Leave it to Matt Gaetz to start a fight in the House of Representatives even after he's left.
On Wednesday, the House Ethics Committee met for more than an hour in the Longworth House Office Building to determine whether to release its report about the former Florida congressman and President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general.
Initially, members of both parties filed out of the committee close-lipped, as is usual in such scenarios. But as Committee Chairman Michael Guest of Mississippi headed out the building surrounded by reporters, he said, "There has been no agreement on the release of the report."
That was enough to set off Susan Wild, the top Democrat on the committee, who moments later emerged to torch Guest.
"We had agreed that we were not going to discuss what had transpired at the meeting," she told reporters. "The chairman has since betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations within moments after walking out of the committee."
Wild then added that the committee will reconvene on December 5.
Accusing another member of a breach of decorum is shocking, even by the standards of the House of Representatives, which is much more abrasive than the stodgy Senate. Especially considering where it happened.
The Ethics Committee is one of the final bastions of bipartisanship in the House. It's evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, meaning that releasing a report requires cooperation from members of both parties.
This was the case with the Ethics Committee investigation into George Santos last year, whose corruption was so obnoxious that members of both parties agreed to release the report. That report ultimately triggered his expulsion.
The circumstances this time differ completely.
For one, Gaetz resigned his seat, which under normal circumstances would trigger the closure of the investigation. Second, as much as Republicans in the House despise Gaetz for his motion to vacate that torpedoed former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, he is now Trump's choice and Trump won the presidency, making him the leader of the party. To release the report against Gaetz would be to defy Trump.
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