For at least 17 years and running, the Senate Ethics Committee — tasked with confidentially investigating allegations of misconduct by the chamber’s austere members and staffers — has failed to formally punish anyone at all, a
Raw Story analysis of congressional records indicates.
That amounts to 1,668 complaints alleging violations of Senate rules with exactly zero resulting in disciplinary action.
In 2023 alone, the Senate Ethics Committee on Wednesday
disclosed accepting 145 separate reports of alleged ethics violations. Of them, 19 merited preliminary inquiries by committee staff. Of those, the committee dismissed 12 for “a lack of substantial merit” or because they deemed a violation to be “inadvertent, technical or otherwise of a de minimis nature.”
None resulted in a “disciplinary sanction.”
And senators seem to know it.
“Maybe it's the equivalent of a warning ticket when you're speeding, like the police,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) – the former number two Republican, or whip, in the Senate – told Raw Story through a laugh this week.
The senators who make up the secretive six-member ethics panel will neither confirm nor deny their work.
“We don’t – I don’t discuss that,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) told Raw Story.
Fischer’s
far from alone, with Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Chris Coons (D-DE) previously declining to comment to Raw Story about the committee’s work.
Senate ethics vs. House ethics
While members of the Senate Ethics Committee refuse to discuss their work — and lack thereof — some members of the House Ethics Committee are aghast at what their senatorial counterparts aren’t doing.
"What's the point of having ethics rules if there's no teeth?" Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) – a member of the House Ethics Committee – told Raw Story.
“Without accountability, we're not going to have compliance,” Escobar said. “If you expect people to abide by ethics rules, there has to be trust in the process and trust that the outcome is fair. But if there's no outcome, then there’s no faith in the system and people will operate with impunity, because there’s no consequences.”
Historically, at least, it would be laughable to look to the House Ethics Committee as a beacon of efficiency — or anything. But in recent months, the committee has changed.
Case in point: Now former-Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who allegedly lied himself both into and out of office.
George Santos yelling at reporters (C-SPAN).
Before Santos was expelled in
December, he survived expulsion votes in May and then November.
But some two weeks later, on November 16, the House Ethics Committee spoke in one loud and bipartisan voice when they dropped their
damning 55-page report that pulled the veil back on the web of lies, greed and corruption they alleged surrounds Santos most anywhere he goes.
The committee interviewed 40 witnesses — after issuing 37 convincing congressional subpoenas — while also thumbing through upwards of 170,000 pages of records, as new nonprofit newsroom
NOTUS pointed out in its helpful historical primer on Senate ethics inaction, which built on a 2023 Raw Story investigation.
By the time the House took up its third Santos expulsion measure on Dec. 1, 2023, the tides had turned even in the full House of Representatives, where Republicans were holding on to a razor thin
222-213 seat majority. While all five GOP leaders in the House voted against expulsion, rank-and-file Republicans voted to oust their camera-loving colleague.
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“That was a tough vote for them given the margins that were so small,” Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) – another member of the House Ethics Committee – told Raw Story. “Democrats too, because, I think, there were two votes before but he wasn’t expelled. When the report came out, I think, people were able to look at the body of evidence,”
In the end, based on the ethics report,
73% of the House voted to expel only the sixth member in the storied history of the rowdy chamber.
"At the end of the day, to me, what it did was, it allowed for due process," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) told Raw Story. “It allowed for due process for him, but it gave us the ability to move ahead with the expulsion.”
Lawler and other New York Republicans led earlier efforts to oust Santos — in part because
his constituent’s were calling their offices for assistance — and he says the Ethics Committee report was the gamechanger.
“A lot of people felt that they had enough due process and information,” Lawler said.
The nation’s founders wanted the two separate branches of the legislative branch to police themselves. That’s about it. In the Constitution, the details of said policing were left to be written by future generations of lawmakers themselves.
"Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member," according to the
Article I, section 5 of the Constitution.
Historic Senate inaction
The House and the Senate are different. And that extends to ethics, too.
In its 235-year history, the U.S. Senate has expelled 15 members. The first came in 1797 — less than a decade since the chamber’s inception — when
Sen. William Blount (R-TN), a founding father who signed the original Constitution before being expelled by a vote of 25 to 1 for committing treason.
The other
14 expulsions came in 1861 and ‘62 when roughly 20 percent of senators were expelled after they joined the Confederate rebellion against the United States of America.
But during the ensuing 162 years, the so-called “
world’s greatest deliberative body” has, when it comes to ethical matters, done a lot of … deliberating.
U.S. senators have been caught
running fraudulent campaigns, receiving kicks back for leasing out federal government property, embezzling money (before being laid to rest in the Congressional Cemetery), charging U.S. citizens to perform their senatorial duties and taking bribes in exchange for war contracts. Senators have been nabbed in FBI stings before being sent to prison.
All of those cases of historic corruption came before the Senate Ethics Committee. Some of those inquiries seem to have scared some senators into resigning early, but not one elicited an expulsion vote. Most senators emerged from these and other tribulations without even receiving a formal punishment.
While Santos was the gadfly of the House, there’s still a senior senator buzzing about that even some members of his own party say should be expelled.
In September, responding to numerous requests for information about freshly indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), the Senate Ethics Committee released a rare statement.
In essence: The Senate Ethics Committee said it wasn’t going to say anything, and that it would let criminal investigators take the lead.
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“[T]he Senate Select Committee on Ethics does not comment on matters pending before the Committee or matters that may come before the Committee. Also, absent special circumstances, it has been the long-standing policy of the Committee to yield investigation into matters where there is an active and ongoing criminal investigation or proceeding so as not to interfere in that process.”
The closest the Senate Committee on Ethics got to formally reprimanding one of its own during 2023 came on March 23, when it issued a “
public letter of admonition” to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for soliciting campaign contributions in a federal building.
Specifically, Graham in November 2022 asked the public, via Fox News, to contribute money to the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Herschel Walker, who ended up
losing his midterm race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
In admonishing Graham, the Senate Committee on Ethics noted that Graham had previously violated the prohibition on soliciting campaign donations in federal buildings when he raised money for his own campaign in 2020.
But for all that, Graham’s letter isn’t much more than ink, paper and embarrassment.
Such letters “shall not be considered discipline,” according to the Senate Committee on Ethics’
Rules of Procedure, and they fall well short of actual acts of internal discipline such as censure, denouncement, condemnation, restitution payments or — in the most extreme of cases — expulsion.
The last time the U.S. Senate formally disciplined a senator?
That came on July 25, 1990, when the Senate
voted 96-0 to denounce Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-MN) for “unethical conduct in personal business dealings, Senate reimbursements and using campaign contributions for personal use.”
“I commend the members of the Ethics Committee for their commitment and their dedication to the most difficult task in this place,” Durenberger told his colleagues from the Senate floor following the vote.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), currently the Senate’s youngest member, was three years old at the time.
‘Different set of rules’
Senators maintain the two chamber’s ethical standards are on different planes. They say it’s like comparing apples to, well, the House of Representatives.
For starters, the House doesn’t allow outside parties to initiate ethics complaints, while the Senate does, argues Cornyn of Texas.
“So just a different set of rules,” Cornyn said.
Cornyn loves throwing the book at the deserving, he maintains. Before coming to Congress, he served as an
associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court. He also served as the Lone Star State’s attorney general under then-Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
The Senate Ethics Committee isn’t just about crime — of which there’s been a lot of on Capitol Hill — it also acts as a guide to senators, Cornyn said.
“To keep us ethical, hopefully,” Cornyn said. “Hopefully to provide guidance, so that people don't get in trouble in the first place. That's, I think, one of the roles.”
Raw Story asked Cornyn what its like serving with Menendez, noting that the
allegations against him — fraud, conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit extortion — are quite serious.
“I’m a believer that there's a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, so we'll wait and see how that process plays out,” Cornyn said. “I'm sure it's a miserable experience.”
Misery loves company. And, unlike Santos, who’s busy
photobombing Trump victory parties, Menendez remains in office and has lots of Senate colleagues keeping him relatively warm these days.
