Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Ga. senators tout Ethics rulings, but panel rarely finds wrongdoing

The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee, their campaign ads proclaim, dismissed probes of their stock trades without finding any wrongdoing.

Those outcomes, however, should be no surprise.

The committee of three Republican senators and three Democrats almost never finds fault with the 100 members of the U.S. Senate. An analysis of the committee’s publicly available annual reports from 2007 through 2019 shows it received 1,189 complaints of alleged violations. Not one resulted in a disciplinary sanction, records show. …

Most complaints were dismissed without even a preliminary investigation by staff. Only six cases during that period resulted in private or public letters of admonition — effectively a slap on the wrist — for those who ran afoul of the Senate’s rules or standards. …

Ethics’ membership is handpicked by party leadership, and the panel largely operates in secret, issuing few public records about its cases. That thwarts independent verification of the extent of the committee’s review or how it reached its determinations. Congressional watchdogs and ethics experts, critical of the secrecy surrounding the committee’s work, have been pushing for years for a more independent and open process that will help restore trust in Congress.

“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 & ethics with Common Cause, one of the groups that filed the complaint against Loeffler. “It’s a huge problem.”