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In one of their first moves of the new Congress, House Republicans have voted to gut their own independent ethics watchdog — a huge blow to cheerleaders of congressional oversight and one that dismantles major reforms adopted after the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Monday's effort was led, in part, by lawmakers who have come under investigation in recent years.
Despite a warning from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Republicans adopted a proposal by Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) to put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the jurisdiction of the House Ethics Committee.
The office currently has free rein, enabling investigators to pursue allegations and then recommend further action to the House Ethics Committee as they see fit.
Now, the office would be under the thumb of lawmakers themselves. The proposal also appears to limit the scope of the office's work by barring them from considering anonymous tips against lawmakers. And it would stop the office from disclosing the findings of some of their investigations, as they currently do after the recommendations go to House Ethics.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/house-republicans-gut-their-own-oversight-233111
The Office of Congressional Ethics was established in 2008 under House Democrats, in response to the era of lobbying scandals made notable by Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist who went to prison on corruption charges.
It is the first independent body to have an oversight role in House ethics. There is no Senate counterpart. The OCE independently reviews allegations of misconduct against House members and staff, and if deemed appropriate refers them to the House Ethics Committee for review. The OCE cannot independently punish lawmakers for any ethics violations.
Update: House Republicans pull plan to gut independent ethics panel after Trump tweets
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BK on Tuesday January 03 2017, @02:45PM
Is this Politico?
I do enjoy the political stories...
And we do use the submissions that we get...
But still, this is partisan bureaucratic shuffling. Not only is there no sci/tech angle here, this is pure insider politics. There's lots of things that have political implications that have that sci/tech focus. I'm all for turning this into a pure political site if that's what we want, but I thought it wasn't.
That said, cheerleaders can be fun... We need more stories about cheerleaders.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @03:07PM
Is this front page news, or news for politics.soylentnews.org subsite, just like slashdot had?
Personally, I would like to see the default soylentnews homepage only contain tech stories without a product marketing angle, verified new science or technology, and anything that doesn't meet that burden of proof gets put on secondary pages ala slashdot where you can find them if you are interested, but they aren't cluttering up the homepage for real and relevant stories for the common values of the viewerbase.
Personally I am a bit tired of US politics and until the R's have a supermajority, nothing is really going to change until 2020 or beyond. (Although if they DO then we can have another discussion on American values and the upcoming second Civil War.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @03:13PM
Are we gonna have yet another bitchfest because a non-tech story gets posted on a slow news day?
A story that indirectly affects not just the US but much of the world? Congress makes foreign policy after all.
Come on.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday January 03 2017, @04:37PM
You can filter out stories in your account settings. People complain when we don't run a lot of articles in a given day, they complain we ignore political issues, etc.
Speaking as head of staff, we can't satisfy everyone. At best, we can provide options to let people exclude some topics. Perhaps we need a more clear "political" topic, but as things stand, unless we get an overwhelming majority who want us to exclude all political articles (which gets sticky because one mans political is one man's technological), I question what we can actually do about it.
Still always moving
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BK on Wednesday January 04 2017, @05:31AM
Agreed that you'll never make everyone happy.
One constant thread in questions about stories that seem... out of place... here is the question of what, exactly we are.
We are NOT 'news for nerds'. Most of us migrated from that place and may have fond memories of it but we're something else.
We are not JUST a science/tech blog. We do cover some news and some news and newsy politics. But most of our stories have at least a peripheral sci/tech angle or a clear economic rights/free speech nexus. Is that what we are?
We've covered some pure election events. We covered the Brexit vote. Both of these events are and were big news - If you're writing a history of 2016 ten years from now, both will merit at least a bullet point and maybe a lot more.
Today's story is not just politics, it's meta politics. Admittedly, it was the big news story of the morning and eventually it was worthy of a DJT 'tweet'... but that doesn't say much. It differs from election news in that is is unlikely to be important. No matter how it all falls out, it will not be among the 20, or 50, or even the 100 most important USA political stories of the ext 30 days. If nothing else, it will pale in comparison to cabinet nominations. So it seemed out of place and hence my question. What are we? What do we cover?
Somehow we missed the Russian plane crash into the Black Sea. We missed the Istanbul club bombing. We don't cover news. We don't cover important news that is merely important.
It's not a slow news day. There were 17 items in the queue when this was posted. While we are powered by user submissions, we had options today and chose this. What are we? What do we cover?
We should be able to answer this question.
One last thing - While I haven't engaged in this one, I am one who enjoys the USA politics stories. I'm OK if we want to be become a political blog... but we should be sure that that's what we want. We should be able to answer the questions: What are we? What are we not?
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @03:17PM
> it's not a slow news day. There were 17 items in the queue when this was posted.
There were far less when the story was put into the posting queue.
In fact most of the entries in the submission queue at that point were bottom of the barrel stories that were basically days old rejects just waiting for someone to officially axe them.
> Somehow we missed the Russian plane crash into the Black Sea. We missed the Istanbul club bombing.
None of those events were submitted, nor do they have any significant implications beyond the effects on the people directly impacted. Similar events have all happened before and been discussed ad nauseam. This "meta" politics story isn't just about political inside baseball, its indicative of how the current single-party dominated US government will be governing going forward. That not only holds implications for americans, but the world at large because the US is the 800lb gorilla on the world stage.
(Score: 2) by BK on Wednesday January 04 2017, @05:56PM
If you're on the editorial staff, this would be a fair place to log on. Else I call BS. Reason being that this story went live at around 9AM Eastern USA time. Congress is too lazy to start much before that. My reply was close to the post.
Agreed. Maybe that means that we don't cover news. Or that we only cover news that someone submits. Or that we only sometimes cover news that someone submits. Hence this meta discussion.
Agreed on the Russian plane crash. Mechanical failure sucks but has little effect outside Russia (unless you rely on the Russian military to maintain your flaps). The Istanbul attack may well have implications beyond the club attacked... In my experience, I 've found that sometimes things that happen outside the USA are important.
Is that a sportsball reference? I had to rewrite my original post to avoid that term as it's meaningless outside the USA, and these days even within the USA. I submitted a sportsball story into the queue here and got it rejected so shame on you for invading my safe space.
I guess what it's indicative of is what we can discuss if we want to. As I indicated in prior posts, I chose not to engage with that story here since I raised this meta- thread, and I'll not change that now.
The thing is that ANY vote or parliamentary maneuver can be indicative of [foo] if you want it to be. John Kerry is famous for raising a defense of being for something before he was against it [youtube.com]. Which was indicative? Both! Neither? The one that wins me the argument?
On that basis, every committee appointment, every legislative vote, every procedural vote, every committee vote, every amendment, etc., is worthy of discussion - and I think that's a fair position - if what we are is a place to discuss USA politics. And this story fits right in. But as I said when I started, I thought that we weren't primarily a place to discuss the nuance of USA politics.
I thought we were something else. I'm willing and even excited to be corrected if I misunderstood, but we should be clear about it.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @04:59PM
This is not a science and technology site. Lacking that angle is not a problem.
The problem is that when ANYONE moves to remove ethical oversight, it affects all of us. This allows people in positions of power to unduly influence us (or your science and technology if you insist) negatively while creating some positive outcome for themselves or their interests.
This news is just about everywhere I have looked. The responses are mostly the same: horror or appreciation.
It appears to be that as long as its one's own team being unethical, it is OK -- and it was OK to bound the democrats with such ethics, but it gets in the way of "real work" that the republicans need to accomplish.
Let's hope they don't set up death panels that pay out directly for immigrants served.