It meets secretly and doesn't even publicly disclose its schedule. It won't officially comment on whom it's investigating.

But like it or not, the Senate Ethics Committee is back in the public spotlight as it begins to investigate the special-loans-for-Senators scandal revealed on Portfolio.com earlier this month.

After Portfolio.com reported that the troubled mortgage lender Countrywide Financial appeared to have set aside some of its own criteria in making loans to a pair of prominent Democratic senators, attention quickly turned to the Senate Ethics Panel.

Four days after Portfolio.com named the senators—Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who chairs the Budget Committee, and Chris Dodd, of Connecticut, who chairs the Banking Committee—a private group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a formal complaint and called for an investigation.

Such a move almost always triggers a preliminary investigation, and the ethics committee chairwoman, Barbara Boxer of California, told the Washington Post that one is underway. "A complaint has been filed, and we are, as we always do, looking at that," she said.

While the committee won't officially say whom it is investigating, both Dodd and Conrad have vowed to cooperate fully. Conrad's office told Portfolio.com today that it had yet to hear from the committee but reiterated that it will cooperate fully. A source familiar with the details says the committee has not yet contacted Dodd's office, either.

Other fallout from the scandal continues.

Earlier this week, Boxer and John Cornyn of Texas, the ranking Republican on the ethics panel, proposed requiring members of Congress to include mortgage information on their public financial-disclosure statements. They wanted it included as an amendment to the $300 billion housing-bailout bill that is wending its way through Congress.

Cornyn and Boxer have said that all six members of the ethics panel back the amendment; not surprisingly, both Dodd and Conrad support the idea too. But Cornyn's office said that Dodd and the other manager of the housing bill, Richard Shelby of Alabama, the banking committee's ranking Republican, have refused to allow the amendment to be added because they say it's not germane to the bill.

Whether the amendment will come to a vote this week remains in some doubt.

In the House, a group of 28 Republicans asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week to look into the issue, but she dismissed the problem as a Senate matter. Wednesday, another group of House Republicans wrote to Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, to investigate and subpoena records from Countrywide—which is run by Angelo Mozilo and is being taken over by Bank of America—to find out if more members got a special deal.

That leaves the investigation in the hands of Boxer and Cornyn, a political odd couple.