House lawmakers clamoring for ethics reforms after wave of resignations

The surge of House resignations this month has triggered calls from both parties for a broader overhaul of the ethics process and how the chamber polices its own.

While many lawmakers have welcomed the hasty departures of former Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), their cases have also stirred up plenty of frustrations about Congress’s internal handling of allegations of misconduct and the pace of the Ethics Committee’s subsequent investigations.

Those frustrations are now morphing into specific calls to revamp the ethics process, with leaders in both parties joining the growing chorus of lawmakers eyeing ways to improve the chamber’s oversight machinery, particularly when it comes to empowering women to report allegations of sexual misconduct.

“We are looking at every potential avenue to tighten up the rules and make sure that women have an avenue to report,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters this week. “We have to protect women and anyone who feels like there’s any inappropriate behavior whatsoever. So if there are ways to tighten the rules, suggestions, we’re seeking that from all members.”

“I suspect you get bipartisan, almost unanimous, support to do that.”

What that process might look like remains unclear. But in the early stages, many lawmakers are pushing for reforms that would expedite investigations, at the very least, while others would go further to create new outlets for victims of abuse to lodge complaints without fear of reprisal.

Democratic leaders appear ready to jump on board.

Rep. Pete Aguilar (Calif.), the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said the chamber should adopt “an expedited process for these types of allegations.” And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is also weighing reform options, saying he intends to work with the Ethics Committee and other “thought leaders” to create a system “that treats victims and staffers with the dignity and respect that they deserve.”

Leading the charge for the Democrats, Jeffries said, will be the Democratic Women’s Caucus, headed by Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.). She was on the front lines of the effort to expel Swalwell and Gonzales, before they both resigned, and has denounced the current system for failing unknown numbers of abuse victims.

“We needed to protect the women staffers here,” said Leger Fernández. “They needed to see that powerful men would be punished for sexually abusing women. Because it doesn’t happen. Because we could not complain that we’re not holding Trump accountable if we don’t hold our own accountable.”

Like many other Democrats, she said Ethics Committee investigations simply “take too long” to reach a verdict and make recommendations to the full House, in the form of sanctions. And a growing number of Republicans are voicing similar gripes.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) had spent months spearheading the effort to expel Cherfilus-McCormick, who was the subject of an Ethics investigation as far back as 2023, over campaign finance allegations, and was indicted last year by the Justice Department on charges of stealing $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She denies the charges.

Her resignation precluded any votes on Steube’s resolution, but it did little to temper his frustration with a process he considers to be too long, too expensive and too lenient toward lawmakers facing mounting evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

“Two years is way too long,” he said.

“I don’t know if they need more people, or if they’re just inundated,” he continued, referring to the Ethics Committee. “But it shouldn’t take that long, and she clearly milked this for as long as humanly possible.”

Lawmakers on the Ethics Committee, meanwhile, are defending their efforts, arguing that they’re working as quickly as they can on complex investigations that are frequently tedious and demand lots of time.

“Each investigation has to stand on its own, and so some investigations can be accomplished much quicker than others,” said Rep. Michael Guest (R-Miss.), the chair of the Ethics panel.

In the case of Cherfilus-McCormick, he said, “It was a complex, financial crime, and there were a lot of documents that had to be gathered throughout the course of that investigation.”

She also shuffled through three separate attorneys during the course of the probe, he noted, which added to the delays.

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), another member of the Ethics Committee, offered a similar defense. He agreed with the critics that Congress should strive for reforms to speed things up, and he proposed that one way to do it would be to adopt a mechanism to enforce the panel’s subpoenas more quickly.

But he also warned “the devil’s in the details,” and ensuring a fair and thorough investigation necessarily takes time.

“The ultimate challenge is [there’s] a lot of due process. Due process takes time, especially in the cases that have a lot of documents, like the financial transaction stuff, or the sexual harassment [and] assault kinds of things. Because then you’re interviewing a lot of witnesses or [making] a lot of credibility determinations. So it’s not easy,” Ivey said.

“I mean, there’s no place you go where these are resolved fast, unless it’s, like, El Salvador or something.”

Such arguments are going only so far with the Ethics critics and women’s advocates, however, many of whom have now turned their attention to a fourth lawmaker under an ethics cloud, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who has been accused of campaign finance violations, sexual misconduct and using his seat in Congress to enrich himself personally — all charges he denies.

The Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Mills last November, and it might be months more before the panel finalizes that probe and releases any sanctions recommendations to the full House. That timeline, the critics say, is evidence that things need to change.

“They need an overhaul in Ethics and, like, get rid of all of them — change the chair, all of it,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who had joined Leger Fernández in the effort to oust Swalwell and Gonzales.

“It should not have taken three years for Ethics to do the right thing [with Cherfilus-McCormick],” she added. “Nor do I think it needs to take multiple years for Cory Mills’ process to go through.”

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