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0-for-1,668: Senators extend their streak of never punishing other senators

WASHINGTON — Arguably the most bipartisan – nonpartisan, really – committee in the Senate is also, arguably, the biggest laughing stock on Capitol Hill.

And matters just got worse: The secretive U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics has extended one of the most ignoble streaks on Capitol Hill.

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.

Run on broken Senate record? Nope. One embattled Dem senator explains his all-in strategy.

WASHINGTON – It’s almost 2024 and many lawmakers on Capitol Hill are in a bind.

How do you run on the record of the historically dysfunctional 118th Congress?

One with a mere 27 bills signed into law in 2023 — the least accomplished Congress in modern history?

Or one — thank you Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — that typically features a three-day Senate work week, where scheduled votes begin on Tuesday evenings and end early Thursday afternoons.

“It's ridiculous,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE) — who’s facing voters next year — told Raw Story. “Have you seen the calendar for next year?”

In short: you don’t run on that record at all, particularly if you’re an endangered veteran lawmaker whose greatest legislative accomplishments occurred in the not-so-recent past.

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Which makes Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) — one of the Senate’s most vulnerable incumbents — such a fascinating test case for the value of a left-leaning lawmaker’s longevity, seniority, track record and toil amid a rightward leaning electorate and a do-little Congress.

Tester tells Raw Story he’s not worried about the light Washington work weeks this year or next. He knows what he’s running on, and it’s not the abysmal record of the 118th Congress.

“What I'm gonna run on is my accomplishments from the time I got here until Election Day of next year, and we're still going to work to get things done and things will get done,” Tester said. “So we've got a lot of stuff done, and we're going to continue in that vein and try to get stuff done. And we'll run on that.”

With the bar so low, Tester has one weapon to his credit: he’s actually gotten some stuff done during the past year.. During 2023, he had two bills — of the mere 22 sent to President Joe Biden for his signature — signed into law, which literally garnered headlines inside the Beltway.

“Two of Jon Tester’s bills have become law this year. That’s more than anyone else in Congress,” reads a Politico piece.

The Center for Effective Lawmaking also named Tester the 4th most effective senator in Washington. While he doesn’t defend the light Senate schedule, Tester says he understands it, and he doesn’t think Schumer ran a three-day Senate much of the year for vulnerable incumbents like himself.

“I don't think it was that,” Tester said. “We did a lot last year.”

ALSO READ: ‘A year I'll never get back’ — Congress longing to forget Santos, McCarthy and all of 2023

Fact check: Republicans agree – and they’re running on unwinding that record. Bidenomics to the White House comms staff is socialism to many in conservative Big Sky Country.

While Republicans hate it, Democrats were able to muster the votes to pass Biden’s sweeping Inflation Reduction Act. While its name is something between a misnomer and a lie — the bill has little to do with inflation – it earmarked $369 billion to help transform America’s clean-energy sector. It also increased the size of the Internal Revenue Service and lowered prescription drug costs for seniors.

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the 117th Congress also passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which increases the threshold for objecting to presidential electoral votes from one member to 1/5th of both chambers. Lawmakers also came together to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first gun-control to pass Congress in decades.

There’s also the Respect for Marriage Act. It extends federal protections to same-sex couples who move to states that only recognize heterosexual marriages. It also divided Montana’s senators. Tester supported it, but Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) – the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee who’s gunning for Tester’s seat – opposed the measure and non-heterosexial marriages.

As chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Tester was particularly focused on implementation of the PACT Act, which offers new benefits to veterans who suffered from exposure to burn pits, Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals during their military service.

“But the truth is, we focused a lot more on oversight. Why? Because the PACT Act was such a big deal that we've got to make sure that gets implemented appropriately,” Tester said of his changing role this beleaguered legislative year.

Still, Tester sits on the Appropriations Committee, which is charged with keeping the government funded. The committee – for the first time in five years – actually completed all of its tiresome work negotiating compromises on the nation’s 12 annual spending measures by the end of July. Then Congress took the month of August off.

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In November, senators rolled three funding measures into one package and passed it. The other nine Senate spending bills are gathering dust. As dysfunctional as the House is, Republicans on that side of the Capitol have passed seven of 12 spending bills. That just smarts Tester.

“What I'm frustrated with is, we get these appropriations bills done on time, and they're still hanging out there flapping in the wind. That costs taxpayers dollars, and just screws with efficiency to death,” Tester said.

When Congress returns after taking a three-week long winter recess, there will just be a couple weeks remaining in government funding. If House Republicans and Senate Democrats can’t hammer out their differences and pass individual funding bills, the government either shuts down or party leaders will likely look for an escape hatch, dubbed a Continuing Resolution – or CR, which keeps last year’s funding levels in place.

“If we end up with a yearlong CR, political malpractice, man,” Tester – who’s running for a fourth Senate term – said.

Policy malpractice is more like it. But the politics of bad policy coming out of Washington this Congress wouldn’t be as big of a factor if he faces Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), who’s flirting openly with a run and fundraising (if lacklusterly) like he’s running statewide.

Tester’s likely opponent seems to be Minnesota-born former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy who’s raised millions – $2.8 million in Q3 of 2023 – and is already up with ads. That’s good news for the GOP, because so is Tester, a Montana-born farmer who raked in a record-setting $5 million in Q3.

Still, Schumer and Democratic leaders have rebuffed criticisms that all these end of year crises could have been handled more calmly had the Senate been in session more than three days a week much of the year.

They have their defenders, including at least one workhorse, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).

“The thing I've learned is that a lot of times those are by cooperation, and sometimes you can end up extending the procedural muckety-muck as opposed to getting some kind of time agreements, so sometimes, strategically, leaving early results in a better environment to get things done,” the perpetually optimistic Booker told Raw Story.

ALSO READ: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jan. 6 anniversary plans: rally with Capitol infiltrator

Booker says patience is key to the legislative process, which he’s had to learn over the years.

“I would stay here, you know, through Christmas Eve and come back the day after Christmas,” Booker remembered. “But clearly that ruins the comity – not comedy – and often actually results in less.”

Sure, but it’s hard to explain arcane Senate culture when your opponent’s tying you to the lazy Washington establishment.

“As governor you're working every day seems like. You don’t have that many days off, so I was really surprised when I came up here how few days we’re in,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) — who’s up for reelection in 2024 — told Raw Story.

And Republicans aren’t giving Schumer and co. any soft pillow to land on, especially ones who know what a productive Senate functions like.

“Oh, you know, I like to work,” Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) – a freshman senator who served as a Hill staffer before climbing the local electoral ladder back to Washington – said through a laugh. “I think the American people deserve us to come up here and do our job. Pass the things that we're supposed to. Work together to make that happen… We need to be voting and we need to be talking, we need to be working and we need to be achieving solutions and actually getting things done.”

These past few weeks things have been frantic on Capitol Hill, but veteran senators say it didn’t have to be this way.

“Baloney, we didn't run out of any time. We had plenty of time on the calendar,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Raw Story.

Incensed – and with a light legislative load – Murkowski pulled a calendar out of the large binder she was holding just steps away from the Senate floor.

“It's just that when you look at these days on the calendar – look at this! Look at all of these red days,” Murkowski tutored. “Those are all days that we are in when you have an advertised no vote Monday, I get it. But then what we do is we kind of cheat and we don't start Tuesday until five o'clock. So then don’t tell me we’re in that Friday. That Friday everybody's gone, because they leave on that Thursday at 1:45. No, I am not a big fan.”

Murkowski’s not up for reelection, but she is known as a serious workhorse. In a perfect world – for an Alaskan, mind you – the Senate would never work a three-day week.

“I would love a schedule where we put in five honest to God business working days. And do that for a couple of weeks and then take a week,” Murkowski said. “Everybody else can leave Monday morning. I have to leave Sunday night at about five o'clock. So yeah, I can't I go anywhere other than the hub, Anchorage, because it takes me a day to get to other parts of the state. It's just, I don't know. It's my Alaska pet peeve.”

The senator’s pet peeve point of privilege aside, Murkowski says the ways of Washington are broken, because while these hectic end-of-year work periods are the norm inside the Beltway, they also screw over Americans – including their representatives in Washington – from coast to coast.

“The only time that we pass any legislation is the last couple of weeks in December. Tell me that that's a good idea?” Murkowski told Raw Story. “I think it empowers leadership. I think it disempowers your committees. I'm a big believer in committee and committee work, but in order for the committee's to work, the members have to be here. I think what we are doing is we are empowering staff, and I think we are empowering leadership.”

As for the Senate being dragged down by dysfunction in the House? Senior senators brush that dirt off their shoulders.

“Naw. It’s another day at the office. Nothing fundamentally different. It's just you have to deal with the fingerprint that we call a different Congress, so the dynamic’s different,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told Raw Story. “You just figure out how to be productive or you get frustrated. I prefer trying to find a way to be productive.”

Easy for Tillis to say. Unlike Tester, he doesn’t have to face voters again until 2026.