The U.S. Senate Ethics Committee released its annual report a couple of weeks ago, and for the ninth straight year it noted that it had imposed no disciplinary sanctions against anyone in 2015.
What that means, it could be argued, is that the committee itself has no ethics — or a standard of ethics so weak as to be ineffective.
The dictionary defines “ethics” as a “branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.”
Apparently in the Senate, as well as much of the rest of the national political spectrum, that means every person writes his or her own rules as long as they come up short of criminality. And even then, the boundaries become blurred.
Granted, there are honorable people in Congress in both parties. We should hope they are in the majority. But it’s hard to believe that someone in the Senate hasn’t done something worthy of a strong public reprimand in the past nine years.
The newspaper, USA Today, reports that since 2007, the committee received 613 allegations of wrongdoing, but it dismissed more than 90 percent of them. Only 75 were given a preliminary investigation.
“The total of the committee’s discipline during the nine-year period is a half-dozen letters the committee wrote to senators saying basically, ‘You should not have done that,’” the newspaper reported.
The committee is bipartisan. Its six members consist of three Republicans and three Democrats with the chairman being from the party that has a majority in the Senate. Maybe that means there’s an unusual spirit of bipartisanship on the committee. Or it could be that since neither party is in control, they cancel each other out whenever an allegation is made.
Either way, it seems like an ineffective committee.
