The scandal surrounding conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- which already threatens to take down House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), Committee on House Administration Chairman Bob Ney (R-OH), and other key Republicans -- is now widening to the entire conservative movement. The New York Times' crack team of Kate Zernike and Anne E. Kornblut have the big scoop.

In Republican Washington, Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist worked all the angles.

One was a $750-an-hour lobbyist, the other an antitax activist, and they helped drive the Republican takeover of the capital and cement the party's power. Both had a close ally in the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. And they shared a conservative ideology and a friendship going back to their days in college.

Now, with widening Congressional and criminal inquiries in the capital into Mr. Abramoff's dealings, they are sharing trouble, too.

While Mr. Abramoff has been under scrutiny for more than a year, Mr. Norquist has attracted unwelcome attention in recent weeks. A Congressional committee investigating whether Mr. Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes has subpoenaed records from Mr. Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform, after he refused for six months to turn them over voluntarily.

The Justice Department is reviewing records of an advocacy group Mr. Norquist started with Gale A. Norton, now secretary of the interior, after reports that Mr. Abramoff instructed Indian tribes to give it $250,000. And Mr. Norquist's name appears over and over in newly disclosed documents outlining Mr. Abramoff's work in the Northern Marianas Islands, an American protectorate in the Pacific, which Democrats are agitating to investigate.

The subpoena -- a product of the lone Republican Chairman in the Senate willing to buck the party establishment to fully investigate Abramoff: John McCain. While McCain's service in this investigation is extremely honorable -- seldom is a member of either party willing to go against the leadership -- it underscores a larger point.

The Republican Congress, by and large, has shirked its investigative responsibilities in the past four years. That is not to say that Congress must take an adversarial relationship to the administration; clearly, Republican Congressmen and Senators should not be expected to try to take down a Republican administration. Nevertheless, it is incumbent upon Congress to fulfill its investigative duties. This would entail a full investigation of the Abramoff scandal -- which is much more wide-reaching than we now know -- but also a serious look into pre-war intelligence, the administration's payoffs of journalists, rising energy prices, et. al. Because Republicans will not do this, it's time to elect a new body of legislators who will.