American kleptocracy update

I wanted to start the new year with a bang! 

Two posts today for the price of one!!

Corruption in congress is bipartisan and increasingly aggressive. Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute reports a new change being enacted by the House "Ethics" Committee that he says amounts to a "New Year's Eve ethics massacre." Schuman writes:

The New Years' Eve Ethics Massacre

The House Ethics Committee's decisions let congressmen put campaign cash in their pockets and make other allegations of misusing their offices disappear

For context, congress's independent ethics watchdog, the Office of Congress Ethics (OCE), raised the alarm on four members of Congress. They issued six reports on suspected improper activities of Rep. Alex Mooney, in reports dated July 23, 2021 and December 22, 2021, Rep. Sanford Bishop, in a report dated February 10, 2020, Rep. Ronny Jackson, in reports dated December 22, 2021 and March 25, 2024, and Rep. Wesley Hunt, in a report dated March 25, 2024.

The OCE is not empowered to make final determinations or punish members of Congress, but they do conduct investigations and make recommendations to the House Ethics Committee regarding their findings. OCE sent the Ethics Committee six reports on member misconduct that sat unaddressed for as long as 1,785 days.

The Ethics Committee is composed equally of Democrats and Republicans. Members are appointed by the Speaker or the Minority Leader. The purpose of the Ethics Committee is to police member misconduct, its apparent purpose is to insulate members of Congress from accountability for ethical misconduct, except when leadership withdraws their protection from a particular member.

The Committee is not a court of law. It cannot put anyone in jail. It was created by the House of Representatives to establish and enforce official standards of conduct. Those official standards of conduct are significantly broader than criminal law and are intended to protect the integrity and reputation of the House of Representatives. As a result, the Committee should be quicker to act than a court of law and should act on a wider range of issues.

As a historical matter, the Ethics Committee failed so publicly at its mission after the turn of the millennium that the pretense it is focused on ethics could no longer be credibly maintained. In response to the public outcry, the House established the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) in March 2008 to clean up the culture of corruption in Congress.

That corruption festered when Ethics Committee Democrats and Republicans essentially agreed to avoid investigating anyone for misconduct. 

On December 30th, 2024, the House Ethics Committee "resolved" the OCE's allegations of misconduct against the four members by issuing new guidance on the personal use of campaign funds and wiping away those allegations and others. The Ethics Committee made three important decisions.

First, the Ethics Committee decided that the Congressional prohibition on using campaign donations for personal use is limited to instances that violate federal law. The House of Representatives' rules are broader than the language codified in statute, so they narrowed its application.

Second, the Ethics Committee made it virtually impossible to prove that a member of Congress violated the rules. The Ethics Committee declared guidance from the Federal Election Committee with respect to conversion of funds are "ambiguous" and provide for "significant gray areas." Accordingly, the Ethics Committee decided it would not punish Members who converted those funds unless there was evidence "that any Member intentionally misused campaign funds for their personal benefit." They required specific proof that a Member intended to misuse campaign funds in knowing violation of the rules. And then they looked the other way.

Third, the Ethics Committee made OCE allegations regarding other violations of the House rules disappear without a trace.

Well there it is. Legalized and normalized corruption is right out in the open. Worse, it is bipartisan. I thought that DJT and MAGA were the key forces behind the rising tide of kleptocracy in American politics. Kleptocratic impulses in the Democratic Party apparently are about as bad as those of MAGA. I became aware of serious Democratic Party pro-corruption sympathy when Nancy Pelosi condoned insider trading by members of congress in 2021. It's not clear if there is a significant difference between the Dems and Repubs when it comes to kleptocracy and corruption in government.

It's not corruption, it's just participating 

in a free economy 🤪

(based on insider knowledge)

Last Oct., I posted about a NYT opinion by Sarah Chayes. That was about corruption in the Dem Party. Chayes is a long-time critic of corruption in government. She questioned Dem commitment to ethics and honest government:

The way corruption is prosecuted and reported on — as one-off scandals committed by these individuals at a specific point in time — camouflages what may be modern corruption’s greatest evil: It is at its heart a system of exclusion, designed to reserve ongoing access to political and monetary gain to a close-knit group of insiders.

Around the world, and increasingly in the United States, networks of public officials, financiers, business executives, philanthropists and even out-and-out criminals have used corrupt practices to monopolize public power. These networks repurpose the levers of government to serve their private interests at the expense of the public and to ensure their own impunity.

We are in terrible trouble. Dem Party elites have fallen to the corrupting power of money, as have the Repub elites. The US supreme court recently legalized bribes as "gratuities" or "rewards" for people in government. As of now, it is mostly accurate to call the US a kleptocracy. We are so screwed.