WTF?! House Secretly Gutted Ethics Panel After All, Made It Legal To Hide ‘Donations’ (TWEET)

Remember how the House Republicans tried to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, only to back down under a torrent of criticism? Well, it turns out that Paul Ryan and friends actually succeeded in their mission to neuter the ethics panel after all. A little-noticed change to the House rules allows members to hide their records from any sort of scrutiny–even from someone conducting an ethics or criminal investigation.

The folks at the Center for Responsive Politics noticed that when the House adopted its rules for the 115th Congress, the Republicans managed to slip this in:

(j) MEMBER RECORDS.—In clause 6 of rule VII—
(1) redesignate paragraphs (a) and (b) as sub-paragraphs (1) and (2);
(2) designate the existing sentence as paragraph (a);
(3) in paragraph (a) (as so designated), insert “as described in paragraph (b)” after “Resident Commissioner”; and
(4) add at the end the following new paragraph:
“(b) Records created, generated, or received by the congressional office of a Member, Delegate, or the Resident Commissioner in the performance of official duties are exclusively the personal property of the individual Member, Delegate, or the Resident Commissioner and such Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner has control over such records.”.

Cliff Notes version: all House lawmakers are now the sole owners of all of their documents and records, and public interest be damned. Specifically, if a lawmaker was subpoenaed for spending records by either the ethics panel or a prosecutor, this privilege could potentially allow the lawmaker to ignore that subpoena.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is but the latest example of how the GOP wants to overflow the swamp. For all intents and purposes, this has the same effect as what the GOP initially tried to do in the open before seemingly being forced to back down. After all, if a lawmaker is suspected of taking shady donations (read: bribes), how can you know for sure if you can’t review his or her records? And if you can’t review records, how can you conduct a credible investigation?

Sara Lord, a former Justice Department attorney who specialized in public corruption cases, wants to know. She thinks that this rule change is “an overreach,” considering that it could allow a lawmaker to hide documents that “would otherwise have been treated as public records or official records belonging to the government.” So does Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. She denounced this rule as a blow to “the critical element of independent oversight” over the people’s business.

New Hampshire’s two congresswomen, Carol Shea-Porter and Annie Kuster, were furious with this new rule. Shea-Porter told the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism that the only conclusion you can draw is that “the Republicans clearly want less transparency.” This might explain what she meant in a tweet she fired off on Saturday, four days after the rules were adopted.

In a similar vein, Kuster said that she was “disappointed” that the House Republicans saw fit to make this one of their first acts. She vows to “advocate for more openness in Washington.”

It’s very likely that had this rule been in place during the last Congress, one of the most outrageous corruption scandals of recent years might have never come to light. Aaron Schock of Illinois, best known for decorating his Washington office in a way that aped “Downton Abbey,” was forced to resign in 2015 after being caught improperly billing taxpayers for private flights and lying about how many miles he drove in his car.

Schock is currently facing federal fraud charges related to his spending, and is actually trying to claim that his House spending account belongs to him, not to Congress. Had this rule been in place, he might actually have been able to get away with it. As of now, the courts are still deciding whether to allow him to do so.

The Democrats won control of the House in 2006 in part due to tying the GOP to the seemingly endless scandals surrounding Tom DeLay and others. In a clever move, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee declared that DeLay had turned the House into a “House of Scandal.” Well, DCCC chairman Ben Lujan and his team may want to take a cue from their 2006 counterparts. After all, it’s now clear that under Ryan, the 115th Congress is going to be a House of Corruption.

(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.