Outcry
after Republicans vote to dismantle independent ethics body
Office
of Congressional Ethics was created in 2008 to investigate
allegations of misconduct by lawmakers
Julian Borger in
Washington
Tuesday 3 January
2017 03.46 GMT
House Republicans
have gutted an independent ethics watchdog, putting it under their
own control, in a secret ballot hours before the new Congress
convened for the first time.
The unheralded vote
severely weakens the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which was
set up after a lobbying scandal in 2008 to investigate corruption
allegations against members of Congress. The move, led by the head of
the House judiciary committee, defied the Republican congressional
leadership and was reportedly supported by several legislators
currently under OCE scrutiny.
The amendment was
voted through by the House Republican conference over the New Year’s
holiday with no prior notice or debate and inserted in a broad rules
package the House will vote for on Tuesday. It turns the formerly
independent OCE into the Office of Congressional Complaint Review, a
subordinate body to the House Ethics Committee, which is currently
run by the Republican majority and has a long history of overlooking
charges of malfeasance by lawmakers.
The new body will
not be able to receive anonymous tips from members of Congress or
make its findings public.
The vote comes at a
time when the Republicans control all three branches of government
and are seeking to remove some of the residual constraints on their
powers. The rules package to be voted through on Tuesday, for
example, will limit the ability of the Democratic minority to block
legislation like the repeal of Obama’s Affordable Care Act by
staging a filibuster.
It also comes at a
time when president-elect Trump is attempting to fend off scrutiny
over multiple conflicts of interests questions arising from his bid
to keep his business empire in his family’s hands even after he
takes office on 20 January.
The House Republican
vote triggered a wave of outrage from Democrats and government ethics
specialists.
“Undermining the
independence of the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics would
create a serious risk to members of Congress, who rely on OCE for
fair, nonpartisan investigations, and to the American people, who
expect their representatives to meet their legal and ethical
obligations,” Norman Eisen and Richard Painter, ethics counsels to
Barack Obama and George W Bush respectively, argued in a joint
statement.
“If the 115th
Congress begins with rules amendments undermining OCE it is setting
itself up to be dogged by scandals and ethics issues for years and is
returning the House to dark days when ethics violations were rampant
and far too often tolerated.”
The House Democratic
leader, Nancy Pelosi, said: “Republicans claim they want to ‘drain
the swamp’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in the
House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of
their actions,” Pelosi said in a statement.
“Evidently, ethics
are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”
Goodlatte defended
the vote.
“The amendment
builds upon and strengthens the existing Office of Congressional
Ethics by maintaining its primary area of focus of accepting and
reviewing complaints from the public and referring them, if
appropriate, to the Committee on Ethics,” the judiciary committee
chairman said in a statement.
Goodlatte did not
explain how the OCE had been strengthened by being stripped of its
independence and stopped from making public statements.
The OCE was set up
in 2008 after a string of corruption scandals involving two
Republican politicians and a Democrat. Former congressman Randy
“Duke” Cunningham, a California Republican, served more than
seven years in prison on bribery and other charges.
Ohio Republican
congressman Bob Ney pleaded guilty to corruption charges and a
Louisiana Democrat and former congressman, William Jefferson, was
convicted on corruption in a separate case.
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