Mr. Trump’s response was something altogether different. He didn’t condemn these Republicans for defying and undermining his drain-the-swamp pledge. He asked them to address more urgent business first, like destroying health care reform and passing tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, while he was tweeting on Tuesday morning, Kellyanne Conway, the incoming counselor to the president, had already been on television supporting Mr. Goodlatte and his gang, saying House Republicans had a “mandate” to curb “overzealousness” over ethics.
.. For Paul Ryan, the attack on the ethics office was certainly a milestone: He hadn’t even been re-elected House speaker when he was rolled by his caucus.
.. The claim by Mr. Ryan and Mr. Goodlatte (who, hilariously, leads the House Judiciary Committee) that gutting the office would improve “due process” for accused lawmakers is a marvel of Orwellian newspeak. So is Mr. Goodlatte’s insistence that dismantling the O.C.E. “builds upon and strengthens” it.
.. So guess who joined Mr. Goodlatte in calling to gut it? Representative Blake Farenthold of Texas, who had been
investigated by the O.C.E. for sexual harassment. Representative Peter Roskam of Illinois, who
came under O.C.E. scrutiny after he and his wife took a
$24,000 trip to Taiwan, which appeared to have been paid for, improperly, by the Taiwanese government.
Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, who was the ranking member of the House Committee on Small Business in 2009 when he
invited expert testimony on the renewable fuels industry from a representative of a renewable fuels business in which his wife had a financial stake, a potential conflict of interest. And Representative Steve Pearce of New Mexico, who
last year tried to eliminate the O.C.E.’s entire budget after it investigated one of his staff members.