In Olympia, Democratic state Rep. Chris Hurst wants to ban lobbyists from giving lawmakers gifts or buying them dinner or drinks. Sean Cockerham in The News Tribune reports:

"I think you would be hard-pressed to find a single constituent saying 'that's how I want my legislator to behave,' " said Hurst, a Democratic state representative whose district stretches from Auburn through East Pierce County.

His bill to ban such practices for legislators and other state officials isn't popular with leaders of the Democratic-controlled state House. House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler of Hoquiam said the bill is overkill and gives the public a bad impression of the Legislature.

"It makes it look like we accept a lot of gifts," Kessler said. "I don't see a problem right now. If there was a problem and it was rampant, I'd say absolutely."

And there's trouble in D.C. for the Senate ethics bill. The new Democratic majority has had a tough go trying to pass ethics reform. It was supposed to be the first thing passed this year. But the bill stumbled first over an intra-party fight about earmarks. Then the bill faced an onslaught of opposition from conservative Christian lobbying groups that claimed the new restrictions were designed to hamper their access to Congress.

And now the bill looks dead because of a fight over the line-item veto.

From this morning's Washington Post:

"It's as obvious as the sun coming up somewhere in this world that they tried to kill this bill," a furious Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last night in an interview. "And all 21 Republican senators up for re-election are going to have to explain how they brought down the most significant reform ever to come before this Congress. They brought this baby down."

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said insistence on a line-item-veto vote was proof that the GOP is serious about passing the toughest possible overhaul of the way Congress conducts its business. Efforts to give Bush power to strike individual items from spending bills have been struck down by the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans insist that the latest version will pass constitutional muster.

The bill could still be revived. And I bet it will, given that without it a large piece of the Democrats' campaign promises cannot be fulfilled. The bill contained lobbying gift bans, travel restrictions, and greater transparency on earmarks and other Congressional spending practices. The House already passed a similar measure.

Now begins the business of blame assessment. And it's a tricky business, as you can see in this exchange between NPR reporter Peter Overby and Morning Edition host Renee Montagne:

Overby: The Democrats say that the Republicans never really wanted ethics reform. The Republican say no, they do want ethics reform but the Democrats are being hypocritical because if you're going to have real ethics reform you need something to control the little earmarks that get snuck into a bill and a line-item veto would give the president a chance to knock those out.

Montagne: So this proposed amendment brought down the entire bill.

Overby: Yeah, it did. Reid and McConnell negotiated late into the night and they thought they had reached a deal. But a deal like that needs the unanimous consent of the Senate. That's the way the Senate works. And one other senator objected.

Montagne: And that senator was?

Overby: Robert Byrd, Democrat, the longest-serving senator in office now. And he's chairman of the Appropriations Committee and he's a fierce defender of the congressional power of the purse. So one interpretation is Byrd is the one who killed the bill and the other interpretation is that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, managed to kill this ethics bill without leaving any fingerprints.