Flooded with phone calls from voters, House GOP drops effort to gut ethics panel
Flooded with phone calls from voters, House GOP drops effort to gut ethics panel
The House GOP reversed course on Tuesday, deciding in a closed door meeting to abandon a plan approved less than 24 hours earlier to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE).
In an emergency conference meeting Tuesday morning, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) offered and the party approved a motion to restore the current OCE rules. The reversal came as members of Congress said their offices were flooded with calls from constituents angered by the decision.
“We have got just a tremendous number of calls to our office here and district offices concerned about this,” Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) said, according to Bloomberg News.
After the secret vote Monday night, many people urged others on Twitter to call their members of Congress to find out how they voted. Lists of Congressional office phone numbers were retweeted thousands of times.
Democratic lawmakers also joined the outcry against the vote and publicly blasting the decision. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared that “ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”
President-elect Donald Trump also responded on Twitter Tuesday morning, saying that the OCE is “unfair” but questioning the House GOP’s timing. Nevertheless, media organizations credited “criticism” from Trump for the reversal.
Ordinary people accomplished this. Not Trump.