I missed this NYT piece earlier this week.  It begins: “Saying that public trust is at stake, a special House ethics panel on Tuesday called for new rules to prevent lawmakers and their staffs from violating conflict of interest standards and proposed other new measures designed to keep partisan squabbles from undermining future investigations of such wrongdoing. The broad set of recommendations, coming only a few months before the House will adopt a new set of rules for the next Congress, were released as the ethics committee finally completed a three-year investigation of Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, an inquiry that itself got caught up in controversy because of such partisan disputes and ambiguous ethics rules.”