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Surprising No One, Senate Ethics Committee Admits it is Incapable of Enforcing Official Senate Rules

Washington, D.C. - Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) received a letter from the Senate Select Committee on Ethics dismissing the request CREW made last December asking the committee to investigate senators’ failure to abide by a ban on secret holds and issue guidance for senators’ future conduct.

In September 2007, the Senate enacted the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), which prohibiting the use of “secret holds.” Section 512 of HLOGA requires senators to reveal when they are “intending to object to a proceeding” — a parliamentary maneuver more commonly known as a “hold,” which is frequently used to stall or stop legislation or nominations. HLOGA did not, however, include any mechanism to enforce the ban and senators have continued to use secret holds.

CREW conducted a review of the Senate Calendar of Business and found that over a two-year period, only two bills had “a notice of intent to object” placed in the calendar. For the same period, however, CREW discovered several bills and nominations that appeared to have had secret holds placed on them, but for which no corresponding objections were placed in calendar and no senator publicly announced a hold.

Ethics Committee Chief Counsel John Sassaman explained that the committee does not have jurisdiction to investigate violations of the ban because it was intended as a directive and contained no enforcement mechanisms. While CREW had asked the committee to find violations of the ban constitute “improper conduct reflecting upon the Senate,” Mr. Sassaman wrote that finding a violation of the ban “could effectively turn the Committee into a policing agency for alleged departures from Senate parliamentary procedure, a matter which is outside the limited jurisdiction of the Committee.”

CREW executive director Melanie Sloan stated, “If the ethics committee can’t enforce a ban on secret holds enacted by the Senate just a couple of years ago, then the ban was clearly nothing more than a sham from the get go.” Sloan continued, “The Senate tried to pawn off this ban to an American public fed up with congressional inaction and secrecy as real change. Now we learn the truth: the ban – like so much that comes out of senators’ mouths -- is meaningless. Was the ban part of ‘honest leadership’ or ‘open government’? Seems like a tossup.”

Click here to read the Senate Ethics Committee’s response to CREW.