Ethics-deficit disorder: The National Journal’s Charlie Cook muses on how and why members of Congress get into ethical trouble and how and why they never seem to learn from their and their opponents’ missteps. His solution? A film on ethics, like the old hair-blood-and-eyeballs drivers’ ed movies of high school, to be shown to congress members regularly as a kind of cautionary tale.

After each set of scandals, lawmakers seem to watch their p’s and q’s for a while, but then some of the veterans fall back into bad habits and some newcomers succumb to age-old temptations. As soon as previous scandals are out of sight, the prospect of getting caught apparently is out of mind.

There tends to be an equal amount of stupidity, hypocrisy, malfeasance, and even mean-spiritedness on either side of the aisle.

So, here’s an idea for the House and Senate majority and minority leaders of January 2007 — whoever they will be. Have a media consultant put together a 15-minute video that reviews the past 30 years of Capitol Hill scandals and what happened to the miscreants involved. Show it at your party’s first caucus and make attendance mandatory. The ethics show would be the congressional equivalent of the gory driver’s ed films used to frighten teenagers.

Cook notes that life — and politics — would be considerably easier for both parties if their members would just behave:

There isn’t a whole lot that Republicans can do about Iraq and Bush’s unpopularity, but these other problems are, collectively speaking, self-inflicted, just as Mollohan and Jefferson are self-inflicted wounds for Democrats. I often wonder whether congressional leaders realize how ridiculous they look defending the bad behavior of their own members. Do they really think that viewers will be swayed by the contention that their party’s members must be considered innocent until proven guilty if they don’t give the same benefit of the doubt to the other party’s lawmakers?

And Cook offers an excellent rationale for remaining an independent voter, unaffilated with either party:

Partisanship being what it is, a member can depend on the opposition to throw a gigantic spotlight on any alleged transgression. And both sides tend to be guilty of selective outrage, becoming insufferably self-righteous about the indiscretions of opponents while turning a blind eye to misdeeds within their own party.

To me, that’s one reason it’s so easy to be an independent. There tends to be an equal amount of stupidity, hypocrisy, malfeasance, and even mean-spiritedness on either side of the aisle, if you look hard enough. And that makes it difficult to root for one side or the other with much enthusiasm. Most partisans just won’t admit that truth.

Ain’t it the truth, Charlie. Yeah, when was the last time we heard about an ethically challenged independent?