These are tough days in the office of the House Majority Leader. The Washington Post's Mike Allen writes that "House Republican aides said yesterday for the first time that they believe they will have to reverse or modify the ethics rules that were passed on a party-line vote in January and have caused Democrats to refuse to allow the ethics committee to organize." Feeling the heat, yet another GOP staffer is leaving the hill for the more comfortable environs of K Street. The Hill's Jonathan E. Kaplan has the story.

Juliane Carter Sullivan, a senior aide to Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), has joined Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

She is the fifth DeLay aide to leave since the start of the 109th Congress. Stuart Roy and Jonathan Grella, DeLay’s spokesmen; Carl Thorsen, his counsel; and Deana Funderburk, a policy analyst, all left earlier this year.

[...]

Sullivan played a role in one of the transgressions for which the House ethics committee admonished against DeLay. [emphasis added]

DeLay's aides are jumping ship left and right. Do they forsee tough times ahead? Tough to say. It could be that they just want to cash in by becoming corporate lobbyists. Just the same, they might suspect that their boss' days are numbered and want to get out while they still can. Either way, it's not measure of confidence when five of your senior staffers leave in the course of just a few months.