Welcome to the weekly standard podcast. I'm your host, Michael Graham with this weekly standard is Michael Warren and there was a Tempest in a teapot or was it a Crefoplin an oven how big was this ethics committee reform burned down not burned down story that we just went Whatever the most explosive kitchen related metaphor it is. That's that's what we've reached crop-pot stage. Oh definitely pressure cooker Really?
Okay, let's not go that far. So what was the problem that Republicans were trying to solve and what was their method? So maybe we should back up just a tad and explain what exactly it was Michael the the house Republican conference Which is basically every Republican in the house had a meeting on Monday night in which they were closed doors No records of who voted for what but there were reporters outside who were able to quickly ascertain what was going on and What was being discussed was an amendment in addition to what's called the house rules package Which essentially every two years the new house of representatives has to agree on a set of rules for how conduct will go How they build will pass and all that sort of stuff and it's a pre-routine thing and Congressman Goodlat a good lat of Virginia added an amendment That would reform change curb the powers completely destroyed depending on who you're listening to the powers of this independent Ethics office within the house of representatives that essentially was created in the when the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 To sort of police ethics within among the house members This was an amendment to to kind of fix that There were a lot of problems with this office and a lot of members in both parties wanted to get rid of it The leadership within the Republican conference Paul Ryan and Kevin Carson the house majority leader strongly urged them not to do this Mostly I gather on political grounds on optics grounds because what was the first thing that Republicans were going to do is they were going to Gut this ethics office as soon as they have full and complete power and so they were urged not to do that But the Republican conference didn't listen to leadership and voted for it So not getting too much in the weeds here What they essentially voted for on Monday night was they agreed that the rules package that Republicans would put forward and eventually vote for on the House floor and the full house would have this amendment that would that would sort of curb this office and of course when you say Drain the swamp to politicians. They mean get rid of the people who chase you down for that's their vision But that's obviously I'm making a joke But that's the optics problem the Republicans faced was dealing with this But my understanding is that there were serious problems with the way this Allegedly independent office behaved right there were and again members from both parties were upset about this and if Paul Ryan I'm sure was not the only leader to be hearing this from his member I guarantee you Nancy Pelosi was hearing this from members of her conference It was an office that often leaked to the press the sort of structure of the office allowed for outside Entities and people to make ethics complaints to some partisan group, you know move on dot whatever right say I think congressman conservatives a bad guy and I saw him not pay his check at the waffle house last Thursday That's absolutely right.
It's actually became a tactic many members of Congress were having to face these kind of Surrealist charges and having to pay money to in order to combat those charges That would eventually be turned out to be you know not founded and so this is a big problem that all these members were complaining about And I think there's a lyric truth of that This is not simply the swamp of defending itself here and sort of and all that but as we said the optics of it weren't exactly ideal There's also another problem Which is that people look back at congressional baby in the past for people who reach way back I happen to work as a young political on the campaign that got Dan Ross and Kowski out of the house See thanks to 18 I think it was indictments because the most office in the base, you know, Congress lending itself money and all this stuff It's kind of great in the research of that But how do you on the one hand the argument is well? All you need is self-police and we'll have a committee of members and the members will please members and you say that people God, that's not gonna work They say okay, we'll have a completely outside group But that outside group is open is just pointed out to outside pressures right and they can become partisan in both directions So don't like this is there a solution was there a proposal in this rules deal was was there something to put forward to fix it Or was it just we know we don't like what we have right now is good it was a reform It was it was sort of again curbing that off it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't undoing the office entirely But it was limiting that office's power from what it wasn't look I don't know what the right solution is this is sort of one of these in the weeds issues where there I'm sure there are a lot of smart people on both sides the island nonpartisan and all that who have the best ideas But it's a kind of difficult waters to navigate what the Republicans ought to have done It would have been smart for them to do was to get a few Democrats on board with some kind of proposal I know there was a push I think a couple months ago actually to have a member of the Democratic Conference join in on this It would have been really smart politics would have been much harder to say for Nancy Pelosi couldn't have spoken out of it Look, Nancy Pelosi came out with some some statement about how this was clearly Republican Conference doesn't care one way about ethics Well, you know secretly she's going that'd be really nice to rid of this So it was a really kind of dumb politics and as it turns out the I guess the Republican Conference now on Tuesday has decided Let's take that amendment out of that final rules package before we go Okay, so you mentioned Nancy Pelosi, Paul Rahm You haven't mentioned the one name that matters in Washington DC 2017 Donald Trump And he used that high point of Democratic communication Twitter to speak out about this What did Donald Trump have to say? Do you think that Trump's Trump had an impact on the decision to remove this from the rules package? Right, so Trump, I guess he over two tweets basically made the argument that this isn't that great optics here Why isn't the Republican Congress concerned about health care attacks reform?
There should be their terrorism paraphrasing and that had I think an impact it was a part and parcel part of the entire media narrative from Monday night Which was essentially the Republicans are shooting themselves in both feet and their own arms and all these sort of things So there was this big media narrative that I actually think Trump kind of came in late on He may have been what the straw that broke camel's back and sort of pushed Republicans to rethink their votes from last night's meeting Monday night's meeting But I think he was in many ways was picking up on what the media narrative was which was this did not look good for Republicans and that had some influence but not entirely I think it's a say to say this was not a smart political move this at this proposal But there's also a scenario you can see in the future Michael Warren where Republicans need to do something tough That's gonna be unpopular in the short term but that they believe will be a win some policy change Something that'll be easy to demagogue whenever you know tax cuts on the rich or you hate sick people Is Donald Trump gonna be the kind of partner from the White House who will get the GOP's back when they make these tough decisions? Or is he gonna be the guy after 24 hours of bad media going don't kill grandma? What's your supposed to journey reform? Yeah, that's a good question and honestly even after this sort of this debacle and Trump's role in sort of Defusing it.
I think it's a little unclear. He didn't go what I thought he might once I knew he would tweet about this morning I thought he could totally burn this all down and really go after the Congress in a way that that totally distanced himself from it And it would actually have been probably even better politics for him to do that, but he didn't he was a little he was nice You know, he could be nice. Yeah, exactly and so that makes me wonder Maybe on the things that he cares about if there is a real push back from congressional Republicans on to say something like trade Right or immigration don't think so on immigration possibly on trade You could see him really sort of use the bully pulpit on Twitter or elsewhere to push back and really burn things down in order to sort of stay in that Middle on the things he doesn't care about so much Maybe he sees like a distraction like this ethics panel sort of thing I think you're gonna see something more like what we saw on Tuesday And the last thing I'll be looking for is when the Republicans are fighting for something that he wants and they're getting beaten up Will he use his air power to help them out because if he won't that's truly a lost opportunity, right? And that's why we'll be watching you're reporting at the weekly standard Michael Warren.
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