A member of Congress is accused of throwing hot water on his wife and injuring his 2-year-old-daughter, who suffered a fractured collarbone. (Rep. Max Miller, an Ohio Republican, vociferously denies these claims.)
Another member of Congress has been accused by the House Ethics Committee of “persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct” toward two young female staffers. (Rep. Chuck Edwards, a North Carolina Republican, denies the allegations. He announced this week he wasn’t going to run for reelection in November.)
That’s just this week. In April, Congress was considering voting to expel two other House members: Democrat Eric Swalwell, who faced an accusation of sexual assault, which he denied, and Republican Tony Gonzales, who acknowledged having an affair with a staffer, a violation of House rules. (The staffer later set herself on fire and died.) Both men ended up leaving Congress.
All of which raises the question: What is up with all these misconduct allegations and scandals in Congress? And what, if anything, can Congress do about it?
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A lot of these accusations are coming to light because it’s an election year, said Steve Israel, a former Democratic member of Congress from New York who served in House leadership.
Israel played a role in pushing then-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) out of office in 2011 after Weiner acknowledged sending sexually suggestive photos to women. Israel said if Democrats didn’t act, Weiner risked becoming a dominant election issue for his party.
“I remember members from competitive districts coming back to me saying, ‘All people are talking about is, am I going to condemn Anthony Weiner?’” he said in an interview in April, when Congress was threatening to expel Swalwell and Gonzales unless they resigned. “The stakes are higher in an election year, and there is a much more intense desire to get these guys out before it seeps into their own elections.”
Politicization is another likely factor.
Miller’s former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, is among the Republicans pressuring Miller to resign by next week in time for the party to pick a new candidate for the ballot in November. (This is a seat that Democrats could win in a really good election.)
“He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter,” Moreno wrote of Miller in an extraordinary social media post over the weekend. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
But most Republican leaders seem to feel differently.
In April, Democrats turned remarkably quickly on Swalwell, probably not wanting to be peppered with questions about the serious allegations in their own campaigns. Republicans were slower to force Gonzales out. Republicans have a slim majority in the House and more to lose than Democrats by pushing out one of their own.
Now the GOP majority is even slimmer, and the party is facing an election in which they could lose control of the majority in the House for the final two years President Donald Trump is in office.
“There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said of Miller this week. “It’s not my business to get engaged in it.”
Miller may also have the backing of Republican voters in his conservative district. “I know there are things in his past that people aren’t happy with, and I’ve had to set it aside,” Ellie Hartzler, 69, told The Washington Post’s Alexei Koseff, pointing to her support for Trump.
Edwards, meanwhile, lavished female staffers with gifts, trips and comments about their clothes, according to a report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee. He is likely to face a censure vote, which is a formal but symbolic reprimand from his colleagues. His North Carolina district is also one Democrats have a chance to pick up in November.
“Let’s face it,” Israel said this spring. “We are in a tribalized and polarized environment, where 40 percent are going to agree with whatever the Republicans say and 40 percent will agree with whatever the Democrats are saying. It’s the 20 percent, the independent swing voter, that will determine who has the majority in the midterms. And in the data I’ve seen, they don’t pay all that much attention to the latest scandal in Congress. They’re paying attention to the economy, and they have this peripheral sense that lawmakers are all corrupt.”
As for what Congress can do about these scandals, that’s tough, ethics experts say. Congress essentially polices itself with its own rules.
There is some bipartisan momentum for ethics reforms: There’s a push to ban members of Congress from having sexual relations with any Hill staffers, which has Johnson’s support. That would build off a 2018 ban on lawmakers dating their direct subordinates.
But there’s also been bipartisan support to ban members of Congress from buying and trading stocks. Last month, the House voted to ban lawmakers from buying individual stocks, but the bill would still allow them to sell stocks, a potentially profitable endeavor.
It’s also hard to clean house when the president, his administration and allies have profited off their service, said Kedric Payne, who leads the ethics program at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Trump has made more than $1 billion off cryptocurrency; government contracts have gone to Trump-linked firms; Trump is almost universally picking his donors for ambassador posts; and Democrats are investigating this week why a South Korean company engaged in a trade dispute with the United States dropped $2 million into a Trump holding company.
“The public has a right to know that the president is using his office to become even richer,” Payne said in a recent interview, “and without pressure from lawmakers and the public, this activity may continue, and it diminishes trust in the entire government.”
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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