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This Week's Updates:
House Republicans Take Swings at Office of Congressional Ethics
On Tuesday, a subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration held a hearing regarding the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), the independent entity tasked with reviewing allegations of misconduct brought against members of Congress and their staff. The hearing was led by Oversight Subcommittee chairman Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who opened the proceedings by describing the limits of OCE’s authority and remarking that the Senate’s lack of a corresponding entity called the office’s value into question.
Rather than focusing on OCE’s processes for investigating lawmakers, however, members spent most of the hearing grilling OCE Staff Director and Chief Counsel Omar Ashmawy, who was charged with a DUI at the end of last year. The decision to retain Ashmawy was defended by OCE Chairman Paul Vinovich and Co-Chairman Mike Barnes, who argued that Ashmawy’s transgression had been taken seriously and that he had been treated like any other staffer convicted of the same crime. Republican lawmakers also zeroed in on a 2015 OCE investigation which connected nine lawmakers to an all-expenses-paid trip to Azerbaijan, bankrolled by a state-owned oil company. OCE leadership defended their decision to release the full report on the investigation—in defiance of the House Ethics Committee—and maintained that they had never leaked news of the investigation to the press.
Ultimately, members of Congress (often on both sides of the aisle) don’t particularly like the existence of an independent entity tasked with holding them accountable for their behavior. As long as the Office maintains some oversight and investigatory abilities, it’s reasonable to assume attacks like this will continue.
Senate Democrats Weigh Supreme Court Ethics Reform
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Accountability, and Federal Rights held a hearing on a Supreme Court ethics bill introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Hank Johnson (GA-4). Dubbed the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act, the bill would establish a code of conduct holding justices to a much higher standard for gift disclosures and recusals. The bill would also establish a “judicial investigation panel” composed of five randomly selected circuit court chief justices, with the power to review complaints filed against individual Supreme Court justices. The panel would be able to hold hearings, take sworn testimony, and issue subpoenas. While the bill has little chance of becoming law, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is exploring other options to investigate Harlan Crow’s many undisclosed gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas, which could lead to a Finance Committee subpoena for Crow.
Meta Faces Bipartisan Rebuke on Child Sexual Exploitation Failures
On Wednesday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) released a joint statement condemning Meta for allowing a network of pedophiles to operate on its platform, as detailed in TheWall Street Journal last week. “It is clear these companies cannot be trusted to protect children on their platforms,” said the lawmakers, “which is why the majority of parents want Congress to do more to strengthen protections for online safety.” Now, committee staff are arranging briefings with both Meta representatives and the researchers who helped uncover the child sexual abuse material.
This isn’t a new problem for Meta. In 2020, CfA’s Tech Transparency Project found that Meta failed to provide law enforcement with the initial tipoff about child sexual exploitation taking place on its platforms in the vast majority of cases. This passive approach is largely enabled by the fact that Meta cannot be sued for enabling the sexual abuse of children, thanks to the Section 230 liability shield.
