Azeri Oil Money Got a Pass From This Ethics Committee

After criticism from President-elect Donald Trump, congressional Republicans backed down from their decision Tuesday to silence and subjugate the quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Assuming they stick to the reversal, that's fortunate -- even if not for the reasons Trump had in mind when he tweeted his dismay at the original plan. The OCE was a rare entity that exposed the goings-on in the Washington "swamp" that Trump promised to drain -- including the inner workings of some shady alliances that have undermined America's moral authority and standing as a global values arbiter.

One of the OCE's most high-profile investigations concerned Azerbaijan, a small, oil-rich post-Soviet nation that has more people recognized as prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International than Russia and Belarus combined. Azerbaijan is a hereditary dictatorship: President Ilham Aliyev succeeded his father in 2003 and has been in power ever since despite periodic rigged elections. It doesn't have a free press, and its economy is state-dominated; it's also involved in a festering conflict with neighboring Armenia over Nagorno Karabakh, a landlocked Armenian enclave handed to Azerbaijan by Stalin in 1923 but made autonomous. Armenia won the territory in 1994 after a protracted war and conflict has scarcely stopped since. Azeris consider Nagorno Karabakh a historic part of the country that's recognized by the international community as such.