The House Republican caucus is expected to vote on a package of rules that “guts” the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) before it can investigate incoming Rep. George Santos (R-NY).
In a statement on Monday, Public Citizen’s Craig Holman warned that two new rules would effectively “gut” the Ethics Committee by removing longtime Democratic members and making the office more difficult to staff.
“These are measures that will render the ethics office ineffectual and which no Member, from either party, should support,” Holman said. “Today’s Republican party is rife with ethical transgressions. And it is now trying to make it much harder to hold members of Congress accountable to the standards of decency we expect.”
Members of the House have called on the Ethics Committee to investigate Santos after he admitted lying about his education and religious background. There are also questions about how he could loan his campaign $700,000.
“OMG it’s bad enough that the GOP is going to seat Santos,” attorney Norm Eisen noted on Twitter. “But at the same time, they’re also going to move a rules package that will insulate him from a major avenue of ethics oversight!”
