Reid's Whitewater

Voters looking for clues as to how — or, more to the point, whether — the Democrats are going to redeem their issue of honesty and integrity on Capitol Hill will be keeping an eye on the growing scandal around the majority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid. He is caught up in a corker of a controversy over a questionable land deal.

One might think that after all the legal fees and energy the Clintons spent defending Whitewater, a top Democratic politician would know better than to get into a complicated, questionable land deal. But the message doesn't seem to have reached Mr. Reid, who is the subject of a fascinating dispatch in Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

The Times' dispatch, from Bullhead City, Ariz., begins, "It's hard to buy undeveloped land in booming northern Arizona for $166 an acre. But now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid effectively did just that when a longtime friend decided to sell property owned by the employee pension fund that he controlled. In 2002, Reid (D-Nev.) paid $10,000 to a pension fund controlled by Clair Haycock, a Las Vegas lubricants distributor and his friend for 50 years. The payment gave the senator full control of a 160-acre parcel in Bullhead City that Reid and the pension fund had jointly owned.

"Reid's price for the equivalent of 60 acres of undeveloped desert was less than one-tenth of the value the assessor placed on it at the time. Six months after the deal closed, Reid introduced legislation to address the plight of lubricants dealers." And that's not all. The newspaper reports that "since taking full control of the parcel in 2002, Reid has pushed for federal funding for a new bridge over the Colorado River a few miles from his property."

When the Associated Press reported some of these transactions earlier, the senator's response was to launch an attack on the wire service. It'll be interesting to see how Mr. Reid responds to the Los Angeles Times. For our part, we understand why Mr. Reid would feel the need to speculate in real estate development. When in Washington, the senator, who is supposed to represent the party of the common man, lives in the Ritz-Carlton, where he initially tried to pay $3,000 in Christmas bonuses to employees out of his campaign funds.

It's hard to afford the Ritz on a senator's salary. Since Mr. Reid, unlike Senators Rockefeller or Kerry, doesn't have an oil or ketchup fortune at his disposal, real estate seems a reasonable area on which to fall back. From the perspective of hard-pressed taxpayers, though, it'd be a better deal simply to raise the senator's salary directly than to have to subsidize him indirectly through regulating the lubricant market or building bridges to nowhere.

Particularly in this climate. It was the Democrats, after all, who decided to try to make congressional ethics into a national issue. We didn't — and don't — have an objection to that; on the contrary, we're all for a hard line in respect of honest government. But it's been hard to take at face value the idealism the Democrats claim for themselves. And it's going to be harder to credit the Democrats' motives with every day that the scandal over Mr. Reid goes unresolved.