Congressional Ethics

The American people voted in record numbers in 2020, and we chose a new President and Vice President. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in on January 20th. The fact that Donald Trump and his supporters don’t like the outcome doesn’t change anything. They would like to ignore the will of the people, but that is not how democracies work. In a democracy, voters choose their representatives, and politicians cannot override the people.

Americans expect and deserve a strong democracy, but we can never take the health of our democratic system for granted. The For the People Act (H.R. 1) brings to bear transformative reforms that will help safeguard our democracy which has been increasingly under attack by enemies both foreign and domestic. It has become clear that we must shore up the defenses of our democracy by expanding access to the franchise, empowering the voices of everyday Americans in our elections, and upholding strong ethical standards in government. H.R. 1 contains reforms that address all three pillars. Many of the solutions in H.R. 1 have worked successfully at the state and local level for years.

“You’ve got election officials all over the country and national security officials saying that it was a clean election and the effort to have an unnecessary investigation is just one to kowtow to the base and the president,” said David Vance, a spokesman for the watchdog group Common Cause.

Regardless, Perdue's stock trades remain troubling, said Beth Rotman of the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause. “It looks terrible if people are coming out of sessions of Congress and getting wealthy on their own at a time when everyday Americans are suffering,” Rotman said.

“We have a fox guarding the henhouse situation when it comes to the Congress looking into its own members,” said Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics with Common Cause, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Loeffler. “It’s a huge problem.”

Tonight, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s direction, Senate Republicans did profound damage to the Senate and the Supreme Court of the United States. They subverted the serious and deliberative constitutional obligation that we (and many others) called on them to uphold just 38 days ago. Instead, they rushed through Committee hearings and made a mockery of advice-and-consent by ramming Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through to a lifetime appointment only eight days before Americans finish voting and after more than 60 million Americans have already voted. In so doing, Senate Republicans excused her incomplete answers to basic questions—demurring on whether “climate change is happening” (it is) and whether voter intimidation violates federal law (it does). They smothered Justice Ginsburg’s “most fervent wish” that her replacement be considered after the election. And they did so at the expense of millions of Americans suffering from the coronavirus pandemic who desperately needed the Senate to negotiate and pass COVID relief legislation.