Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy believes Republican lawmakers made a boneheaded call when they hastily attempted to quash a federal ethics committee earlier this week.
"I think they're guilty of political stupidity," McCarthy said Thursday to Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV's "America Talks Live."
"I'd like to say that they did it inadvertently, except to his credit I think [House Speaker] Paul Ryan tried to warn them off and they did it anyway."
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On Monday night, GOP House members voted 119 to 74 to kill off the Office of Congressional Ethics, only to walk back on their decision a day later amid bipartisan cries of protest and a finger-wag from President-elect Donald Trump.
While McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, believes House Republicans made a bad move, he also says the ethics group under question isn't needed.
"Forget the timing and the bad politics, as a matter of policy, what they were trying to do is absolutely sound and should be done," McCarthy told Malzberg.
"That body is a constitutional anomaly … The important thing to remember here is that the ethics committee of Congress, not this other thing that the Democrats created in '08, is the only standing committee of Congress that is rigorously bipartisan.
"It's got 10 members, five on each side, they operate under strict protocols that be like professional investigations meaning you get due process but if there's a real allegation of ethical wrongdoing, it gets raised up, it gets sanctioned and it probably gets notified to law enforcement."
McCarthy, a National Review contributing editor and former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the author of "Faithless Execution," published by Encounter.