An ignominious start

And they were off. House Republicans in Washington began their new glory era Monday with a cynical assault on ethics and accountability, executed by secret ballot in a closed meeting.

If there was something stupider they might have done, it was not immediately evident. Or later evident.

The House Republicans voted in private conference by what sources put at 119-74—and in defiance of pleas for reason from House Speaker Paul Ryan—to gut the House’s independent ethics-violations investigative agency. They did so on the basis that the office was mean to members who got complaints filed against them and came under investigation.

The independent investigative office had been created by the Democratic House majority in 2008, when Congress was reeling from the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. There were percolations that charges of pedophilia were coming. House members wanted no part of passing judgment on their distinguished colleagues on such unpleasantness.

So they farmed out the responsibility. They wanted teeth in the process, but not their own.

Now Republican House members were saying the independent agency was abusive and violated due-process rights.

Through it all, the best way for a congressman to deal effectively with an independent ethics watchdog office would be … you know, to be ethical. All the due-process violations in the world couldn’t prove you acted improperly if you hadn’t acted improperly.

But House Republicans had a different idea. It was to put the independent agency under the House Ethics Committee. It was to rename it the Office of Congressional Complaints, except that it would not be allowed to accept complaints—the oft-vital anonymous ones, anyway. It would not be allowed to release investigative reports or refer anything to law enforcement. Instead it would merely report to the members it was investigating, then proceed as told by the members it was investigating.

The plan, you see, was to hold the vote in secret, then fold the new treatment of the ethics office into a broader rules package to be voted on by the full House on the floor in the opening session the next day. Then all Republicans would routinely vote for that full rules package—because you need an opening set of rules to proceed, and a floor fight on a mere section would be ill-advised. Identities of those in the 119 voting to gut the agency could remain hidden if that’s what those Republican congressmen wanted.

What could possibly go wrong? The next day, the preposterous minority president-elect went on Twitter—of course—to say that, as bad as the independent ethics office might be, House Republicans ought to have a different first-day priority, perhaps tax reform or health care.

Most likely the preposterous minority president-elect was being cynical himself, getting out the hollow message that he wasn’t part of this Republican congressional affront to ethics and accountability. That’s because he, of course, had promised to drain the Potomac swamp of corruption, not deep-six the independent agency investigating it.

Or maybe Trump was so utterly manipulative—so effective at playing all of us with pronouncements that seem irrational or incendiary but are merely smartly strategic—that he was positioning to get credit for the House Republicans’ abrupt reversal later in the day.

Earlier in the day his spinmeister, Kellyanne Conway, had seemed to contradict her boss and defend the House Republicans’ action. But it didn’t matter. Nothing that gets communicated by the Trump team much matters beyond the moment of utterance.

What we have is a preposterous minority president-elect who uses BS as MO.

Trump once recoiled from Larry King on live television and told King he had very bad breath. He said later that King’s breath was fine and that he was merely looking for an advantage.

Anyway, House switchboards were ablaze. If there’s one thing regular people get, and abhor, it’s yet more of the heavily lathered politics as usual they thought they were undoing. If there’s another thing they get, it’s politicians acting in secret to insulate themselves from inconvenience.

If there’s another, it’s the flaw in foxes guarding henhouses.

Amid all that, Republican House members went back into conference Tuesday and, by quick unanimous consent, undid what they’d done 24 hours earlier.

The effect? It actually turned out pretty well for Trump and Republicans.

Trump looks like an ethical hero, the wise setter of proper priorities, and a man of quick influence over his minions.

House Republicans can dismiss the matter as a 24-hour hiccup and now get down to repealing Obamacare and cutting taxes, if not building a wall and executing a mass deportation of millions in a single day.

In time, if everything else goes well, and people are happy enough that they won’t much care, House Republicans can find another day to gut that independent ethics agency.