Why the Matt Gaetz report blew up the Ethics Committee

Republicans have found themselves stuck pretty badly between a rock and a hard place, reports Eric Garcia from Congress

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.

Wild lost her re-election campaign, meaning in a few months, she will not have to deal with Republicans or the consequences of torching them.

Nevertheless, this could not have come at a worse time for Republicans. At this point, Republicans in the House want to minimize the pain from the headache for their colleagues in the Senate. While the GOP will likely have either 52 or 53 Senate seats — depending on how the recount for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat goes — there are already Republicans who look wobbly on voting to confirm Gaetz.

The Trump transition team seems to know this. On Wednesday, they dispatched JD Vance to the Senate to meet with members of his party, specifically to talk about Gaetz.

There already look to be cracks in the strategy. Senator Susan Collins, the moderate Maine Republican who is a swing vote, told The Independent that so far, Team Trump had only set up a meeting between her and Representative Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Stefanik — along with Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State — is perhaps the easiest of all of Trump’s nominations. Failing to set up a meeting between Collins and Gaetz is an amateur move. The GOP needs to keep her at least open to the idea of that nomination.

But the truly crucial swing vote will be Senator Thom Tillis, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and who will be up for re-election in 2026. Conservatives in North Carolina don’t like Tillis and he could face a credible challenge from Democrats, who have wanted to flip that seat blue for years.

Tillis seemed annoyed about having to talk about the Ethics report, however.

“I think tradition has largely been, with a few exceptions, not to issue a report if the members no longer a member of Congress,” he said. “So let’s get rid of the notion that somehow we’re not going to know anything about the [attorney general] nominee.”

Tillis’s frustration reveals the central problem that Trump’s nomination of Gaetz has created for the GOP. Either the Ethics Committee crosses both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has advised against the release of the report — or they vote against releasing it, which will almost inevitably lead to it being leaked to the press or Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. At this point, it should be all about self-preservation. But self-preservation might be threatened by the egos of a few at the top.