House Republicans on Revised Pelosi/Capuano Ethics Proposal

This just in...

“There is no point in grafting a pointless new bureaucratic layer onto the broken ethics process without fixing the Ethics Committee. The best way to deter unethical law-breakers in Congress is to make certain they face real law enforcement: the FBI and the Justice Department. That is the key to Rep. Lamar Smith’s stronger Republican ethics proposal.

There is a difference between pretending to reform the ethics process and actually doing it. Creating a new bureaucracy that would stand between Members of Congress and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI is not “reform.”

The minor tweaks announced today to the Pelosi/Capuano proposal will simply make it totally ineffectual. If the concern is that the Ethics Committee is gridlocked along partisan lines, what is the point of creating a new group with the same partisan stalemate – especially when the new group is not allowed to examine ethical violations that occurred before it was created?

This is a silly and obvious political dodge to avoid dealing with hard work of real reform. Let’s be clear: the Democratic proposal is useless unless we fix the Ethics Committee and pointless if we do. That is why the Republican proposal to fix the Ethics Committee itself is the best way to help mend the broken bonds of trust between Congress and the American people.

Republicans are eager to work with Democrats in a bipartisan fashion to fix the Ethics Committee, move the Senate-passed FISA legislation, and enact real earmark reform. The silly political posturing of this ‘faux-reform’ on ethics is a sideshow that does nothing to help deal with the problems facing the American people.” – Michael Steel