The Gaetz Scandal

A bit of historical and partisan perspective

I’m a bit late on this, but I have a comment about the release of House Ethics Committee on Matt Gaetz.

I’m afraid I didn’t make a note of who said it, but one commenter said that such things are a consequence of the collapse of local news outlets. No one is watching any more, and so politicians — at least at the sub-presidential level — may feel free to do whatever they want. That’s sensible and true as far as it goes.

But really my guess is that Members engaging in Gaetz-style atrocious behavior as detailed in the House Ethics report have less common these days, at least up to very recently, not more so. It’s true that there are far, far fewer people in Washington (or out in the nation) covering Congress for local outlets. But there are more people covering Congress for national outlets, which barely existed before (say) WWII and have picked up steam over time.

The truth is that even if 20th century scandals were uncovered involving Members of the House, a lot of them wouldn’t be news outside of the district.

Even in the 1970s there were some House scandals that broke nationally, but to me a good marker of the change was the 2001 Gary Condit story, in which the unsolved murder of a young intern in his office produced the revelation that he had been romantically involved with her. Condit was an unknown back-bencher at the time, but cable news channels ate up the story as if he was a presidential candidate.

Which gets to the other piece of this: Until the 1970s, and even later in many cases, all those local reporters on Capitol Hill didn’t consider breaking stories about the personal lives of politicians part of their job.¹ And yes, that would certainly include paying for sex and other things in the Gaetz report.

Not to mention how many things many in the media would have considered as boys just being boys, back when (almost) all of the elected officials and reporters were men.²

So if there are more reported scandals now, and that is the case, it doesn’t mean that there is more terrible behavior.

The other thing worth emphasizing when these stories come up is that there is now almost certainly a partisan difference, with Republican politicians more likely to commit criminal or otherwise heinous or scandalous acts (some empirical support can be found looking through here, here and here).

This didn’t used to be the case, and I do not believe that Republicans or conservatives are any more prone to such thing than Democrats. What has changed, however, is the incentive structure. Once upon a time both parties were equally likely to rid themselves of bad actors; now Republicans are far more likely to tolerate, and in some cases even celebrate, behavior they once would have shunned.

Of course, the most famous of these is Donald Trump — both for his own misdeeds, and those he tolerates in others. It is absolutely inconceivable, for example, that a Democratic president-elect would nominate and stick with someone who had generated the accusations that have been lodged against Pete Hegseth. It’s not just that Democratic Senators would revolt; we would see multiple resignations from any transition team stocked with Democrats who were faced with that situation.

To be sure: It’s not a hard-and-fast rule. House Republicans helped Democrats to oust fabulist George Santos after he was indicted; Democrats mostly continue treat Bill Clinton as a respected party elder.³ But overall, the difference between the parties was clear before Donald showed up. After all, Republicans long ago welcomed back Watergate criminals G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson along with Iran-Contra figure Oliver North. The partisan gap is far more obvious now, in the era of Trump, Gaetz, Hegseth, Ken Paxton, Roy Moore, and others. Enough so that it very likely affects which people choose to run for office and which do not.

1. Some people date this to Gary Hart’s 1987 scandal, but that’s not quite true. The process of getting from reporters shielding the secrets of President John Kennedy (and many others) to where we are now took plenty of time and advanced (if you want to call it that) in fits and starts, and not always in a straight line.

2. Granted, some scandals in the 20th century wouldn’t be news now: There were no openly gay Members of Congress until the 1980s, and earlier having a child out of wedlock or even a simple divorce could damage and even end a politician’s career. But again: In many cases reporters just ignored a lot of things that, had they been public, would have been damaging. It wasn’t their job. And I suspect some of these would-be-scandals produced quiet retirements from office, driven by party leaders, without reporters ever hearing about them.

3. To be sure, the Clinton case is complicated, among other reasons because Hillary Clinton has been a party leader as well.