The Republican attempt to unilaterally gut the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics in a secret vote may be a sign of the way things are going to go over the next four years.
There are probably as many Democrats as Republicans who have had an issue with the OCE, so this could have been a bipartisan effort to fix what they saw was a problem (the problem being that someone was looking at whether they were behaving ethically), but they chose to do it secretly without notifying anyone else and with no accountability, and that turned out to be a disaster.
Although Trump tweeted his displeasure this morning (he really needs to shut up - we only have one President at a time, and it's not him yet. He'll get his turn on Jan 20), the idea was scrapped today because the electorate lit up the Congressional phone banks complaining about what they were trying to do. It takes a special kind of arrogance to decide that, after running campaigns that promised to clean up Congress, the party in power can begin the new Legislative session by working secretly behind closed doors to severely limit the ability of an Office that is intended to clean up Congress.
I've seen and read pundits who say that the Republicans were emboldened by Trump's lack of concern about ethics - if he can do it, so can we. I'm not sure that's true. Trump is going to do what he wants to do, and it's going to be up to Congress to keep him in check. I think the problem is that these Congressmen think they have a mandate to do whatever they want to do, and they just got schooled by the people that elected them.
There is no mandate, despite what the Trump team and the RNC keeps insisting - more than half of those Americans who voted (which was less than half of eligible American voters) did not vote for Trump, the Republicans lost seats in both Houses of Congress, and the reason they still hold a majority in the House is because of gerrymandered districts that favor the Republican candidate. A mandate means that there's a clear majority that supports you. We don't have that here. |
