My latest column at The Week is a follow-up to yesterday’s post:

The first fracas of 2017 provides a useful template for how politics is likely to proceed in the Trump era.

On Monday night, in a vote taken behind closed doors, the House Republican Conference decided to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, eliminating many of its powers and putting its successor entity under the control of the House Ethics Committee (which is staffed entirely by members of Congress). The uproar was fierce and immediate, not only from the Democrats (who created the body in 2008 in response to the escalating ethical problems of the Hastert/DeLay era), but from reform-minded conservatives and independents as well.

But the most important pushback came from the president-elect, who tweeted on Tuesday:

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

……..may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

Lo and behold, Congress got the message, and by mid-day Congress had scrapped its plans — at least for now.

But what exactly was the message?

Well, consider how the drama has affected the various players.

Donald Trump looks like a champion of clean government (though the OCE would have had no power to investigate his Executive branch) and the interests of the people, while still suggesting that he understands the motivations of those who voted to undermine the office. If the House GOP had any intention to hold Trump to account for corruption, they just made it that much harder for themselves.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, an average Republican Congressman from a safe Virginia seat, is going to have his name in the papers for a while as the poster boy for lax ethics enforcement. But his colleagues — many of whom understandably have little love for the office he aimed to cripple — will remember him as the fellow who stood up for their interests. He’ll make friends, not lose them, as a consequence of his actions. The members who voted with him, meanwhile, won’t ever be known unless they want to be.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, on the other hand, officially opposed the measure, but was overruled by his own caucus. Then, when the measure passed, he defended the proposed changes that he had opposed in conference. And finally, after Trump’s twitter attack, he saw his caucus fold in the face of popular opposition from both the left and the right. He is exposed as somebody unable to convince his people to follow his political advice, while Trump looks fearsome — not least because he is capable of coopting Democratic criticisms without being deemed treasonous.

Ryan’s caucus members know, in other words, where the power really lies, and it isn’t in the speaker’s office. And Ryan knows that as well.

My conclusion:

Most fundamentally, the message was a reminder to Republicans in Congress that they owe far more to Trump than Trump does to them — and that he can safely do them far more damage than they dare to do to him. That Congressional Republicans gave Trump such an easy opportunity shows how much they still have to learn about the shape of politics in the Trump era — or how confident they are that they can always offer their Speaker as a sacrifice if the winds begin to turn.

As for the Democrats, the lesson is that the GOP Congress is more exposed than Trump is. Their best chance of winning back a share of national power in 2018 will come from fracturing the fragile alliance between the two sides of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now we’ll see who learns to play by the new rules first.

I don’t highlight the role that ordinary citizens played in the fracas, but that is also important. Individual legislators got thousands of angry phone calls from constituents about the ethics vote, and that clearly was vital. That doesn’t really change my analysis, though, for two reasons.

First, we don’t know that only left-wing or Democratic-leaning voters were complaining. After all, liberal good-government groups weren’t the only ones expressing outrage; Judicial Watch also slammed the GOP Congress for its move. And the representatives in question are Republicans, most of whom represent conservative districts, so it makes sense that they would care more about hearing from constituents who could defenestrate them than from folks who would never vote for them in the first place. To an extent, then, the rapid public backlash against the House GOP mirrors or reflects the dynamic Trump’s rise in the first place, which was very much aimed against the GOP as it previously stood.

Second, it is entirely plausible that one reason Trump intervened against the House GOP is precisely because he saw or felt the public outrage. In other words: public pressure affected Trump before it could affect the House GOP directly. This is precisely what I mean by saying that if the Democrats want to score wins, they need to recognize that Trump and the GOP House can be easily separated — because Trump is much more interested in his own personal power and popularity than he is in either the success of the party or any particular policy outcomes.

Anyway, read the whole thing there.