WASHINGTON, October 2 – Today the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and five other good government organizations* sent a letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) and to Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and John Boehner (R-OH) to stress their support for the new office and its work in the House.
The letter reiterates the reform community’s support for the OCE.
“Speaker Pelosi set up the OCE specifically to try to ‘drain the ethics swamp’ in the House,” explained Lisa Gilbert, U.S. PIRG’s Democracy Advocate. “This letter was sent to make clear the deep concern our organizations feel about the apparent effort of the House Ethics Committee to increase its authority over the OCE. The Committee should not be able to prematurely take ethics matters away from the Office without formally empanelling an investigation.”
The organizations also included a cover letter sent only to Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Boehner to express concern about a recent incident in which the Ethics Committee issued a public statement in the middle of an ongoing, nonpublic ethics inquiry that challenged the work done by the OCE as referred to the Ethics Committee.
“Bottom line, we do not want to see OCE’s effective performance to date undermined by inappropriate challenges. The new office has helped to increase sunlight to the ethics process in the House, and we would sincerely like to see it continue to have that chance,” Gilbert concluded.
* Other organizations: Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and Public Citizen
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U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest advocacy organization.
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Cover-Letter-to-Speaker-Republican-Leader.pdf