House Democratic leaders resist triple ethics bypass procedure

Despite pressures from the House Democrats’ Progressive Caucus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has resisted demands to remove Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) from her committee assignments on Budget and Natural Resources.

The complication is that the Speaker has no such unilateral authority, and a resolution to do so must be passed by the House. Such a resolution (H. Res. 845) was introduced on Dec. 7 by the aggrieved Member, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Muslim, whom Boebert had intimated was a terrorist and suicide bomber. The offensive reference was captured in an unofficial social-media anecdote circulated to Boebert’s supporters.  Boebert has since publicly apologized for the incident.

Supporters of Omar’s resolution were spurred by the adoption of two other resolutions adopted earlier this year, removing Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) from their committees for making offensive statements about Democratic members.

The problem with this approach is that it completely flies in the face of long-standing precedents and due process. According to a very knowledgeable source inside the House, the Greene and Gosar cases are the first instances ever in which members have been removed from their committees, other than by action of their own party caucuses, without first being subject to a House Ethics Committee investigation, hearing, and then, a report recommending punitive action of some kind.

Add to that the fact that the preambles to the Greene and Gosar resolutions, and the pending Omar resolution against Boebert, erroneously rely for their justification on clause 1 of House Rule XXIII (“The Code of Official Conduct”) that requires members to “behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

As the House legislative history on that clause makes clear in the most recent “House Ethics Manual” (102nd Congress), the clause was only intended to apply to “flagrant violations of the law that reflect on ‘Congress as a whole,’ and that might otherwise go unpunished.”  The Manual goes on to elaborate that it was aimed at members “indicted or otherwise informally charged with criminal conduct in a court” of the U.S. or any state. 

In other words, the clause was never meant to extend to members calling each other names or questioning each others loyalty or patriotism. Moreover, it was never intended to be invoked unilaterally outside the Ethics Committee’s due process requirements.

Having twice violated House precedents by circumventing the Ethics Committee to punish members, it is understandable why the Democratic leadership might now pursue means other than punishing Boebert to address hatred directed at Muslims.

The leadership instead has responded by fast-tracking a bill introduced by Omar last October (H.R. 5665), “The Combating International Islamaphobia Act.” The bill establishes an office in the State Department an Office to Monitor and Combat International Islamophobia, headed by a Special Envoy. The Office is likened to the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism created in 2004. Both would be housed under the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs.  

The House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted a lengthy markup of the bill on Monday, Dec. 13, and ordered the bill reported on a party-line vote of 27 to 16. Given the leadership’s pledge to consider the bill on the floor the next day, the House Rules Committee considered it for a special rule the next morning, sending it to the floor under a closed-amendment procedure on an 8 to 4 party-line vote. 

The Islamophobia rule and bill were both passed on near party-line votes later that afternoon. In so doing, the House avoided, for the time being, the triple Ethics Committee bypass procedure being urged on the Speaker by Omar and her allies. 

Not only did this alternative approach break with the most recent precedent-breaching resolutions, which removed members from committees without full due process and reporting through the Ethics Committee as required by House rules. It also put at least a temporary halt to misusing the first clause in the Code of Official Conduct for other than criminal offenses. 

Perhaps, most importantly, members have been put on notice that they cannot expect to be rewarded each time they go running to the Speaker complaining of nasty insults being hurled at them. If some semblance of civility, respect and decorum is to be restored in the House, it should begin with both sides refraining from vitriolic verbal volleys across the aisle and instead embracing a cooling-off period under the Capitol Dome as their New Year’s resolve. 

Don Wolfensberger is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Bipartisan Policy Center, former staff director of the House Rules Committee, and author of “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays.”  The views expressed are solely his own.