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U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th, voted against a move by some House Republicans to weaken an independent congressional ethics board, a proposal that on Tuesday came under fire from President-elect Donald Trump and got yanked from going to a floor vote.

A majority of the House Republican Conference voted Monday to clip the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers after several bribery and corruption scandals sent members to prison, The Associated Press reported.

The proposed ethics change, which was met by an outcry from Democrats, government watchdog groups and Trump, was part of a rules package on which the full House was scheduled to vote Tuesday but never did.

“Undermining the independence of the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics would create a serious risk to members of Congress, who rely on OCE for fair, nonpartisan investigations, and to the American people, who expect their representatives to meet their legal and ethical obligations,” Norman Eisen and Richard Painter of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in a press release.

Eisen was the top ethics lawyer for President Barack Obama, and Painter was the top ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.

“With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it ... may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

And he used the hashtag “DTS” — shorthand for “drain the swamp.”

Under the proposal — pushed by U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. — the Office of Congressional Ethics would have fallen under the control of the House Ethics Committee, putting lawmakers in a position of watching over one another rather than having an independent panel do it.

The change would have required that “any matter that may involve a violation of criminal law must be referred to the Committee on Ethics for potential referral to law enforcement agencies after an affirmative vote by the members,” according to Goodlatte’s office.

The overall vote of the House Republican Conference was made public: 119-74.

“But there is no public record of how individual Republican members voted,” said John Dinan, a political science professor at Wake Forest University. “These party conference votes are simply votes that a party holds internally on whether to move forward with a measure and don’t carry any legal weight.”

Foxx was among the 74 GOP House members who opposed the proposal, according to her spokeswoman, Sheridan Watson.

“While Congresswoman Foxx agrees the Office of Congressional Ethics is in need of reform, she believes that changes should be made in a bipartisan manner,” Watson said.

The 5th District includes some or all of several counties in Northwest North Carolina: Alexander, Alleghany, Ashe, Avery, Forsyth, Stokes, Surry, Watauga, Wilkes and Yadkin counties as well as two precincts in Catawba County.

The process of putting the House proposal into effect would have gone like this:

Primarily, the full House would have to vote on rules under which the chamber will operate, according to Dinan.

“This is usually the first order of business in a new Congress, for the House to vote on a resolution containing the rules under which the House will operate for the next session.

“And presumably any changes in the way that the ethics committee and ethics office operates would be included in this House resolution, which requires approval by a majority vote in the entire House, in what would be a public vote,” Dinan said.

There is no need for approval by the U.S. Senate or the president.

“That is, the House is not passing a law, which would require Senate concurrence and presidential approval,” he said.

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/rep-virginia-foxx-votes-against-gop-proposal-to-undermine-ethics/article_6d309dc1-794a-5319-821e-bede499426b5.html