PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL The long-awaited House Ethics Committee meeting is over, and Republicans voted against immediately releasing the panel’s report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). We’ve got you covered here. So what’s next? Well, two Democrats are taking the fight over releasing the report to the House floor. Reps. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) and Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) separately filed resolutions Wednesday evening that would force the release of the private report on Gaetz, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department. They each offered their measure as privileged questions, meaning they could go straight to a floor vote. “I wish this wasn't necessary,” Casten told Inside Congress. “We had hoped that the Ethics Committee would release the information, and if they are going to decide not to, then we as the House have an obligation to make sure that that information gets released, and we can do that by forcing this vote with a privileged resolution.”
Unfinished business: One potential hiccup surrounds the status of the Gaetz report, which is believed to delve into allegations of underage sex and drug use that Gaetz has strongly denied. Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) said Wednesday that the report was not yet final, but Casten said that was immaterial.
While House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries had said he supports the release of the report, he and other top leaders haven’t publicly weighed in on the resolutions yet. Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the Ethics panel, angrily responded Wednesday after Guest, in her interpretation, suggested the panel had agreed to withhold the report.
That wasn’t true, she told reporters, noting that a deadlock of the committee’s five Republicans and five Democrats would leave the report in limbo. Another meeting of the panel is set for Dec. 5, she said; it is unclear if Wild or more senior leaders will support floor action before that date. “We are continuing down that path where it goes, but we are all learning the process here as we go along,” Casten said. “This is not something that there's a robust recipe we're all following here.”
History lesson: Offering the Casten and Cohen resolutions as privileged questions would bypass committee consideration and Republican leaders’ control of the floor. But it’s not entirely guaranteed that the measures would qualify for those expedited powers. The presiding officer on Wednesday, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), postponed a decision on whether the two resolutions actually qualify as privileged matters. That will be in the hands of Speaker Mike Johnson, in consultation with House parliamentarians.
Casten is citing a web of precedents that justify a snap vote, but none is a clear-cut slam dunk. Back in 1996, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) moved to force the release of an Ethics report on alleged misconduct by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). It was treated as a privileged matter, and the House subsequently voted to kill Lewis’ measure. The report went unreleased.
But there’s a key difference this time: Gingrich was a sitting member of the House, and Gaetz is not. There is at least one instance where a matter involving a former member's conduct was presented as a question of privilege — in 2006, when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) requested an Ethics investigation of Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) misconduct with House pages.
Casten also referenced the 2011 scenario where the Senate Ethics Committee publicly released a report on Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) in the days following his resignation and forwarded the report to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. But Senate precedents, of course, are not binding on the House. About the timing: The House is set to hit the road Thursday afternoon for the weeklong Thanksgiving recess. It will be up to Johnson, who opposes the report’s release, to determine when exactly to take up the two resolutions — if not tomorrow, then action could get pushed until December, just days before the Ethics Committee next meets. — Daniella Diaz, Katherine Tully-McManus and Nicholas Wu
| 
