Cleaning House in Congress

I recently saw an ad for a housecleaning service where a team of professionals will clean your home from top to bottom for the low introductory price of just $19. Of course, the company is hoping that you will be so pleased with their services that you sign a long-term contract with them.

Having read yet another sordid news story about a congressman having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a staff member, I think I may give this company a call and hire them to clean out the halls of Congress.

Yes, from top to bottom. Fumigate the entire place.

The latest congressional creep to make national headlines is Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for having a romantic relationship with an aide who worked for another member of Congress. Gomez, 51, has been married since 2011 and the alleged affair happened in 2023.

Gomez admitted in a statement that he has made "personal mistakes outside my marriage," but said that his actions were "consensual" and did not violate the law or House Ethics rules.

Did you catch that? Rep. Gomez’s defense is that his preying on an underling was “consensual”, I suppose in the same way that President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern, were “consensual” in 1995 and not a gross abuse of position and power.

Likewise, Gomez is shamefully trying to crawl through a loophole in the House Ethics rules which currently only prohibit a member of Congress from having a sexual relationship with their own staffer, not someone else’s. How lame is that?

To their credit, House Speaker Mike John Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have formed a bipartisan sexual misconduct task force, led by Reps. Kat Cammack (R-FL) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), chairs of their respective party’s women’s caucus, to close that loophole.

Speaker Johnson is pushing hard for a ban on all lawmaker-staffer sexual relationships. "I think it's inappropriate, as it would be in any workplace," Johnson said.

Johnson’s proposed ban can’t come soon enough, because the so-called “People’s House” has become the “People’s Brothel”.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX) were all forced to resign recently amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) just lost his re-election bid because of similar accusations and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) is facing House censure for creating a hostile work environment.

Not to be outdone, former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-NM) is being sued by the ex-wife of her former bodyguard for “alienation of affection”. Why is that? Because the first openly bisexual member of Congress slept with her husband, Matthew Ammel, and got caught doing so. Heather Ammel, a North Carolina resident, is suing Sinema for $75,000 under the state’s “homewrecker law”.

“You took a married man away from his family,” she told Sinema when she discovered the affair.

Of course, there is a lot of nonsexual dirt that needs be cleaned up in Congress, too… and much of it involves money. More specifically, the abuse of one’s political office to enhance one’s financial position.

Exhibit A is Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, who entered Congress in 1987 with a net worth of just $3 million. Somehow, she has managed to parlay that seed money into a $400 million fortune … a remarkable 13,000% increase.

Can you say, “insider trading”?

The aptly named PELOSI Act that was introduced in the Senate earlier this year would ban members of Congress and their spouses from trading individual stocks. The bill advanced out of committee in July and is currently awaiting a full vote on the Senate floor, where it faces uncertain prospects amid partisan disagreements over enforcement mechanisms and exemptions for blind trusts.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is the author of the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act. Here is his reasoning for introducing the bill and pushing so hard for its passage…

"We have an opportunity here today to do something that the public has wanted us to do for decades, and that is to ban members of Congress from profiting on information that, frankly, only members of Congress have," Hawley said during a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on July 30.

Go get ‘em, Josh!

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi’s profiting at taxpayers’ expense is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to congressional corruption. Some is blatant, such as former Sen. Bob “Gold Bar” Menendez (D-NJ) taking gold bars as bribes and storing them – along with $500,000 in cash – in his clothes closet. Others are more subtle, like former Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ) – who was consistently ranked by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as one of the 10 most corrupt members of Congress – using campaign funds to promote his daughter’s acting and singing career, and to fund a lavish overseas family vacation.

For the record, Menendez was convicted and sentenced to federal prison whereas Andrews was permitted to resign before being censured by the House. After a two-year stint as head of government affairs at the prestigious Dilworth Paxson law firm in Philadelphia, Andrews now serves as CEO of the Health Transformation Alliance, a cooperative of major U.S. corporations working to reshape and improve America’s healthcare system.

Since Andrews was a chief architect of Obamacare, which was shoved down Americans’ throats in a strictly partisan vote in the middle of the night in 2010, I have my doubts about HTA.

Just like I have my doubts about the legality of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) paying her daughter $192,300 from her campaign coffers to keep her "slate mailer" operation afloat between January 2021 and December 2022. The unethical arrangement involved outside campaigns paying Waters' campaign to appear on the slate mailers - or endorsement mailers - sent out to constituents in the Los Angeles area.

Sounds like influence peddling and money laundering to me.