Hours before Congress convened in January, House Republicans voted to eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics. The OCE is an independent body charged with reviewing allegations of misconduct against House members.
After a day of public outcry and the gnashing of media teeth, the GOP reversed its decision and ethics office was left intact.
But, as we editorialized then, Republicans were right to try and deal with the OCE. It desperately needs reform, and should indeed be eliminated, not as an effort to shield lawmakers from responsibility for any wrongdoing they commit, but, rather, the opposite. Getting rid of the ethics office would restore accountability to Congress and to voters, which is where it is placed, properly, by the Constitution.
A high-profile incident this week shows one of the things that is so wrong with the ethics office. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, announced Thursday that he is temporarily recusing himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He’s stepping aside because he’s under investigation by the ethics office into allegations filed against him there by politically motivated leftwing organizations.
Nunes says he’s seen documents showing that Obama administration officials may have wrongly unmasked American citizens working on President Trump’s transition team who were incidentally surveilled during eavesdropping for other purposes. The possibility of dirty tricks by the Obama administration against the incoming government blurs the left’s favored narrative of Trumpian collusion with Russia, so Nunes had to be eliminated or tarnished.
Hence the ethics complaints. Nunes left himself open to attack because he briefed Trump about those documents before he showed them to members of his own committee, which is invetigating the Russian interference.
Under current rules, anyone can file an ethics complaint against a member of Congress, and the House Ethics Committee is required to investigate it. Even if the complaint is bogus, it casts a shadow over the lawmaker, and, as was the case with Nunes, he comes under immediate pressue to withdraw from his public duties until he clears his name.
The ethics office cannot prosecute anyone. It’s like a grand jury, referring complaints to the House Ethics Committee, which is the body that determines guilt or innocence and punishes offenders.
One thing it can and does do, however, is sully reputations and prevent accused lawmakers from doing their jobs. It doesn’t matter if the charges are serious or frivolous. Nunes called those against him “entirely false and politically motivated.” But even if he’s cleared, the initial impression of guilt will has been made and the entire intelligence committee investigation has been compromised. Which is what the political groups that made the complaint want.
The ethics office was created in the aftermath of corruption scandals in 2006. But nobody is happy with it, and it needs to go. In 2010, members of the Congressional Black Caucus complained about it wreaking havoc with members’ lives. A year later, North Carolina Democrat Melvin Watt tried but failed to slash its budget by 40 percent.
Only half of the cases it examines make it to the House Committee, so it sullies reputations unfairly at least half the time. Activist groups with their axes to grind should not have this power.
The Constitution provides that Congress shall police itself on ethical matters. That is as it should be. If lawmakers don’t do that job properly and allow scoundrels to go unpunished, the remedy is for voters to throw the bums out and replace them with lawmakers who take this responsibility seriously. It is an enormity to create a quasi non-governmental organization to oversee the functioning of the principal democratic instutiton of the Constitution.
Diminishing the role of the ethics office triggers reflex — read, unthinking — wails of outrage from various quarters. And it is thus politically difficult to do, especially by a party led by a president who pledges to drain the Washignton swamp. But, as we pointed out in January, the House already has an ethics review committee — it’s called the House Ethics Committee. It’s overseen by Congress, whose members are held accountable by the most important independent entity there is — the voting public.
