So from 2008 till last week we had a clean congress?
Here’s the crucial bit:
‘Office of Congressional Ethics was established in 2008 under House Democrats’
In other words, it was and is a fan-dance prop used to convince someone they’re seeing something (more) that they’re not.
The Democrats are about as interested in ethics as they are in lumberjack competitions.
In other words....it was an Obama Board. Maybe look at who got brought up before it instead of the existing Board.
The issue is determining how it is staffed and what are its guidelines. Like with all things swamp related, a pretty title is intended to deceive; for example, “Affordable Care Act”.
Saying Congressional Ethics is an oxymoron!
That NPR and the NYT are clutching their pearls, and Nancy Pelousy is raising a stink, over this move tells me all I need to know.
The reason the Dems want the panel independent is the professional staffers who people these things are reliable Leftists. NO agent of Government should be independent of oversight unless specifically appoint such powers for a targeted, and limited, duration.
The Republicans correctly figured out that this office would soon be getting of deluge of complaints from Democrats about *everything* the Republicans did, with zero regard to any genuine complaints. All done as an effort to slow down or even halt what the Republicans are trying to do.
Remember back to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill fight? The great Democrat quote to come out of the melee was from Nina Totenberg, from NPR, who said during the hearings, “It’s the seriousness of the charge” that matters, not the truth.
Even in the last election, Democrats tried to create an obviously bogus, and even impossible, rumor that Ted Cruz was a serial killer. The Zodiac Killer who operated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Utterly ridiculous in that Cruz was *born* in 1970.
This was done with the typical Democrat assumption that the public are utter imbeciles, and would disdain Cruz because of “the seriousness of the charge”.
This is why the Republicans limited this “independent” group to just reporting to the House ethics committee, which is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, so the Republicans can kill any nonsense or slanderous accusations made against them.
"The OCE was created by House Resolution 895 of the 110th United States Congress in March 2008.[9] It was created under the leadership of then-Speaker Pelosi as part of her effort to "drain the swamp" of corruption in official Washington that had garnered so much attention in the preceding congressional sessions and led to across-the-board Democratic victories in the 2006 and 2008 elections."
"Drain the swamp"? The mosquitoes and alligators and snakes in DC have never had it any better!
"The OCE opened dozens of reviews, based on publicly available information, submissions from the public, press accounts and other sources of information. This included the multiple ethical and criminal violations stemming from, among others, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and former representatives Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, Mark Foley and William J. Jefferson."
I think you can guess the political party of most of those prosecuted.
Or persecuted.
The Republicans in Washington are hopelessly corrupt, of course. But eight times as corrupt as the Democrats? That's impossible! It only proves that the office is partisan.
This ethics office is about as corrupt as it gets. Typical of leftist government committees, offices and initiatives they are given names that suggest fairness and integrity but are only used to to silence dissenting politics. That being said this was not the time to undertake this.
The words Congressional and Ethics should not be used together.