PSA: republican house caucus votes to defang house ethics oversight

[elsane]

Hey USian readers, call your representative in the House because this is some serious bullshit.

Do it ASAP this morning to get ahead of the House floor vote. If you don't know their number get it here: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Call re: "Rep. Goodlatte's proposal to put the Office of Congressional Ethics under the authority of the Ethics Committee."

Comments

[elsane]

I know, right? This particular move was so maladroit as to set off the primal primate unfairness sense, so it was easy to get big pushback fast. It's going to be much harder to get this level of organized outrage activated for things that are orders of magnitude more reprehensible, but more abstract, like the "lets get rid of that pesky clean air act" stuff they've got warming up. Even the more palpably awful stuff like revoking healthcare or civil rights protections is going to be so carefully obfuscated in procedure and doublespeak and misdirection that it will be hard to get such a pushback. And yeah, they're going to try to kill it again in August. (Let's get some trump investigations started first to make it politically uglier to try to kill.)

On the other hand, we started out 2017 with a hard blow to the Repugnants' sense of impunity, and a clear demonstration of the power of constituent protest, so at least it's a good thing to build on...