An “ethics earthquake” hit Congress two weeks ago, said Zachary Schermele in USA Today, and it’s only intensifying. The first tremor was the resignation of Rep. Eric Swalwell, the seven-term California Democrat and a leading candidate to be the state’s next governor, after he was accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women. The married father of three says the accusations—including that he raped two women—are “false” and “lies.”
Just hours after Swalwell quit, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), who admitted an affair with a female aide who later died by suicide, also resigned. In both cases, a bipartisan coalition of female lawmakers had signaled they were moving toward expulsion votes, but this “#MeToo moment” seems part of a broader reckoning, Schermele said. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) resigned last week after the House Ethics Committee found her guilty of spending millions of Covid relief dollars on her 2022 election. And pressure is mounting on Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who’s being investigated over allegations of domestic violence, revenge porn, and campaign finance violations; he denies any wrongdoing.
Why is this happening now? asked Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe. Maybe it’s a backlash to the #MeToo backlash. Maybe it’s our post-Epstein sensitivity to “power and perversion.” Whatever the reason, it’s good for the country that Congress is policing itself and “setting standards in a bipartisan way.”
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Swalwell’s exit was about politics, not decency, said Allysia Finley in The Wall Street Journal. Democrats knew for years that Swalwell was a sex pest, but they still cheered his relentless attacks on President Trump and nodded along as he declared during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that sexual assault victims “deserve to be heard.” But when the allegations against him became public, Democrats turned on Swalwell in case he threw the California governor’s race to a Republican. It’s nice that other resignations have followed, said Jon Allsop in The New Yorker. But the careful, scalp-for-scalp arithmetic carries “an unseemly whiff of partisan horse-trading.” Is this a real crackdown on ugly behavior? Or a choreographed effort to look like they’re “taking it seriously”?
The House’s “culture of turning a blind eye” will be hard to shake, said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. Yes, the #MeToo movement “scared some people straight for a while,” but it didn’t change “the essential power dynamic on the Hill,” where members drunk on flattery and self-regard routinely abuse the often young, often female staffers who work for them. For the ambitious Swalwell, that culture of sexual tolerance was as much of a draw as fame, power, and the other “trappings of office,” said Melanie Mason in Politico. A protégé of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Swalwell “thought he was untouchable—until he wasn’t.”
Republicans are in no position to moralize, said Christian Schneider in National Review, having handed their party to “inveterate horndog” Donald Trump. But Swalwell does represent a uniquely Democratic species of predator: the “male feminist” who trumpets his support for women as a “prelude to making advances,” then uses his progressivism as a “cloak of invisibility” when accountability looms. Swalwell, at least, has paid a price, and with criminal probes underway in New York and California, it could get higher, said Ingrid Jacques in USA Today. But until both parties stop recruiting “creeps and criminals,” and voters start demanding better, the swamp of congressional ethics will remain “a bipartisan problem.”
