William F. Smith: “While this proposal is marginally improved over the first proposal, it still contains flaws that make it defective. The…”

“While this proposal is marginally improved over the first proposal, it still contains flaws that make it defective. The fundamental flaw of the proposal is that it fails to reform the House Ethics Committee itself. The creation of another ethics entity would be an admission of the failure of the Ethics Committee. Americans rightly feel the ethics process simply does not work. They do not know when ethics investigations are started; they do not know the status of those investigations, and they do not know whether a partisan deadlock has resulted in stalling an investigation forever. Americans need this knowledge, and that can only come through reforms to the Ethics Committee itself that will produce more bipartisanship and greater transparency. But the proposal before us simply adds another layer of bureaucracy on top of an already broken system. It creates an entirely new entity that invites yet more partisanship under clearly undemocratic procedures.”