HOUSE GOP REVERSES COURSE ON GUTTING ETHICS PANEL

Following a public outcry, and tweeted criticism from President-elect Donald Trump, House Republicans reversed course Tuesday on a proposal to gut their own ethics watchdog.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called an emergency House GOP conference Tuesday around noon to scrap a proposed House rule that would have effectively declawed the Office of Congressional Ethics. The proposal, which House Republicans approved behind closed doors Monday night, would have defied Trump’s “drain the swamp” mantra aimed at making Washington more transparent and less cozy.

But McCarthy’s motion to restore the current OCE set-up was adopted by unanimous consent after Trump himself got involved — an intervention that irritated a number of House Republicans who supported the move to neuter the ethics office.

“We shot ourselves in the foot,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), who said the ethics snafu was an unnecessary self-inflicted wound. “Sometimes people have to learn the hard way.”

“They need to know the gravity of this situation,” said one senior GOP source ahead of the vote to restore the OCE’s full powers, while noting that the office was not without flaws. “The best thing may be to unwind it.”

The abrupt reversal marked a rocky first day of the new, 115th Congress. It was supposed to have been a jubilant opening for conservatives, with Republicans taking control of both chambers and prepping for the takeover of the White House by their party leader, Donald Trump.

Then came this self-inflicted public relations debacle — and the whole day unraveled from there.

House Republicans’ surprise adoption of the OCE rules change Monday night appeared to catch even House GOP leadership off guard. The pitch would have put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the thumb of lawmakers on the House Ethics Committee. Monday’s effort was led, in part, by lawmakers who have come under investigation in recent years.

Trump on Tuesday morning called out his fellow Republicans on Twitter. “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it,” Trump said in one tweet, adding, “……..may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS.”

Previously an independent body, the new set-up would have essentially declawed the office. It would bar OCE from considering anonymous tips against lawmakers and sharing investigative findings with other branches of government or the public, as the office currently does in the name of transparency. It would also apparently keep OCE from investigating criminal activity, the bulk of their work — instructing the office to “immediately” refer any hint of such actions to the lawmaker-controlled ethics panel rather than pursue themselves.

It would have been an awkward way for Republicans to start the new Congress — and not merely because it gives the appearance that they don’t value oversight of their own actions. It also stepped on their message of the week, which is one of unity and “hitting the ground running” in a new GOP-controlled Washington.

This week was supposed to center around Congress taking the first major steps toward repealing Obamacare, and the Hill’s soon-to-pass rebuke of the landmark United Nations resolution chiding Israel. But the rules change has sucked up much of the oxygen on Capitol Hill, at least so far.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and McCarthy had urged their colleagues during the closed-door Monday meeting to vote against the idea. GOP leadership said any reforms of OCE should be done on a bipartisan basis.

Despite their disapproval, both Ryan and McCarthy spent much of early Tuesday morning arguing that OCE will “continue to operate independently” and will continue to investigate members of Congress “thoroughly and independently,” as Ryan said in a statement.

“I want to make clear that this House will hold its members to the highest ethical standards and the Office will continue to operate independently to provide public accountability to Congress,” Ryan said in his statement. “All members of Congress are required to earn the public’s trust every single day, and this House will hold members accountable to the people.”

Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Ind.), the incoming chairwoman of the House Ethics Committee, echoed Ryan’s statement on Tuesday morning. In her new role running the committee that would oversee the OCE, she pledged not to interfere with the office’s board “or prevent it from doing its work.”

“The Office has an important role to play in restoring confidence in Congress, and it will continue to perform its work in the new Congress as the Office of Congressional Complaint Review,” she said in a statement. “I will work in a bipartisan manner with the Office to ensure its independence and to maintain the highest ethical standards of the House.”

Still, the actual language of the amendment suggests otherwise. Asked, for example, about OCE not being allowed to probe criminal activity, McCarthy during a Tuesday pen and pad with reporters said they would still be allowed to do so. But when pressed about the specific language of the rule, he changed his tune slightly, arguing that immediate referral was more efficient.

“If at any time the board of the office discovers information indicating that a matter which is the subject of a review by the board may involve a violation of a criminal law, the board will immediately refer the matter to the Committee on Ethics,” the rule states.

On MSNBC Tuesday morning, McCarthy acknowledged that “it is true that I opposed moving forward on this at this time because I thought it was something both parties should take up at the same time.” But he said he will vote for the rules package that includes the provision and argued that “most of these reforms are bipartisan supported reforms.”

“I don’t want to put politics with it,” McCarthy said. “That’s why I thought this wasn’t the best time to go forward with it.”

But the conference did not heed their earlier warning, approving the rules change 119-to-74 Monday evening.

Asked about the matter on Squawk Box Tuesday morning, Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway defended the House’s move, while caveating that “of course [Trump is] going to drain the swamp; ethics is a big piece of that.”

“I don’t want your viewers to be left with the impression … that ethics is gone now,” she said. “There will be a new group in its place that is overseen by the House Ethics Committee, and that new group in large part wants to curtail what some have seen as 100 investigations since 2008, only a third of which have been referred to the House.”

Members, she added, “feel their due process rights have been violated and compromised.”

Her comments, however, came before Trump’s tweets chiding lawmakers.

Trump’s apparent annoyance over the rules change could easily effect whether the OCE change passes the House later Tuesday. All Democrats are expected to vote against the House rule. If the 74 Republicans who voted against the rule during the rules package markup also vote against it on the floor, then the rule will not pass.

It’s unclear, however, how many are willing to put themselves on their line publicly, going against the conference to defend an office that many feel needs to be reined in somehow.

Democrats and outside ethics groups, meanwhile, have blasted the pitch as irresponsible.

“Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions,” snarked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in a statement on Monday after news of the secret-ballot vote. “Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

Even conservative groups like Judicial Watch have called the proposal “shameful.”

Madeline Conway and Louis Nelson contributed to this report.