The chairman's troubles - scandal-plagued Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski

Don't call him "Congressman - no one calls him that. If you're a friend or close associate, he's "Danny" or "Rosty." But to all others, Illinois Representative Dan Rostenkowski is known, deferentially, as "The Chairman."

Chairman, that is, of the House Ways and Means Committee - the powerful tax-writing committee which molds all congressional tax legislation, as well as trade, health care, and welfare law. Do you think Presidents shape tax policy? Wrong. Rosty shapes tax policy. If you're st business that needs a tax break, or an industry association which needs a loophole, you need The Chairman.

Today, however, The chairman is in trouble. At what should be the apex of his 34-year congressional career - just as he's shepherding the Clinton tax plan through the House-Senate conference - Rostenkowski has come under the ever-expanding cloud of congressional scandal. He is being investigated for allegedly converting some $21,000 in taxpayer-funded office vouchers and campaign checks into cash through fake stamp purchases at the House Post Office.

Rostenkowski has not been formally charged, and he decries the whole affair as a "fishing expedition and political witchhunt." Nonetheless, the allegations are serious enough that he has hired Washington super-lawyer Robert Bennett to represent him, and recently called a Capitol Hill press conference to proclaim his innocence. Rostenkowski told reporters gathered in his Ways and Means Committee hearing room: "I have committed no crime and have engaged in, no illegal or unethical conduct." The allegations, he said, are "unfair, false and baseless."

There are three basic schools of thought in Washington on the Rostenkowski affair.

The first, put forth by Rostenkowski's defenders, is that he couldn't have done it - the amount in question is so small, they can't imagine he would risk his whole reputation and political career for it. They point to the fact that, had Rostenkowski retired last year, he could have legally kept the more than $1 million left in his campaign coffers. Would a man who gave up $1 million free and clear, they ask, then turn around and steal a paltry $21,000? "I've known Danny a long time," says former Democratic Party chairman John White, "and I just can't see him sneaking behind the counter at the post office, swapping stamps for cash."

But even a cursory look at Rostenkowski's conduct over the years shows that, if he has not in fact crossed the line of congressional ethics, he has certainly walked close to it. For example, according to a recent investigation by the Los Angeles Times Rostenkowski accepted 167 free trips between January 1, 1987, and December 31, 1991 -all paid for by corporations, lobbyists, universities, or charities. Thirty of the junkets were to golf tournaments (Rostenkowski spends an average of one in four days playing golf on someone else's tab). And according to the Times, the 167 figure is deceptively low because "it does not appear to count separately some trips that were arranged back to back, with one corporate sponsor paying Rostenkowski's way to one engagement, and another flying him on from there to another event."

In addition to lobbyist-funded junkets, Rostenkowski topped the list of congressmen who accepted honoraria to speak to universities, trade groups, and special interests before the practice was banned in 1991. According to Congressional Quarterly (CQ) magazine, "in the ten years he was allowed to accept honoraria as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, [Rostenkowski's] take totaled almost $1.8 million." Figures like these led CQ to dub Rostenkowski "the King of Honoraria."

Furthermore, according to the Times, Rostenkowski skirted the line of impropriety in using campaign funds as well. In 1992, for example, his re-election campaign paid $1,600 in "consulting fees" to five golf pros. And Rostenkowski paid himself and his sisters $73,000 to rent a little-used office in his Chicago home. None of this is necessarily illegal. But Rostenkowski, the Times concluded, has "unapologetically hobnobbed with lobbyists and leaders of the industries and interests affected by the activities of the committee he heads ... [and] pushed right to the edge of the rules when money was involved."

Some argue that Rostenkowski is not representative of Washington today. Like one of the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, he's a powerful giant who throws his impressive weight around; but he's also a creature from a by-gone era - the age of machine politics, when backroom deals were the norm and a little greasing of the palm was considered part of business-as-usual in Washington. But others - chief among them House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich - say Rostenkowski's troubles are just the latest in a series of congressional scandals, part of a general outbreak of corruption in Congress.

Gingrich, who helped bring down former House Speaker Jim Wright over charges of corruption, argues that this kind of conduct is widespread, and lies at the very heart of popular disgust with the national legislature. Indeed the list of senior congressional leaders recently brought down in scandal is a long one. From Speaker Wright, to former House Democratic Whip Tony Coelho, to former California Senator Alan Cranston (the only senator censured in the Keating Five scandal) to Representative Fernand St Germain, former chairman of the House Banking Committee, senior Democrats keep getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar.