In Roll Call this morning John Bresnahan has a piece (sub.req.) on Alan Mollohan (D-WV), ranking member of the House Ethics committee. It seems Mollohan received a bunch of campaign contributions from Mitchell Wade's MZM in addition to another company that sometimes partnered with MZM.

As Bresnahan writes:"The donations to Mollohan were perfectly legal. But the fact that the top ethics cop for House Democrats received significant sums from the company behind Congress’ biggest bribery scheme in recent memory opens him up to conflict-of-interest questions in any future ethics investigation involving MZM."

In other words, in this case, Mollohan may be the unwitting beneficiary of the GOP shutdown of the ethics committee, seeing as Duke was able to go from ethical questions to legal questions to bribery investigation to resignation and the slammer without so much as the ethics committee making a peep.

Also fair to say that even with the shutdown, Nancy Pelosi seems to have kept any Dem from so much as lodging an ethics complaint against the formerly high-flying Duke.