Now maybe we know why the Republicans want to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). It seems that a number of President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominees are bumping into ethics-related problems in the confirmation hearings. Darn those pesky ethics rules, the transition team might think! Can’t the GOP see that President-elect Trump’s nominees are having problems with them?! Why don’t they just do something about those irritating rules so that Mr. Trump’s nominees can be quickly confirmed and get on with the American people’s work?!
Could this be why congress without fanfare tried to push an amendment through that would rip the teeth out of the congressional independent ethics watchdog? Can it be that the GOP is simply trying to help the Trump transition team and these eager nominees get on with the work that the American people want them to do? Or is something more nefarious going on?
Although the GOP was forced to abort their effort to allow the fox to guard the hen house by removing the OCE’s independence via an amendment that would have put it under the oversight of the House Ethics Committee, they did not utterly give up on their effort to virtually take ethics out of the mix when it comes to America’s elected congressional officials in Washington. After the uproar around their original effort settled down, according to an article in The Fiscal Times by Eric Pianin, they quietly placed a single sentence into another amendment that was passed, making it harder for the OCE to do its job in the future. Based on that article, ” that sentence enables individual members to hide official documents that could prove embarrassing or even incriminating if they were suddenly investigated by the ethics office or the Justice Department for criminal activity.”
It appears that the GOP has no concern whatsoever about whether or not congressmen are ethical and whether they use their office and position in congress to enrich themselves. I guess they just don’t think that the American people, whose name they regularly invoke, care anything at all about ethics as long as the job gets done. What other reason could they have to be so determined to completely gut or get rid of the OCE? Sure, they might have hidden things from ‘the American people’ by quietly passing a rule making it harder for those investigating them to discover their dastardly deeds; but I want everyone who reads this article to know that THE GOP QUIETLY PASSED A RULE MAKING IT HARDER FOR THE OCE AND ANYONE ELSE TO INVESTIGATE ‘THE AMERICAN PEOPLE’S’ CONGRESSMEN.
Today is the day that President Obama will leave office and, at exactly noon, President-elect Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. ‘High Noon’; that is what it will feel like for a lot of Americans. I hope that he will not be the same man that he was during the primary and general elections and that he will work hard to be president to all Americans.
He must know that with all of the discord and potentially detrimental information that is swirling around him with regard to the possible conflict of interest that his businesses pose, his lack of effort to reassure those Americans who did not vote for him that he does not consider them to be his enemies and his apparent lack of awareness that he needs to pull America together after an extremely contentious election is creating a tremendous amount of apprehension and stress for many Americans. I hope that he will address these concerns in his inauguration speech.
I, and I believe that all other Americans, wish President-elect Trump the best as president. Because although we might not agree with him and how he goes about leading America, once he is sworn in, he will be the president. I wish him well because I wish America well. And it is in that vein that I hope that this ‘High Noon’ feeling that I am experiencing as someone who did not vote for President-elect Trump is nothing more than a bad case of overreaction brought on by a touch of Trump-inspired cynicism.
Eulus Dennis – author, Operation Rubik’s Cube and Living Between The Line