Congress

House ethics watchdog now open for business

Published

1 year ago

May 14, 2025

The House’s outside ethics watchdog will soon be able to begin investigating lawmakers after the longest period of dormancy in its 17-year history.

The Office of Congressional Conduct — which vets misconduct allegations against lawmakers then sends findings to the House Ethics Committee, which can recommend potential formal action — has been effectively shuttered since the start of the 119th Congress as it awaited the appointment of board members.

But on Tuesday afternoon, the House clerk read aloud the names of those four members from the chamber floor, permitting the office to make moves toward resuming normal operations once again.

Karen Haas, a former House clerk, will serve as board chair; ex-Minnesota Democratic Rep. Bill Luther will serve as board co-chair. Another former House clerk, Lorraine Miller, alongside former Georgia GOP Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, will also hold seats.

It follows drawn-out pleading by good government organizations and a personal appeal earlier this month from a group of House Democrats who directly asked Speaker Mike Johnson to appoint members to the board.

“Ensuring OCC can operate effectively should not be a partisan issue,” wrote Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and seven colleagues.

It’s not currently clear what the hold-up was about, though House GOP leadership made early moves to suggest it was seeking to slow-walk the OCC’s ability to get up and running. The rules package at the start of this Congress included language that changed the name of the body and required the board to meet to formally appoint the staff, essentially stalling its ability to resume operations.

Former GOP Rep. Porter Goss, who helped create the office in 2008, said he believed the inaction in forming OCC’s board for the new Congress might have been intended to quietly kill it altogether. A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to an inquiry about the reason for the delay.

In any event, with the board’s reappointment — all four members served last year, too — the OCC now has its work cut out for it.

Staffers will soon face a mountain of cases that have accumulated during the OCC’s months of relative inactivity. The absence of a board forced the agency to sit almost entirely idle: While it could continue to gather freely-accessible information to develop cases, it lacked the ability to open any investigations without a formal governing body.

Beyond reviewing complaints against lawmakers, the inaction from House leadership in appointing a board for the new Congress also prevented OCC from formally changing its name on some official materials — as was required in the Rules package for this Congress — and from releasing reports on its activities.

Launched in 2008 by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the OCC was a response to a series of ethics scandals roiling Capitol Hill at that time, including the high-profile bribery charges against the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Whereas the House Ethics Committee’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, the OCC was set up to receive complaints from the outside public about any House member. The independent, nonpartisan body could then investigate the matter and turn over credible allegations to the bipartisan Ethics panel made up of House members evenly divided between the two parties.

Goss said he, Pelosi and others proponents of the OCC believed that public-shaming could compel good behavior: Whereas the OCC is governed by a board of private citizens, the House Ethics Committee is a panel of members who adjudicate cases against their peers. And while the Ethics Committee is notoriously quiet, OCC is public-facing.

“The idea was that this would take the pressure” off the Ethics Committee, Goss said.

The House also took months to reappoint members to its Ethics Committee in the longest delay in recent history. It followed the tumultuous circumstances surrounding the release of the report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, accused of illicit drug use and paying a minor for sex.

But many lawmakers revile the OCC, regarding it as a politically-motivated operation unfit to oversee the activities of the House. Shortly after Trump’s first election, lawmakers sought to kneecap the office altogether.

Former Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Miss.), who as a member of Congress served on the Ethics Committee, has since leaving office represented people with cases pending before the OCC and said in an interview he would advise future clients to not cooperate with the office’s requests. He called it a “gotcha organization” with little usefulness to the House and said it was time to shut it down to save taxpayer dollars.

One current House member, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters around Congressional ethical concerns, argued that the OCC was a partisan entity that would take up just about any complaint — and that, despite the headaches the body creates, it has no real power in how the House Ethics Committee adjudicates complaints.

In the meantime, polls have found public trust in the federal government, particularly trust in Congress, to be exceptionally low. Good governance activists argue that the OCC is a key tool in restoring that trust and bemoaned the delays in reconstituting the office.

Aaron Scherb, a lobbyist for the progressive group Common Cause, cited concerns about “misconduct just being swept under the rug” in the OCC’s absence.

“As we’ve seen, the House Ethics Committee is extremely lacking in its investigations, and so the OCC has in some cases helped spur or kind of helped catalyze the House Ethics Committee to conduct more rigorous investigations,” Scherb said.

A spokesperson for OCC declined to comment.

Congress

Where Warnock is visiting in the final midterms sprint

Published

6 hours ago

October 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Raphael Warnock is hitting the road for the last month before Election Day.

The Georgia Democrat’s final midterm campaign surrogate sprint will only increase chatter around the possibility that he might run for president in 2028, according to a nine-stop itinerary shared first with Blue Light News.

First, he’ll touch down in New Hampshire on Tuesday before hitting Nevada on Wednesday. Next, he’ll travel to South Carolina (Oct. 13), Mississippi (Oct. 14), North Carolina (Oct. 15), South Carolina (Oct. 16-17), Michigan (Oct. 20-21), Wisconsin (Oct. 23) and Ohio (Oct. 24-26).

“Senator Reverend Warnock will be hitting the trail to energize voters who are sick of the President enriching himself while ordinary people continue to pay more for everything,” a spokesperson told Playbook. “Tapping into the righteous anger that voters are feeling across the country, the pastor in the Senate will again make the campaign trail his pulpit: calling out Trump’s corruption, while leaving voters hopeful for the next generation of Democratic leadership.”

Asked recently at the Texas Tribune Festival about whether he would run for president, Warnock said: “We’ll see what happens.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: Dems split on probing Trump corporate allies

Published

8 hours ago

October 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Democrats are eager to win back subpoena power if they retake Congress, but they’re split on how hard they’ll go after corporate America.

The party is united by the idea of aggressive oversight of President Donald Trump’s administration, which will help shape their messaging in the run-up to the 2028 election. But Democrats are at odds over how fiercely to use their probing power to go after the corporations, law firms and universities that courted the White House over the past two years.

“We don’t want to turn into a banana republic where you lose an election and it’s all about retribution,” Rep. Bill Foster, a senior member of the Financial Services Committee, said.

“We’re going to have to be a little bit wise about when companies simply did something they had to do to survive this unprecedented level of corruption, compared to companies that actually got on board and profited more by being a partner in his corruption,” he added.

Some progressives counter that a restrained approach would sit uneasily with the party’s base.

“It would be political suicide for Democrats to campaign on fighting corruption and then turn around and go easy on the very companies that are facilitating it,” said Ella Fanger, corporate power policy adviser at the liberal nonprofit group Demand Progress.

Prime targets for some Democrats are the tech companies that have taken steps to be on the president’s good side, like Apple, Amazon and Meta, which have all donated to Trump’s ballroom effort. Major cryptocurrency players, including Coinbase, Ripple and Tether also chipped in for the ballroom, and will be subject to questioning from Democrats.

The late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s networks and associates are also poised for probes — a push that has ensnared big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America in the past.

Sen. Chris Murphy said the party should focus on the nexus between Trump and corporate corruption.

“We should get to the bottom of the corrupt relationship that exists between corporations in this country and the Trump administration,” Murphy said, pointing to questions he’s posed about a tobacco company’s donation to Trump’s super PAC before new e-cigarette rules were unveiled.

Still, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who serves on Senate Banking, warned against the weaponization of power.

“Our focus should be solving problems that we’re seeing happening,” she said, pointing to cost-of-living issues around health care, housing and energy.

What else we’re watching:

— FIRST IN IC: BUILD AMERICA CAUCUS AGENDA — Energized by progress on permitting and housing legislation this term, a bipartisan development-focused caucus is rolling out a detailed agenda for next term. The 40-member Build America Caucus is releasing a 95-page package of proposals, first shared with Blue Light News, that outlines plans touching on health care, transportation, child care and research. The group launched last year with the goal of cutting red tape and regulatory bottlenecks to spur development.

— AI COLLAB STILL ILLUSIVE FOR CRUZ, CANTWELL — Commerce Chair Ted Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell might still be celebrating Senate passage of their landmark college sports bill last week, but it’s unclear the momentum will carry forward to agreement on another committee priority: artificial intelligence. Among the dozen lawmakers, aides and industry experts who spoke to Blue Light News, few expect the two senators to shed their well-established ideologies and styles after the mutual win. That could doom their ability to replicate their latest achievement in something as complex and divisive as an AI regulatory framework.

Jasper Goodman, Katherine Hapgood, Riley Rogerson and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

It took four years, but a Capitol Hill office finally has a union contract

Published

8 hours ago

October 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Four years ago, California Rep. Ro Khanna’s staff voted to unionize — one of a handful of Democratic offices that sought to ride a wave of organizing momentum during then-President Joe Biden’s administration.

Much has changed since, to put it mildly, but Khanna aides persevered and recently won approval of their first collectively bargained contract — the first labor agreement of its kind inside Congress.

“This was four years in the making,” Nicole Waring, a deputy director of constituent services for Khanna and the union steward, said in an interview. “We finally, finally reached the point where we were able to finalize our contract and ratify it.”

The agonizing process of turning pro-union enthusiasm into an actual binding agreement is both a breakthrough for the fitful labor movement on Capitol Hill while also underscoring how that movement has sputtered in the years since Biden left office, Donald Trump took back the White House and unionization moved off the front burner for Democratic staffers.

Since an initial wave of offices voted to unionize in 2022, that momentum has largely petered out. Less than a dozen offices are now unionized as staffers’ efforts are complicated by heavy workloads, adversarial bosses and Congress’ recent record high turnover rates that have led some aides to the conclusion that unionizing is more trouble than it’s worth.

Against that backdrop, that the eight-person union in Khanna’s office was able to win a contract constitutes a bright spot for organizers.

The agreement establishes a higher salary floor and a mechanism to renegotiate salaries if the office’s budget allowance increases, according to Waring and portions of the text reviewed by Blue Light News.

The document also codifies a procedure to resolve internal grievances. When Khanna almost certainly wins reelection, the agreement — which was officially ratified in August — will continue through next term.

“I’m proud of our office for signing the first long-term contract in the history of the U.S. Congress. I hope this can serve as a model for other offices in Congress,” Khanna said in a statement thanking his staff. “We need to be a model for the collective bargaining in our offices that we want to see across our nation.”

Waring said Khanna and his senior aides were supportive and trusting during contract negotiation but noted that, even under those positive circumstances, the effort was time- and labor-intensive.

“There’s a lot of back and forth. It takes time to review each passback of the contract, redline everything,” Waring said. “The biggest thing was we wanted to make sure that this contract would be governable, and rather than just make things convenient and take shortcuts, make sure that it was going to be something that we knew would stand the test of time.”

Khanna’s chief of staff, Marie Baldassarre, said in an interview the process for her office took years because “we realized like this is going to actually impact people’s lives, and it’s a binding contract, and so we have to get it right.”

“It’s just never been done before, and none of us were experts,” she added.

Staffers on Capitol Hill often face a grueling office cultures that can hamstring efforts to advance worker protections. Staffers for pro-labor Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), for example, voted to unionize in 2023 but then faced internal retaliation, according to the Nevada Independent.

Staffers for lawmakers across the ideological spectrum can be subjected to long hours, eyebrow-raising member requests and unrelenting demands that can spur staffer interest in pursuing labor protections — but also fears about potentially hindering their careers.

A person involved in the Congressional Workers Union — an umbrella group that provides support to individual office bargaining units — called the Khanna office contract “historic” and acknowledged it was “probably the biggest win recently” for the broader organizing effort.

“There’s small wins all the time,” added the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the group.

Staffers for former Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) ratified a contract in the final days of his term in December 2022. While that contract was technically the first for a member office, it was largely symbolic given Levin’s imminent departure. Staff for Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) secured “memorandums of understanding” with their members in 2024, but not formal contracts.

“Hats off to them for getting it done,” Levin said in an interview. “In terms of what comes next, much will depend on the outcome of the midterms.”

Levin, a labor attorney, said that Republican majorities and White House have had a chilling effect on Capitol Hill unions and predicted that if Democrats take back the House majority next year, a flurry of labor activity will ensue. He added that several Democrats with close ties to organized labor are poised to enter the House, naming fellow Michigan Democrat and former SEIU organizer Donavan McKinney.

“In this political climate, the idea of getting contracts negotiated on Blue Light News, where it’s hardly ever been done, I think that seems very challenging to me,” Levin said. “I do think it’s great that another office has gotten the first contract, and I think the momentum will continue to grow from here.”