that one of the first acts of the Republican controlled 112th Congress will be to gut Ethics laws and the ability of outside groups to file ethics complaints against sitting Members of Congress.
Steve Benen is out with this bit of unsurprising news this morning:
HOUSE GOP QUIETLY EYEING ETHICS OFFICE FOR ELIMINATION…. [snip]
Most voters have probably forgotten all about this, or for those who do remember GOP corruption, at least hope Republicans won’t go back to their nefarious ways. But just a few weeks after the midterm elections, one of the first orders of business appears to be Republicans quietly eyeing the elimination of the Office of Congressional Ethics.
Despite publicly promising more transparency and disclosure of the inner workings of Congress, behind closed doors, the GOP leadership has made moves indicating the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) may be targeted for cuts or extinction. [snip]
It’s not surprising, of course, that some Republicans would want to scrap the office; one assumes arsonists would want to shut down fire departments, too. But the effort, if it proceeds, should send quite a message to voters about GOP priorities — the party promised to change the way Congress operates, but voters may not have realized that meant making it easier for representatives to get away with ethics violations.
When Democrats took control of Congress four years ago one of the first things they did was to put in place a stronger and more independent ethics process. A key aspect to it was the OCE and it has worked (see Rangle, Charlie). Without the OCE we will return to the days when it was almost impossible to launch an ethics investigation of a Member of Congress. It is not a surprise that the incoming Party of Grifters would want to shut that down as a first step, especially as so many members of the Republican caucus have exposure on ethical issue. In the last four years they were out of power and so nobody really cared about the skeletons in their closets. Now that they are taking over again they will make sure that even if something does come out they can kill it quickly. These grifters learned a lot from the Abramoff/DeLay era and the chief lesson was to always sweep things under the rug and delay/obstruct any investigation.
And so the OCE had to go. I expect they will replace it with the new Office of Investigations of Democrats and Minorities (OIDM) so they can still claim to be concerned about ethics. Also, too, they will most likely work to have this guy fired.
Cheers
LGRooney
If we had a real press corps, I would be much less alarmed at this development. Alas…
WyldPirate
Maybe the Rethugs can hire a bunch of new UCF BSchool grads to serve as staffers for the new “Office to Investigate Ethical Lapses by Democratic Congressmen Only”.
Chris
Basically a microcosm of their overall strategy. Shutting down the ethics panel so they can get away with unethical behavior = shutting down the government (“drowning it in a bathtub” specifically) so the robber barons can get back to running the country without any check on their power.
El Tiburon
Ethics, like facts, have a well-know liberal bias.
Get used to hearing this phrase repeated like a billion times:
LGRooney
@WyldPirate: Won’t happen. You’d have to have at least one honest, hard working person on the staff so the others would know what to do. As such, “honest” and “hard working” will rule out anyone who votes the “right” way and, if we have learned anything from GOP rule over the past 2-3 decades, they don’t trust anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
And, yes, I just said that they only trust those that are untrustworthy.
Jamie
what do they say in a Baltimore Pittsburgh Football game? Just let them play!
Dennis SGMM
@El Tiburon:
When politics is criminalized, only criminals will become politicians.
Whoops: too late.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
The best part is, they will be screaming that as Darrell Issa conducts his investigation into the Obama administration making a job offer to Joe Sestak if he agreed not to run for Senate.
Quiddity
I’m sure David Broder will pen a stern op-ed decrying this move by Republicans.
Joseph Nobles
Pay-go will be next.
Dennis SGMM
Why do I have the feeling that “gate” will become a suffix for nearly everything that has taken place in the administration since January, 2009?
ChrisNYC
This has been known for weeks. Right after the election, Boehner said he’d close the office. Why liberal blogs haven’t picked it up until now, I have no clue. It’s a perfect contrast — the Dems pursue ethics charges while the GOP closes the office. And, Rangel’s violations were not corruption so there’s so little political risk. The worst part about the fight on the left is that the GOP just sails along unopposed.
Brachiator
Well, I guess you could call this “smaller government.”
Sometimes I fell as though I am watching democracy unravel. The strangest thing is that many of “the people” (especially the Tea Party People) are not only cheering it on, but actively participating in the demolition.
Nick
@LGRooney:
Clearly, if Obama would use the bully pulpit
Jamie
@Brachiator:
this country has already become a plutocracy.
Dennis G.
@Quiddity:
True, but only after he hears about it when he checks in with the telegraph office for the latest news. It will take a while to decipher those dots and dashes, so you can not expect Broder to pick up on this until summer at the earliest.
But when he does it will be a barn burner of a column.
burnspbesq
@ChrisNYC:
So? Even assuming I agree with that statement, reporting and disclosure rules are the key to any system designed to deter corruption. It’s the Al Capone theory of law enforcement.
El Cid
The main problem with the Abramoff scandal is that it was investigated and received attention. Had that not happened, a major scandal could have been avoided.
Sophist
So let me get this straight — the republican agenda is basically:
1. Tax Breaks for Rich People
2. Gutting Social Security
3. Impeaching Obama for, uh, you know, something. Whatevs.
4. Firing the people that make sure they don’t steal candy from babies or sell Yellowstone to Suriname
Am I getting this right?
Annelid Gustator
PUMA alert! Clinton throws self under the bus. PUMA twins unite! Shape of a[n] idiot!
Dennis G.
@El Cid:
Yep, that is the lesson that was learned.
Maude
@Annelid Gustator:
She said that when she was in the Senate about running for president.
El Cid
@Annelid Gustator: On this past Friday’s KPFA (Berkeley’s) Morning Show, an interview was played with Max Blumenthal, among other things author of Republican Gomorrah, which added recent studies of authoritarian personalities and manipulation on the right to more recent Republican and TeaTard and Talibangelical movement.
One of the interesting pieces of data was that Democratic primary voters who voted for Hillary Clinton were much more likely to have authoritarian personalities. I can’t at the moment find the exact minute / second this was presented in the 2 hour show.
ChrisNYC
@burnspbesq: Hold up. I’m no big fan of Rangel. I think he should have gone on trial and his conduct in the process was pretty horrifying. But, please, Rangel’s violations are in a completely different ballpark than use of office for personal gain, i.e. vote selling, which was at the heart of a lot of the GOP problems last time they were in. There was no allegation that Rangel violated his trust with his constituents by legislating in a way that benefited himself, rather than them. Sure, disagree, but I think that’s what most people in this country consider the real problem. That’s why I think there’s not much political risk to using his trial as a comparison.
From what I know of the Waters case, the allegations there are pretty textbook use of office for personal gain.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
So the GOP evolution in a nutshell is:
In the WH, from Nixon to Cheney.
In the Congress, from Tom Delay to ???
honestly, I’m not sure that Mr. Oompah Loompah is really up to the level of evil necessary to make this work. I’ll give odds that he is replaced by somebody with less brains and even more ideological fervor within the next 4 years.
themann1086
Thanks, I’ll be sending this to my dad. He’s a conservative who votes Dem periodically and usually splits his ticket cause he’s mostly about local issues and hates incumbents. It’s his major blind spot that throwing out some incumbents usually just serves to empower even worse incumbents…
debbie
I look forward to the day that voters who voted for a “new way” wake up and see that they’ve enabled the same crooks who got where we are today. It’s sure to be ugly.
jayjaybear
@Dennis G.:
Oh, good…I’m not the only one who hears T. Herman Zweibel when I read Broder…
Dennis G.
@jayjaybear:
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Emerald
@Nick:
Obama doesn’t have a bully pulpit. The media has taken it away from him.
He can give all the speeches he wants to give, make all the statements he wants to make. They will decide what gets publicized, if anything.
Paris
Obviously, the voting public doesn’t care about an ethics office and they probably aren’t interested in pay-go. They just know that as soon as democrats got the majority, all their taxes went up so Queen Nancy could abuse her position and demand a private Air Force jet to ferry corrupt lobbyists to the left coast and back.
It was probably a waste of effort for the Democrats to try to act responsibly and professional.
PWL
Well, the Repubs always want to go back to the Good Old Days…..so why not return to the glorious days of 2003, when Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay and Randy Cunningham (among others) were having so much fun?
Quiddity
@Dennis G.: I forgot all about the telegraph office. Yup, that’s where he gets his news. Thanks for reminding me.