Surely Donald Trump didn’t run for president to protect members of Congress from its own watchdogs.
Which is why Trump reacted to House Republicans’ brazen takeover of the ethics enforcement process with a critique, though not a condemnation. The president-elect offered his tweak via a pair of tweets, saying Congress should focus on things other than “the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it ... may be.”
“Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance!” Trump suggested, adding the hashtag #DTS -- “drain the swamp.”
Yet the swamp remains, and seems to be getting murkier, thanks to the first official actions of a Congress now convening to kick off the Trump era.
The surprise move to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics undoes a central feature of the reforms put in place after the Abramoff-era of GOP control ending in prison sentences and a loss of the majority. House members, via the Ethics Committee, will once again have complete control over scrutinizing their colleagues, with the independent office no longer able to take whistleblower complaints or even communicate its findings with the public.
Trump took a stand against that move on Twitter -- sort of. He left unsaid whether he thinks the changes themselves are a good idea, leaving open the possibility that he’s siding with members of House GOP leadership, who are objecting more to the timing than the substance.
“I didn't think it was the right time to do it,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, said on Tuesday. “I thought we should take it by itself in a bipartisan manner. People on both sides [of the political aisle] support the reform.”
Earlier in the day, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway signaled a general agreement with that sentiment. She said on “Good Morning America” that there will still be ethics oversight under the new rules, and also that “there’s also been an overzealousness in some of the processes over the years.”
“We don’t want people wrongly accused,” Conway said.
The accusations, for now, are aimed at the rank-and-file Republicans who insisted that watering down their own ethics rules was a pressing matter for the start of the Congress. The move will test House Speaker Paul Ryan’s vow that “this House will hold its members to the highest ethical standards.”
More fundamentally, it will test the Trump team’s commitment to reforms, not just slogans.
The president-elect chose this issue to break the uneasy peace that’s prevailed inside his party since his election. But Trump did so tentatively and gently -- two words seldom associated with his style -- and thus offered only hints of the potential schisms to come.
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