The Senate Ethics Committee Once Again Finds Nothing to Sanction

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics did not formally punish anyone during 2025 — continuing a streak of nearly two decades in which it has not issued a single “disciplinary sanction” despite numerous scandals.

Of 181 alleged Senate rules violations the Senate Ethics Committee reviewed last year, it issued no “private or public letters of admonition” and no case before it resulted in a “disciplinary sanction,” according to a NOTUS review of a new report the committee issued Saturday.

The Senate Ethics Committee dismissed 150 cases “for lack of subject matter jurisdiction” and culled another 10 because complainants “failed to provide sufficient facts as to any material violation of the Senate rules beyond mere allegation or assertion.”

The committee did launch preliminary inquiries into 27 cases, including several held over from past years, according to the report. The committee dismissed 18 of those because of a “lack of substantial merit” or because an alleged violation was “inadvertent, technical or otherwise of a de minimis nature.” It did not indicate the fate of the remaining nine cases, which the committee has the right to continue reviewing in 2026.

The secretive committee released no details of any of the cases it began considering in 2025.

It’s not as if the Senate is ethically pure or free from outside investigation.

Last summer, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma twice violated the disclosure provisions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act by improperly disclosing personal financial trades valued in the millions of dollars. Earlier this week, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama also violated the STOCK Act.

The Department of Defense is investigating Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, for allegations of misconduct stemming from the retired Air Force captain’s suggestion last year that troops refuse illegal orders. The FBI is also investigating Kelly and fellow Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin. Both senators deny wrongdoing, and there’s no public indication that Kelly or Slotkin are under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee.

And former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who represented Arizona until early 2025, is now embroiled in a legal battle over allegations she had an affair with a member of her security team — a team on which she has spent hundreds of thousands of campaign committee dollars. Sinema’s financial ventures and luxury-filled campaign spending have been the subject of numerous news articles, including by NOTUS, and a government watchdog complaint dating to her time in elected office.

Since 2007, the Senate Ethics Committee is 0-for-2,007 in issuing formal disciplinary sanctions stemming from complaints it has considered, a NOTUS review of committee records indicates.

The Senate Ethics Committee has several disciplinary tools at its disposal, including recommendations to the full Senate of expulsion, censure, payment of restitution and downgrading a senator’s seniority. For Senate staffers, suspension and dismissal are also options, according to the committee’s rules of procedure.

The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee is led by Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who is the chair, and Sen. Christopher Coons of Delaware, who is the vice chair. Sens. James Risch, Deb Fischer, Brian Schatz and Jeanne Shaheen are also members.

In an interview at the U.S. Capitol this week, Lankford, a Republican, offered little insight about his committee’s internal processes.

“We detail out all the different actions,” Lankford said. “But as you know, we don’t go through the specifics so, the who or the what on them.”

Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire, similarly demurred.

“Because I’m a member of the ethics committee, we are not allowed to talk about any of the cases before the committee, so I’m not going to comment,” Shaheen said.

When asked if he thought the committee might need to take a different approach, considering it hasn’t formally sanctioned anyone in years, Lankford defended the committee’s process.

“Our goal is to make sure that we hold as high a standard as we can in the Senate. We do take actions, we do engage. We just do it in a private way, so it’s not a political football,” he said. “It’s a bipartisan, equally divided, three and three committee. We go through the hard decisions and then we actually hold each other to account.”

One long-time congressional ethics watchdog offered a different perspective.

“The Senate Ethics Committee is where scandals go to die,” said Aaron Scherb, who blamed the lack of ethics violation punishments on the Senate’s “culture of chumminess.”

The committee last made an official statement of any kind about its work in August 2024.

That month, the committee issued a three-paragraph explanation about losing jurisdiction in its “adjudicatory review of alleged violations of the Senate Rules” by then-Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who had just resigned from the Senate following his conviction on federal bribery charges.

While Menendez ultimately went to federal prison, the Senate Ethics Committee did not formally punish him in any fashion, including during the monthslong run-up to his conviction and imprisonment.

The most recent non-Menendez communique from the committee came in September 2023, when the committee released a statement about why it doesn’t often release statements.

“In response to repeated requests from the press, we want to reaffirm that the Senate Select Committee on Ethics does not comment on matters pending before the Committee or matters that may come before the Committee,” the committee wrote at the time. “Also, absent special circumstances, it has been the long-standing policy of the Committee to yield investigation into matters where there is an active and ongoing criminal investigation or proceeding so as not to interfere in that process.”

The statement coincided with it issuing an informal “public letter of admonition” to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The committee this year 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 did not pursue the matter further.