I think I disagree with John Podhoretz this morning.

I do agree with him a bit: that it all looks bad, and that’s how people are seeing it, as my normal-people focus grouping overwhelming shows. The Tom DeLay rule change sounds terrible. To people hearing about it on the evening news last night, it sounded like the GOP is trying to protect a criminal.

But, the new rule makes sense, it seems to me. As Roll Call explained it yesterday, “Under the new Republican guidelines, if a leader or chairman is indicted on a felony charge, the Steering Committee must meet within 30 days and make a recommendation to the full Conference on whether the lawmaker should be removed from his position.” That protects against partisan witch hunts in courts to oust the like of a DeLay (who a Texas District Attorney wants to do in, seemingly obviously). Perhaps that’s the way the rule should have been written when it was born, in Rostenkwski days. But I don’t get all upset at rules changing. (Like seniority and the Jud Cmte, but we won’t go there.)

And, odds are, criminals aren’t going to stay in leadership positions. Besides the weight of the world weighing in on the House if they tried to keep an obvious felon in leadership, the new rule, as Roll Call noted, “requires a leader or chairman who has been convicted of a felony to immediately step down, a provision that did not exist in the previous rules.”