The Washington Post wags their finger at Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) and his wife for her shady job as his campaign fundraiser:

Imagine that every time members of Congress received a $1,000 campaign contribution, they could skim $150 off the top and put it straight into their personal bank accounts. Sound shady? That is, in effect, how Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.) and his wife, Julie, operate. According to our review of campaign finance records, Mrs. Doolittle has received at least $215,000 from Mr. Doolittle’s various campaign committees since 2001. This doesn’t include $6,800 in payments to another of Mrs. Doolittle’s companies, Events Plus, before she started doing his fundraising work. She’s taken in nearly $100,000 during the 2006 campaign alone.

This is an unbelievably questionable arrangement that I have written about here before. Yesterday the Sacramento Bee reported that the head of the Association of Fundraising Professionals denounced Mrs. Doolittle’s percentage-based fees as “absolutely not the standard in the industry” and declared that the ethics code of Fundraising Professionals “explicitly prohibits percentage-based compensation”. Mrs. Doolittle, and congressmen as well, will easily eclipse Congressman Doolittle’s annual congressional salary if their fundraising continues at this pace. One would imagine that an operational House Ethics Committee would hold hearings on such a suspect fundraising arrangement.