced a House resolution to do just that.

Often when a privileged resolution involves a politically thorny issue, the majority party will move to table — or kill — the measure. The roll call vote probably will be on the motion to table Flake’s resolution rather than the measure itself.

The timing of Flake’s call for a vote could hardly be less auspicious for Democrats. A list of Democratic-sponsored earmarks in the omnibus that are targeted to clients of PMA was circulating Monday night on Capitol Hill.

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