By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff

Among the promises the Democrats made when they won control of Congress two years ago was to clean up Washington following a series of GOP bribery and influence peddling scandals. Now Republican officials in South Carolina say the No. 3 Democrat in the House — Majority Whip James E. Clyburn — is proving his party to be hypocritical by hiring as a district caseworker a long-time friend convicted of public corruption.

John “Rick” Rickenbacker was an assistant school principal and chairman of the Orangeburg County Council in 2006 when he was indicted and pleaded guilty to taking a $50,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as a consultant to a company seeking to buy the Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg.

Clyburn says he’s known Rickenbacker for years and thinks he deserves a second chance. Not so Katon Dawson, the South Carolina GOP chairman who says the congressman’s hiring decision “undermines calls for honest government and disregards the public trust.” It’s bad news, Dawson says, “when the third highest-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives surrounds himself with close advisers who have broken the law and leveraged access to power for personal gain.”

Clyburn is a shoo-in for a ninth term in a reliably Democratic district connecting parts of Columbia, Florence and Charleston. But Dawson says he hopes to make other Democrats in the state pay this November if they don’t themselves denounce Rickenbacker’s joining the congressional payroll this month — at an annual salary of $45,000.

Clyburn says he believes Rickenbacker has paid his debt to society and is sorry for what he did. Hiring him, Clyburn says, is in keeping with his own work in Congress to help rehabilitate prisoners. Rickenbacker last month was released from a halfway house after a year in federal prison. He’s now helping Clyburn constituents who have questions about their Social Security and veterans’ benefits.

“It would be hypocritical for me to ask others to take a chance on those who have made mistakes, but not be willing to do so myself,” Clyburn says.