Ethics? We don’ need no steenkin’ ethics!
Given House Republicans’ incessant bloviating over the past six years, everybody in Washington and everywhere else expected that their first order of business as the new Congress met Monday would be to pull the plug on Obama care, and 20 million formerly uninsured Americans. Guess again.
Their first action was to “gut the one quasi-independent office that investigates House ethics,” as a New York Times editorial put it. http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/opinion/house-fires-at-ethics-and-shoots-self.html?emc=edit_th_20170104&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=27174500
Rep. Bob Goodlatte, in whose west central Virginia district The Jourmudgeon finds himself, spearheaded a rules change that “would have prevented the office, known as the O.C.E., from investigating potentially criminal allegations, allowed lawmakers on the House Ethics Committee to shut down any O.C.E. investigation and, for good measure, gagged the office’s staff members in their dealings with the news media,” according to The Times. The effort was hatched in a secret meeting with no advance notice.
Facing the shit storm that ensued from across the political spectrum when the attempt became public, Goodlatte blamed the fiasco on dat ol’ debbil – get ready – the liberal news media. They completely misrepresented an honest attempt to improve how the House polices itself – by putting the people who would be investigated for ethics breaches back in complete command of those investigations. The Jourmudgeon is left to wonder why, if the initiative was so pure, Goodlatte and his cronies decided to go through with it in secret.
President-elect Trump, by the way, chastised House Republicans – not for the action, but for the timing of it. Gut the ethics unit later, he said, in effect. Right now you need to be repealing Obamacare and approving tax cuts for the wealthy.
Goodlatte, by the way, raised just shy of $1.8 million in his 2016 reelection campaign. Slightly more than $1 million of that came from Political Action Committees, the bulk of them representing banking, insurance, utilities, health care, telecommunications and, of course, big energy. Of another $770,000 in individual contributions, a substantial chunk came from executives of those industries. http://www.fec.gov/disclosurehs/HSCandDetail.do
