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#1222659 2017-01-03 11:39 AM
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Not shocked that they did this but thought maybe they wouldn't start the new year this way. lWP


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Serious question:
Why do you feel this committee was necessary when neither the Senate nor the White House had them, when there will still be a bipartisan ethics committee and given that criminal ethics violations can still be prosecuted by state and local law enforcement agencies?

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Trump saves ethics: House Republicans reversed themselves Tuesday under pressure from President-elect Donald Trump, and dropped plans to swiftly gut an independent congressional ethics board.

Told ya you'd find yourself agreeing with Trump more than you'd care to admit.

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I love how M E M's party of social marxist Democrats, who have demonstrated over and over that they have absolutely no ethics, who weaponized the IRS to suppress religious conservative and Tea Party groups so they could win the 2012 election by a narrow 1%, whose Democrat Senate majority leader Harry Reid was approached about his slanders against Mitt Romney and asked to defend them, and could only cynically say "we won".
The Democrats, whose "fast and furious" gun scheme was intended to sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels and get people killed (and it did) just so they could blame gun retailers and crush the 2nd Amendment.

The Democrats, who rat-fucked their own primary candidate Bernie Sanders, and were exposed in e-mails plotting every dirty trick in the book to tank Sanders' candidacy, so they could anoint and crown Frau Hitlery. Every dirty trick, including cultivating anti-Semitism to make voters reject Sanders.

The Democrats, whose DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was exposed the day the DNC convention began, with her own self-incriminating e-mails to be part of the conspiracy to leverage out Bernie Sanders.

And after being forced to resign, was hired a nanosecond later to a leading role in the Hillary Clinton campaign. Which brazenly says that as DNC chair, she was doing Hillary Clinton's bidding.

The Democrats, whose new DNC chair Donna Brazile abused her position as a consultant for CNN to (with Roland Martin) feed Hillary Cinton the questions in advance for TWO presidential debates.


The Democrats, whose operatives stoking violence at Trump rallies were exposed as receiving $1,500 per violent incident they provoked, and boasted they had a "double wall" of insulated deniability, to hide their connection to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

THESE Democrats?!?
These are the people, M E M and his Bolsheviks, who are railing on Republicans for simply weighing the effectiveness of a particular ethics committee, in the absence of any GOP scandal?
Against a Death-Star-sized pile of ethicsless brazen CRIMES within their own DNC party?

At every turn for the last 4 years, Democrats have proven their complete lack of ethics, and eagerness to break the law. They have proven they will do anything, ANYTHING to win an election, without the slightest remorse, even when caught. Your questioning anyone else' ethics is laughable beyond belief.



  • from Do Racists have lower IQ's...

    Liberals who bemoan discrimination, intolerance, restraint of Constitutional freedoms, and promotion of hatred toward various abberant minorities, have absolutely no problem with discriminating against, being intolerant of, restricting Constitutional freedoms of, and directing hate-filled scapegoat rhetoric against conservatives.

    EXACTLY what they accuse Republicans/conservatives of doing, is EXACTLY what liberals/Democrats do themselves, to those who oppose their beliefs.
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 Originally Posted By: Wonder Boy


I love how M E M's party of social marxist Democrats, who have demonstrated over and over that they have absolutely no ethics, who weaponized the IRS to suppress religious conservative and Tea Party groups so they could win the 2012 election by a narrow 1%, whose Democrat Senate majority leader Harry Reid was approached about his slanders against Mitt Romney and asked to defend them, and could only cynically say "we won".
The Democrats, whose "fast and furious" gun scheme was intended to sell weapons to Mexican drug cartels and get people killed (and it did) just so they could blame gun retailers and crush the 2nd Amendment.

The Democrats, who rat-fucked their own primary candidate Bernie Sanders, and were exposed in e-mails plotting every dirty trick in the book to tank Sanders' candidacy, so they could anoint and crown Frau Hitlery. Every dirty trick, including cultivating anti-Semitism to make voters reject Sanders.

The Democrats, whose DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was exposed the day the DNC convention began, with her own self-incriminating e-mails to be part of the conspiracy to leverage out Bernie Sanders.

And after being forced to resign, was hired a nanosecond later to a leading role in the Hillary Clinton campaign. Which brazenly says that as DNC chair, she was doing Hillary Clinton's bidding.

The Democrats, whose new DNC chair Donna Brazile abused her position as a consultant for CNN to (with Roland Martin) feed Hillary Cinton the questions in advance for TWO presidential debates.


The Democrats, whose operatives stoking violence at Trump rallies were exposed as receiving $1,500 per violent incident they provoked, and boasted they had a "double wall" of insulated deniability, to hide their connection to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

THESE Democrats?!?
These are the people, M E M and his Bolsheviks, who are railing on Republicans for simply weighing the effectiveness of a particular ethics committee, in the absence of any GOP scandal?
Against a Death-Star-sized pile of ethicsless brazen CRIMES within their own DNC party?

At every turn for the last 4 years, Democrats have proven their complete lack of ethics, and eagerness to break the law. They have proven they will do anything, ANYTHING to win an election, without the slightest remorse, even when caught. Your questioning anyone else' ethics is laughable beyond belief.



True, but it's a moot point.

Donald Trump, the very president-elect that MEM likes to call a "piece of shit" put a stop to it.

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Trump is a piece of shit but a piece that is apparently more politically smart than the GOP house. They chose to gut the ethics board as the way to start the new year. Now they have to wait till August to actually gut it when less people are paying attention.


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I note you still have not explained why you think this would've had a significant impact on the ability to root out corruption

the G-man #1222670 2017-01-04 11:37 AM
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The GOP changes that they wanted to make would have weakened the office. Did you read the initial changes they tried to make? What did you see that you think improved independent oversight?


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M E M's (and the broader Left's) consistent strategy:

Slander Republicans and accuse them of stuff, put the public spotlight on their oft-repeated false allegations, to hide the fact that their own DNC house is on fire with corruption and deceit (of which what I cited above is just the tip of the iceberg!)

What the lying slanderers of the DNC fail to understand is that Trump, while not establishment Democrat, is also not establishment Republican. At the very least Trump brings a non-partisan effort to truly clean up the worst of both sides of the corrupt political system. But Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and the rest continue to demagogue Trump and his administration as if they were "right-wing" partisans, ignoring that his group is, in fact, entering as a solution to partisanship and to clean up a decades-spanning corrupt system that no other candidate of either party would even have the desire to clean up!


As I quoted Bill Moyers several times over the last 10 years in discussing our growing national debt: "Both parties are so invested in having the system not work, that it's unlikely either one will ever fix it."

Trump is the solution to that. Elected in spite of his campaign gaffs, despite his being vastly out-gunned and out-spent in the 2016 campaign, despite every dirty trick by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, despite the multiple stabs in the back by his own party.
He won.

And as Obama said in 2009: "We won."
Well, now in 2017, Trump can say "We won." Against all odds, and despite every DNC/liberal media deception.

So put aside your slanders, and let the man govern. He hasn't even been inaugurated yet! Let him govern.

A few minutes ago, I heard Vice President-elect Mike Pence say "This administration marks the end of business as usual." And that this is an administration that "keeps its promises." (In sharp contrast to the Alinsky tactics and Cultural Marxist deceit of Obama and Hillary; in Hillary Clinton's own words in a Brazil speech in 2016: "It is important to have a public position and a private position", meaning to publicly state one set of goals and then secretly do the exact opposite, saying whatever lies the public wants to hear just to get elected.)

The Gingrich revolution in 1994 had stated promises that they kept (that portion of which was not vetoed by Bill Clinton).
And Trump, a less ideologically tied revolution, is likewise an administration that says what they mean, and vows to keep its promises to the American people who elected them, and re-establish trust in government.

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 Originally Posted By: Matter-eater Man
The GOP changes that they wanted to make would have weakened the office. Did you read the initial changes they tried to make? What did you see that you think improved independent oversight?


You've attempted to reverse my question to you. I asked:

Why do you feel this committee was necessary when neither the Senate nor the White House had them, when there will still be a bipartisan ethics committee and given that criminal ethics violations can still be prosecuted by state and local law enforcement agencies?

The Office of Congressional Ethics has two powers:
  • issue public reports (with no enforcement power);
  • refer their findings to the House Ethics Committee, which had (and has) the power to issue punishment, like fines and formal reprimands by the full House.


Under the proposed change, the only real difference was/is that the reports weren't public until they were reviewed by the Ethics Committee.

Furthermore, as I touched on above, there are other entities, also independent of Congress, that can investigate these sorts of allegations, with a lot more resources and power:
  • the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
  • the Department of Justice (including) U.S. Attorneys around the country;
  • local law enforcement


And, in fact, these independent agencies have snared congressmen many times over the years. You have actually written about them in the past (at least when the snared members of Congress were republican).

Furthermore, as noted (again) above, this office exists in only one house of one branch of government. There is no similar office for the executive or even the Senate.

So, I'll re-ask the question in a different way: what was being proposed that gutted ethics?

the G-man #1222681 2017-01-07 12:11 PM
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As the WP reports....
 Quote:
Under the proposed new rules, the office could not employ a spokesman, investigate anonymous tips or refer criminal wrongdoing to prosecutors without the express consent of the Ethics Committee, which would gain the power to summarily end any OCE probe.


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Under the existing rules, OCE has no subpoena power, cannot punish lawmakers for any wrongdoing it uncovers, and may only refer its findings and recommendations to the House Ethics Committee.

Since it's essentially already subject to bipartisan HEC oversight, again, how would the proposal "gut" anything?

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Not my problem if you want to minimize what they tried doing. I know you're not naive and understand the GOP's motive.


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I asked about results. You're talking motive. Is this one of those "symbolism over substance" things the DNC is often so into?


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