Here’s what’s going on: The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) is an independent House ethics watchdog that Common Cause and others worked to create in 2008. It helped clean up corruption and make sure members of Congress were playing by the rules.

Before the OCE, House members served as both judge and jury when considering ethical charges against their colleagues. Too often, there was a mutual “look the other way” understanding in which both parties would excuse each other’s misconduct.

Now, Republicans want to go back to those bad old days and hamstring the OCE. They’re planning to make it harder to hire staff at the OCE and implement arbitrary term limits that would target three long-serving Democratic ethics board members – risking decades of institutional knowledge, and majorly weakening oversight in the new Congress.