Paul Singer and Jenny Ung

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Senate Ethics Committee released its annual report this week declaring that for the ninth straight year, it imposed no disciplinary sanctions against anyone in 2015. Since 2007, the committee has received 613 allegations of wrongdoing and has summarily dismissed more than 90% of them. Only 75 have had even a preliminary investigation.

The total of the committee's discipline during the nine-year period is a half-dozen letters the committee has written to senators saying, basically, "you should not have done that." The committee did not issue activity reports prior to 2007, and did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The committee's activity reports indicate that in nearly every case, allegations are dismissed because there are not enough facts to prove wrongdoing (13 of 55 cases last year) or there is no Senate rule governing the alleged activity (36 of 55 cases). In seven cases last year, the Ethics Committee carried out "preliminary inquiries;" five of those were dismissed as inadvertent or minor technical violations. None of those cases was made public by the committee.

These results raise "all kinds of red flags," said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center. "It begs credulity that there have been no ethics violations worthy of disciplinary sanction since 2007 in the entire Senate. The fact is the Senate Ethics Committee has become the 'dead letter' office."

The lack of public punishments may simply reflect that the committee has not found any violations that rise to that level, said Stanley Brand, an ethics lawyer who has advised the committee and also advised lawmakers under investigation. "You don't start out saying we have a quota of members of the Senate that we are going to prosecute," Brand said. "There has to be a probable cause for every investigation." Ethics watchdog groups "want every peccadillo to be investigated like a federal crime and I don't think that's the way it should work."

A coalition of government watchdogs, including the Campaign Legal Center, sent letters to Senate leaders in 2014 urging them to reform the committee and create an independent ethics office modeled after the House Office of Congressional Ethics, which reviews ethics allegations and makes recommendations to the House Ethics Committee for further action. OCE reports become public even if the Ethics Committee rules that there was no violation, which has made the office wildly unpopular among lawmakers.

The last time the Senate Ethics Committee issued any kind of public scolding was a May 2012 letter to then-Sen. Tom Coburn, saying that he should not have held an official meeting with Doug Hampton, a former aide to then-Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who had become a lobbyist but was still barred from lobbying the Senate. The incident was part of Ensign's messy affair with Hampton's wife; Coburn had intervened to counsel Hampton on his departure from Ensign's office and the committee concluded it should have known he was still under a lobbying ban. Ensign resigned while the Ethics Committee was investigating him.

"Senate Ethics has a reputation of being a black hole for allegations," said Jordan Libowitz of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Information tends to go into the committee and nothing comes out of it."

Libowitz said the committee tends to be "more interested in protecting the individual senators and staffers instead of the institution."

The committee serves both as the ethics cop and the ethics adviser to the Senate. In 2015, the Ethics Committee "handled approximately 10,265 telephone inquiries and 2,784 inquiries by email for ethics advice and guidance" and wrote 930 advisory letters on how to avoid conflicts of interest or improper gifts, according to the new activity report.

By comparison, from January 2013 through December 2014, the House Ethics Committee launched 53 investigations, created four subcommittees to probe specific matters and issued 19 "publicly disclosed resolutions" as well as 43 resolutions that were confidential, according to an activities report it issued a year ago.