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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: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @03:50PM
> the office website itself the group never had any authority or power
The office had the ability to do investigations and make the results public without having to kowtow to the people they were investigating.
Your entire screed is based on the fact they were part of the process instead of the entire process. That's not just an unreasonable expectation in a democracy, coming from you its just partisan apologia.
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday January 03 2017, @04:16PM
make the results public
The fundamental disagreement is if the ethics committee 1st level customer support people are essentially running a trial complete with judicial oversight and the public discovery of evidence as you state, or if they are not running a trial with all the judicial oversight and procedure and evidence procedures required. Clearly they are not running a trial, in fact going all public kangaroo court like a bad episode of Judge Judy is likely to make actual legal prosecution more complicated or difficult later on. In that way I'm not certain they accomplish anything useful.
We could try chronological view:
Once upon a time there was this organized crime kingpin named Abramoff who nominally was a republican in private life but in his private life was solely out for himself. In the 00s he did all kinds of "Tony Soprano" type stuff involving wire fraud and mobsters killing each other over real estate fraud and ripping off indian tribe who hired him to support them but he double crossed them to try and double down for more money, and he did some bribes and stuff.
You know the jokes about garbage disposal being all mobster controlled and corrupt, well, Abramoff figured out financial control fraud was even easier in lobbying than in garbage trucking. So thats why he did what he did.
He got busted like a decade ago and the D party will always kick a R when he's down so endless insinuation that all R are in organized crime and such BS. Anyway they outsourced first level customer support from the existing ethics committee in order to appear to be "doing something" while actually doing mostly nothing. Also they stocked it with all democrats to enable an anti-R witch hunt. In usual political fashion the problem was never really congress or the ethics committee or the first level customer support team, so they reorg'd that of course. Never fix the actual problem if you can profit politically off it.
After a decade of lording over the R party that they've got a special outsourced team watching their every move because they're all Hitler Mobster Killers every last one of them, and finding nothing but some minor paperwork malfunctions and boring office drama that don't really matter on the national stage, which isn't much, its time to flush it. Abramoff was water under the bridge and never really mattered all that much on the national stage anyway and it was a decade ago. The propaganda photo op of the whole saga of the office has been over for years, time to flush it, go back to normal operation. They were never set up to make things public, they were never set up to reduce corruption, it was all a big anti-R party photo op from the mid 00s. It don't mean nothing no more, not in 2017. Flush it.
Needless to say as a propaganda coup the D party and therefore the legacy media is really annoyed that its getting flushed for political propaganda reasons that very few people remember from 2004 anyway; but its all on wikipedia if you're bored and want to read the historical truth.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 03 2017, @10:07PM
The office had the ability to do investigations and make the results public without having to kowtow to the people they were investigating.
Here's an interview with Leo Wise [vox.com] the first director of the OCE:
...
Interviewer: I imagine this didn’t make you the most popular man on the Hill. How much resistance was there to your work?
Leo Wise:
There was enormous resistance. We were being screamed at in a tirade of curses, thrown out of a member’s office, and threatened. There was huge resistance to even the idea of having to talk to us — to the notion that questions would be raised. So it was very challenging right from the start.
There were members who behaved responsibly and professionally. But it ran the gamut of opposition, with all sorts of threats about getting the office shut down or the funding for our office cut.
One incident where we got screamed at and thrown out of the office — it was just an initial meeting with a member. It wasn’t some confrontational interview. At the start of this process, which is very sensitive to members and their political concerns, we’d set up a meeting to come and directly talk to the member about the allegation the board had authorized us to look into.
It wasn’t a big public hearing. [The members] could decide what, if any, staff they wanted to have involved or if they wanted to retain legal counsel.
Once we handed the member a sealed envelope — it had just one or two sentences about the subject matter we were authorized to look into — and the member erupted at that. It was just the fact that we had the temerity, even just as staff, to raise a question that provoked this fury from a senior member who had been there for a long time.
...