The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics did not formally punish anyone in 2024 — despite receiving 158 complaints that year of alleged violations of Senate rules, according to a new committee report reviewed by NOTUS.
No, not even former Sen. Robert Menendez, who a judge sentenced last month to 11 years in federal prison on a bribery conviction. Menendez skirted Senate Ethics Committee comeuppance because the committee “lost jurisdiction for its adjudicatory review” when the senator resigned in August.
With this latest report, lawmakers officially marked the 18th year in a row that the notoriously secretive committee failed to formally punish anyone within its jurisdiction, which includes Senate staffers and senators.
Said another way: Since 2007, the Senate Ethics Committee is batting 0-for-1,826 in issuing “disciplinary sanctions” for alleged bad behavior.
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There’s ample public evidence that senators have violated Senate rules over the years, including several who have skirted the personal investment disclosure provisions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012.
“It seems to be the normal course of action for the committee to not do anything,” said Jessica Tillipman, an associate dean at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. “If it’s perceived as toothless, people are going to act accordingly and act with impunity.”
A Senate Ethics Committee staffer directed NOTUS to send questions about the committee’s work in an email, which was not immediately returned.
The bipartisan committee is led by Chairman James Lankford and Vice Chairman Christopher Coons, with Sens. James Risch, Deb Fischer, Brian Schatz and Jeanne Shaheen also serving.
For years, the committee has released little information about its internal processes and deliberations, and members rarely comment on how they decide what to investigate — or not.
The new committee report reviewed by NOTUS, which was quietly posted on the committee’s website without fanfare or a press release, amounts to a 500-word summary of one year’s worth of activity.
The report states that of the 158 alleged Senate rules violations the committee reviewed in 2024, it dismissed 142 “for lack of subject matter jurisdiction” and dispatched another seven because of a lack of “sufficient facts as to any material violation.”
As for the remaining nine cases?
The Senate Ethics Committee dismissed eight because of a “lack of substantial merit” or because an alleged violation was “inadvertent, technical or otherwise of a de minimis nature.” A final case resulted in the committee issuing a private “letter of admonition” to an undisclosed violator.
None of these cases are a matter of public record.
The committee has a range of disciplinary actions at its disposal, including recommendations of expulsion, censure, payment of restitution and downgrading a Senate member’s seniority. For Senate staffers, suspension and dismissal are also options, according to the committee’s rules of procedure.
The last time the Senate Ethics Committee even got close to formally punishing one of its own was in early 2023, when the committee issued a “public letter of admonition” to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The committee scolded Graham for soliciting campaign contributions inside the Russell Senate Office Building on behalf of then-U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker — it’s against federal law for lawmakers to raise money inside federal buildings — but dropped the matter after that.
Relatively speaking, the U.S. House Committee on Ethics is more active — and transparent — than its Senate counterpart. The House committee took the highly unusual step last year when it voted to release a report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz — after he’d stepped down from Congress.
The full House has also been more willing to publicly admonish its members. Four members — Reps. Paul Gosar, Adam Schiff, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman — have been censured since 2020, though not for ethics violations. Rep. David Schweikert was formally reprimanded by the committee in 2020.
Most notably, lawmakers voted to expel New York Republican Rep. George Santos in 2023 following the release of his ethics report. Santos is now awaiting sentencing in April after pleading guilty last year to wire fraud and identity theft.
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Dave Levinthal is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist.
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