Even as House Democrats work to wipe the yolk off of their faces following the indictment of Democratic Congressman William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, it appears that the list of House Republicans under suspicion of unethical behavior seems to be continuing to grow. Check out this latest news from The New York Times David D. Kirkpatrick:

It is no secret that campaign contributions sometimes lead to lucrative official favors. Rarely, though, are the tradeoffs quite as obvious as in the twisted case of Coconut Road.

The road, a stretch of pavement near Fort Myers, Fla., that touches five golf clubs on its way to the Gulf of Mexico, is the target of a $10 million earmark that appeared mysteriously in a 2006 transportation bill written by Representative Don Young, Republican of Alaska.

Mr. Young, who last year steered more than $200 million to a so-called bridge to nowhere reaching 80 people on Gravina Island, Alaska, has no constituents in Florida.

The Republican congressman whose district does include Coconut Road says he did not seek the money. County authorities have twice voted not to use it, until Mr. Young and the district congressman wrote letters warning that a refusal could jeopardize future federal money for the county.

The Coconut Road money is a boon, however, to Daniel J. Aronoff, a real estate developer who helped raise $40,000 for Mr. Young at the nearby Hyatt Coconut Point hotel days before he introduced the measure.

Mr. Aronoff owns as much as 4,000 acres along Coconut Road. The $10 million in federal money would pay for the first steps to connect the road to Interstate 75, multiplying the value of Mr. Aronoff's land.

Now some might argue that this is par for the course in Congress, a dog-bites-man story rather than a man-bites-dog. Not so says a Republican county commissioner -- a Republican -- in the area.

Mr. Young's role, first reported by The Naples Daily News, has escalated objections to the project. Environmentalists say the interchange would threaten wetlands. And a Republican commissioner of Lee County, Ray Judah, is campaigning against the interchange, calling it an example of Congressional corruption that is "a cancer on the federal government."

"It would appear that Don Young was doing a favor for a major contributor," Mr. Judah said.

There is a sentiment among many in Congress -- probably too many -- that a continuation of the status quo is just fine, that the American public will be alright with a neutered ethics process that lets all but the most egregious offenders on Capitol Hill go without rebuke. Along this vein, Susan Crabtree reports Thursday in The Hill, "Several House members on both sides of the aisle are worried that their leaders' increased use of the House floor as an ethics battleground will backfire as more lawmakers are expected to be indicted this Congress."

But rather than worry about the House descending into a partisan battleground over ethics violations, perhaps Congressmen and Congresswomen should worry about the exact opposite -- that as a result of their reluctance to weed out corruption, whether real or perceived, will lead to a continued decline in the public's faith in Congress as an institution.

And, frankly, this so-called "ethics truce" has the potential to hurt Democrats even more than it hurts Republicans. Even taking into account the fact that more Republicans than Democrats are reported to be currently under federal investigation, the Democrats are now in control of the House and a failure to act decisively on this matter is more likely to hurt the party in power than the party out of power. What's more, this is an issue key to the coalition of voters that put the Democrats in the majority in 2006. Exit-polling from the last election indicates that more voters (41 percent) listed corruption and ethics as extremely important to them than any other issue -- and these voters backed the Democrats by a 59 percent to 39 percent margin.

So even though it is the case that the ethics taint continues to plague House Republicans (as evidenced by The Times article) -- in fact more so than House Democrats -- it is nonetheless in the Democrats' interest to buck up and start living up to their pledge to run the most ethical Congress in American history.