How Did Virginia Foxx Vote?

That didn't take long. Last night, in a secret vote, the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which was set up in 2008 following congressional scandals. We don't know what the vote was, because it was secret. We don't know how Rep. Virginia Foxx voted, because the vote was secret, peckerheads!

It was a preliminary vote involving the rules that the majority Republicans can -- and will -- impose on the operation of the House. The package of rules has to be voted on again today in the full body. One wonders whether enough Republicans opposed the very bad "optics" of this move to join the Democrats in voting this down. We do know from inside sources that both Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke against the motion.

Power breeds corruption. We've known all along that the Trump administration is likely to be the most corrupt in history, with more self-serving conflicts of interest than genes in the human genome, and now the Republicans in the U.S. House seem to be paving the primrose path to hell. We look for weak accountability over wrong-doing.

The Office of Congressional Ethics was established following a string of "bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All three were ultimately convicted and served time in jail."

Instead of an independent agency conducting investigations, we'll now have the House Ethics Committee, a bi-partisan bunch which has been more than just reluctant in the past to lower the boom on corruption. They pussy-foot, because they're foxes guarding the henhouse, and the American public are the chickens.