House ethics watchdog now open for business
The House's outside ethics watchdog will soon be able to begin investigating lawmakers after the longest period of dormancy in its 17-year history.
The Office of Congressional Conduct — which vets misconduct allegations against lawmakers then sends findings to the House Ethics Committee, which can recommend potential formal action — has been effectively shuttered since the start of the 119th Congress as it awaited the appointment of board members.
But on Tuesday afternoon, the House clerk read aloud the names of those four members from the chamber floor, permitting the office to make moves toward resuming normal operations once again.
Karen Haas, a former House clerk, will serve as board chair; ex-Minnesota Democratic Rep. Bill Luther will serve as board co-chair. Another former House clerk, Lorraine Miller, alongside former Georgia GOP Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, will also hold seats.
It follows drawn-out pleading by good government organizations and a personal appeal earlier this month from a group of House Democrats who directly asked Speaker Mike Johnson to appoint members to the board.
'Ensuring OCC can operate effectively should not be a partisan issue,' wrote Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and seven colleagues.
It's not currently clear what the hold-up was about, though House GOP leadership made early moves to suggest it was seeking to slow-walk the OCC's ability to get up and running. The rules package at the start of this Congress included language that changed the name of the body and required the board to meet to formally appoint the staff, essentially stalling its ability to resume operations.
Former GOP Rep. Porter Goss, who helped create the office in 2008, said he believed the inaction in forming OCC's board for the new Congress might have been intended to quietly kill it altogether. A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to an inquiry about the reason for the delay.
In any event, with the board's reappointment — all four members served last year, too — the OCC now has its work cut out for it.
Staffers will soon face a mountain of cases that have accumulated during the OCC's months of relative inactivity. The absence of a board forced the agency to sit almost entirely idle: While it could continue to gather freely-accessible information to develop cases, it lacked the ability to open any investigations without a formal governing body.
Beyond reviewing complaints against lawmakers, the inaction from House leadership in appointing a board for the new Congress also prevented OCC from formally changing its name on some official materials — as was required in the Rules package for this Congress — and from releasing reports on its activities.
Launched in 2008 by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the OCC was a response to a series of ethics scandals roiling Capitol Hill at that time, including the high-profile bribery charges against the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Whereas the House Ethics Committee's operations are shrouded in secrecy, the OCC was set up to receive complaints from the outside public about any House member. The independent, nonpartisan body could then investigate the matter and turn over credible allegations to the bipartisan Ethics panel made up of House members evenly divided between the two parties.
Goss said he, Pelosi and others proponents of the OCC believed that public-shaming could compel good behavior: Whereas the OCC is governed by a board of private citizens, the House Ethics Committee is a panel of members who adjudicate cases against their peers. And while the Ethics Committee is notoriously quiet, OCC is public-facing.
'The idea was that this would take the pressure' off the Ethics Committee, Goss said.
The House also took months to reappoint members to its Ethics Committee in the longest delay in recent history. It followed the tumultuous circumstances surrounding the release of the report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, accused of illicit drug use and paying a minor for sex.
But many lawmakers revile the OCC, regarding it as a politically-motivated operation unfit to oversee the activities of the House. Shortly after Trump's first election, lawmakers sought to kneecap the office altogether.
Former Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), who as a member of Congress served on the Ethics Committee, has since leaving office represented people with cases pending before the OCC and said in an interview he would advise future clients to not cooperate with the office's requests. He called it a 'gotcha organization' with little usefulness to the House and said it was time to shut it down to save taxpayer dollars.
One current House member, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters around Congressional ethical concerns, argued that the OCC was a partisan entity that would take up just about any complaint — and that, despite the headaches the body creates, it has no real power in how the House Ethics Committee adjudicates complaints.
In the meantime, polls have found public trust in the federal government, particularly trust in Congress, to be exceptionally low. Good governance activists argue that the OCC is a key tool in restoring that trust and bemoaned the delays in reconstituting the office.
Aaron Scherb, a lobbyist for the progressive group Common Cause, cited concerns about 'misconduct just being swept under the rug' in the OCC's absence.
'As we've seen, the House Ethics Committee is extremely lacking in its investigations, and so the OCC has in some cases helped spur or kind of helped catalyze the House Ethics Committee to conduct more rigorous investigations,' Scherb said.
A spokesperson for OCC declined to comment.
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