Comer Amendment to H.R. 1: “Applying ethics rules to one political party but not another is wrong”

Amendment passes by voice vote

WASHINGTON—House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) today spoke on the House floor advocating for his amendment to H.R. 1, the “For the Politicians Act,” which would add the ethics requirements Democrats wanted to impose on President Trump last Congress back in the bill to ensure Democrats’ ethics rules apply equally regardless of party.

Below are Ranking Member Comer’s remarks as prepared for delivery.

I urge all Members, on a bipartisan basis, to support this amendment.

When reviewing H.R. 1 as introduced this Congress, I noticed it was missing several ethics provisions that were included in the bill last Congress, when Donald Trump was president. But now that Joe Biden is president, those ethics provisions conveniently disappeared.

What was missing from this updated version of H.R. 1 were the following provisions:

Requirements that presidential transition teams disclose “a list of all positions each transition team member has held outside the Federal Government for the previous 12-month period, including paid and unpaid positions.”

Requirements that presidential transition teams disclose “sources of compensation for each transition team member exceeding $5,000 a year for the previous 12-month period.”

And a requirement that “The head of a Federal department or agency, or their designee, shall not permit access to the Federal department or agency, or employees of such department or agency, that would not be provided to a member of the public for any transition team member who does not make the [required prior employment and conflicts of interest] disclosures.”

It’s clear the absence of these provisions was pure politics but my amendment adds those provisions back in since what’s good for the Republican president is good for the Democrat president and his or her administration.

Ethical principles are supposed to be universal.

They’re supposed to apply equally.

And a bill that so obviously exempts only one political party from ethics rules is not itself ethical.

Many Democrats should vote for this amendment since it restores what Democrats proposed in the last Congress.

We took the same exact language and included it in this bill.

If this bill had gone through regular order and been marked up at committee we could have addressed these discrepancies at the committee level instead of imposing this extended amendment process on the whole House.

But this bill didn’t go through regular order, and so I offered this amendment at the Rules Committee.

This amendment restores to the bill ethics provisions that were originally intended to apply to President Trump and his advisors but were dropped from the bill under President Biden’s Administration.

Applying ethics rules to one political party, but not another, is wrong.

The Rules Committee, to their credit, took a step toward correcting this wrong by making this even-handed amendment in order.

Now it remains for the full House to pass this amendment and to show its agreement, on a bipartisan basis, that ethics rules should apply equally.

I urge all Members to join me in supporting Comer Amendment #18.