Ethics Tactics Roil the House
GOP Contends Rules Violated
Roll Call Staff
House Republicans, furious with what they said were Democrats’ high-handed tactics used to pass an ethics bill, on Wednesday demanded an investigation into the parliamentary maneuvers and raised the specter of sidelining the newly created independent ethics office.
The House approved the Office of Congressional Ethics late Tuesday night, overcoming the trepidation of Democrats and Republicans to implement the first major change to the chamber’s ethics process in more than a decade.
The OCE would mark the first time that a semi-independent entity, whose members would be appointed by bipartisan House leadership, would oversee compliance with the chamber’s internal rules.
Republicans, who opposed that approach in favor of overhauling the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, protested on the House floor Wednesday by engaging in procedural delays intended to highlight hard-line tactics used by Democrats to overcome a near-defeat of the measure.
During a procedural vote preceding final passage of the resolution, known as “ordering the previous question,” Democrats appeared to lose, as nearly two dozen of their own Members voted against the proposal.
But Democrats refused to gavel the vote closed for another 12 minutes beyond the normal 15-minute period, as leadership pressed four Members to change votes and provided the majority a narrow victory.
“It’s rather ironic that they have to break their new ethics reforms in order to pass a new ethics reform bill,” observed House Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (Fla.).
Republicans loudly protested as the vote remained open Tuesday night, alleging that Democrats violated House Rules XX, which prohibits a vote from exceeding the 15-minute limit “for the sole purpose of reversing the outcome of such vote.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) proposed Wednesday that the House ethics committee and a select committee investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) and other Democratic leaders’ role in the Tuesday night vote, forcing the issue to the floor as a privileged resolution.
That measure also provided for the repeal of the procedural vote and the subsequent ballot, effectively reversing the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics without another difficult House vote.
Although the House voted to table the measure, rendering it dead, Republicans vowed to press on with their objections to the vote as well as the ethics office.
Pelosi, who made the bill’s passage her personal mission in recent weeks, defended Democratic tactics and rejected comparisons to the former Republican majority.
“It was very different. We were in a reasonable time frame,” Pelosi said. She added that Members who changed votes in the period after the 15-minute clock had run out were merely confused about the procedural motion. “Some people just didn’t understand what those consequences were,” she said.
Rep. Bart Stupak (Mich.), one of the four Democrats to switch his vote on the procedural motion, said there was nothing nefarious in his reversal — just a mistake.
Stupak acknowledged that, like several other Democrats, he had initially been on the fence about whether to support the ethics bill. But earlier in the day Tuesday, he assured Pelosi that he would support the bill.
He said when he got to the chamber he looked at the tally board and saw that Members such as Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) had voted no, and so he voted no as well, thinking that was the way he was supposed to vote on the procedural motion. He then left the chamber and made a phone call to his wife just off the House floor.
A Democratic floor staff later located him and told him that he was supposed to vote yes. He then changed his vote. Stupak said he was distracted because his local high school basketball team had just won its way into the state’s equivalent of the Final Four.
“It was my fault,” Stupak said.
But another Democrat, who opposed the ethics office but voted in favor of the bill, raised doubts over the Speaker’s explanation and suggested Members were not perplexed by a common procedural vote.
“There were an awful lot of discussions with Members, literally asking them to support the measure,” said the lawmaker, who asked not to be identified. “I held my nose. I didn’t like it. … Everybody knew what we were doing.”
Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) — who cast the final votes along with Stupak and Reps. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.) — acknowledged he voted in favor of the measure despite reservations.
“I’ve been struggling with it all week. … I don’t support the notion of delegating Congressional authority on ethics,” he explained.
Taylor: Preventing Another Underwear Bomber
March 19, 4:09 p.m.
The intelligence community faces challenges daily. No example is more emblematic of the problems faced than the so-called underwear bomber of 2009. As threats emerge, the hunt for “persons of interest” must occur in a more reliable and efficient manner because the consequences of inaction can be catastrophic. Read Full Article
Roll Call Video Channels
