The House Ethics Committee released a statement with its ruling on the matter of Maxine Waters, a Democratic Congresswoman from California who is in line, following Barney Frank's retirement, to be the top Democrat on the House Financial Services committee. It found that there was no clear, convincing evidence that Ms. Waters violated House rules when she hired her grandson as her chief of staff and when the chief of staff then got involved in a government issue that affected "OneUnited Bank, in which Representative Waters' husband held stock and for which he had previously served on the Board of Directors."
I tend to think such matters should be left to voters (or, when appropriate, prosecutors) rather than ethics committees, but it's an interesting statement on the House's ethical standards, even under the current Republican House leadership. The Los Angeles Times coverage is here.
The Ethics Committee statement includes the line:
we believe that the full Committee, or the House, should consider adopting policies that recognize that employer/employee relationships with grandchildren can be just as fraught with risk as other familial relationships in the workplace, some of which are prohibited within the House by rule or statute.
I wonder what the House Ethics Committee would have thought of Robert Kennedy's service as attorney general, or of John Quincy Adams' role as his father President John Adams' minister to Prussia. They probably would have declared it "fraught with risk."