Drain the swamp? New GOP majority defangs ethics panel instead.

If ever there was a year in which ethics ought to loom large on the congressional agenda, it is this one. There is, of course, the trail of lies and deceit perpetrated by the latest poster child for questionable political ethics — Representative George Santos. But surely the newly seated New York Republican isn’t the only House member whose behavior merits scrutiny from the independent panel set up precisely to handle that kind of investigation. Recall that as the last session of Congress

ended, the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection also made several referrals to the House Ethics Committee citing the refusal of several Republican members to supply information to the committee.

So the timing of several changes to rules governing the independent House Office of Congressional Ethics couldn’t be worse. The Office of Congressional Ethics was set up precisely to handle hot-potato cases like the Santos matter but in a far more transparent way than the House Ethics Committee ever could — although ultimately its referrals following those investigations go to the Ethics Committee for a final vote.

But Monday night the House voted to accept a package of new rules — ones negotiated with members of the Freedom Caucus — that finally led to Kevin McCarthy’s 15th-ballot victory as speaker. The package included what several good government groups described as an assault on the independence of the Office of Congressional Ethics. At the very least the changes will wipe out years of institutional memory on the panel and sow confusion, when clarity is needed more than ever.

This from the party that claims it wants to “drain the swamp” of D.C. corruption.

The bipartisan panel was created in 2008 by then Speaker Nancy Pelosi and minority leader John Boehner following an annus horribilis in which a number of members of Congress and high-ranking staffers were caught up in the bribery/corruption scandal that brought down lobbyist Jack Abramoff and just about anyone he touched.

The independent panel is unique to the House. The Senate does not have a similar entity.

The Office of Congressional Ethics is empowered to investigate charges of misconduct, including things such as accepting improper gifts (Representative Carolyn Maloney is being investigated for accepting “impermissible gifts associated with her attendance at the Met Gala in 2018, 2019, and 2021”) or insider stock trading by House members. A late disclosure by Representative John Rutherford of 157 personal stock transactions in 2021 netted him an investigation. However, the House Ethics Committee later cleared him of any intentional wrongdoing.

The Office of Congressional Ethics’s six board members and two alternates are appointed half by the speaker and half by the minority leader. That won’t change under the new rules. But three of the committee’s four Democrats, including current Chair Mike Barnes, a former Maryland congressman, will have to be replaced under a rule that sets eight-year term limits for board members, wiping away decades of combined experience. A second provision requires that staff would have to be hired within 30 days, a change ethics watchdogs believe is a backdoor

The Office of Congressional Ethics was set up precisely to handle hot-potato cases like the George Santos matter.

way to make it harder to hire staff.

Meanwhile, a complaint filed by the liberal End Citizens United, with the Office of Congressional Ethics, is one of at least three lodged against Santos. It alleges that nearly 40 payments of $199.99 listed as Santos campaign expenditures constitute an attempt to evade federal laws requiring receipts for campaign purchases over $200. Other complaints have been filed with the Justice Department, over the source of the $700,000 Santos claims to have loaned his own campaign, and with the Federal Elections Commission.

Serial lies about his education, his job history, and his religious roots seem to be the least of Santos’s problems. That is, assuming there is the will, especially on the part of Republicans, to sacrifice one of the handful of members who constitute their slimmest of slim majority.

The latest tweaks by House Republicans to rules governing the work of the Office of Congressional Ethics are hardly the panel’s only handicaps. It has never had subpoena power, thus allowing members who face its scrutiny to pretty much ignore its requests.

A report by the Campaign Law Center issued last summer found five of the eight members whose investigations were made public by the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2022 refused to cooperate with the investigation. All five were Republicans.

Nearly a year ago a report by the Congressional Research Bureau looked at the origins and the work of the Office of Congressional Ethics and examined a host of good options “to further clarify” the office’s “relationship with the public, rank and file House members and the Committee on Ethics.” Those options included creating a statutory Office of Congressional Ethics, not subject to the kind of biannual tinkering that changes in House leadership can bring, or at long last giving it subpoena power.

The potential of the Office of Congressional Ethics has never been fully realized. If McCarthy and his merry band of rebels really want to make meaningful change in how the

House does business — and how its members are viewed by an increasingly skeptical public — looking at how it deals with obvious ethical violations by its members would certainly be a good place to start.