During the last year, Ney has uncharacteristically broken with the GOP's House leadership on some key issues.
He was one of nine Republicans in the chamber to vote against a recently passed budget-cutting bill because of concern about its effect on his congressional district's steel industry and cuts to Medicaid. He also opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and has been among a handful of Republicans working against reauthorization of the Patriot Act because of concerns about its effect on civil liberties.
Ney's district in eastern Ohio is heavily rural and picked up more Republican voters when it was redrawn after the 2000 census. He won reelection in 2004 with 66% of the vote.
Ney's spokesman, Brian Walsh, said Tuesday he expected the district's constituents to give the lawmaker the benefit of the doubt as the ethics scandal continued to unfold.
"I think many people in Washington these days presume someone to be guilty until proven innocent," Walsh said. "I think that's different in middle America."
Three Democrats already are vying for the right to oppose Ney in November. The campaign manager for one of the Democrats, Joe Sulzer, said the ethical allegations swirling around Ney were not yet "central in the way it is in D.C. right now" for most voters in the district.
But the Sulzer aide, Joe Abbey, added that he believed the Abramoff plea would "advance the issue tenfold" and sharpen questions of whether Ney was more focused on helping Abramoff than his constituents.
One Democratic official in Ney's district cautioned against counting out the lawmaker.
Mark Thomas, a Belmont County commissioner, noted that Ney helped secure more than $20 million for the area in a recently passed highway bill.
"I think the people in this district are taking the position that until he has been accused of whatever he may be accused of, and the facts come out, and he has an opportunity to respond," Thomas said, "we're going to be behind him as a congressman."
*
\o7Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.
\f7
