Give credit where it's due: President-elect Donald Trump is changing the way Washington works – though not perhaps in the way most people understand that phrase. Typically that phrasing conveys the idea of toughening ethics standards in order to combat corruption and self-dealing. But in Trump's D.C. it's the near-opposite, with the emphasis on circumventing rather than bolstering such practices.

How else to explain the extraordinary rush to speed through Trump's cabinet of billionaires before basic due diligence on them has been completed? The Senate is scheduled to hold a spate of hearings this week – including five on Wednesday – but the Office of Government Ethics, which conducts the background checks on nominees and handles their disclosure paperwork, hasn't finished its investigations on most of them.

Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, or OGE, sent a letter to a pair of Democratic senators Friday in response to their inquiries about the process. He was candid in a way one does not expect from a Washington bureaucrat:

The announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me. This schedule has created undue pressure on OGE's staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews. More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings. I am not aware of any occasion in the four decades since OGE was established when the Senate held a confirmation hearing before the nomination had completed the ethics review process.

Shaub argues that the Ethics in Government Act (which is to say the law) requires that his agency certify nominees' financial disclosure reports before hearings are held; but, he added, "OGE has not received even initial draft financial disclosure reports for some of the nominees scheduled for hearings."

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This isn't a simple matter of paper-pushers and arbitrary deadlines. The agency doesn't just take a nominee's form and make sure the Ts are all crossed. Even under ordinary circumstances, as Shaub noted, the "financial disclosure process is complex" and "involves assisting the nominees to make complete and accurate disclosure of complex financial holdings and arrangements, identifying conflicts of interest uncovered through reviews of nominees' disclosures and developing comprehensive written ethics agreements that resolve all identified conflicts of interest." He adds that ordinarily his office vets candidates before they're even nominated – a practice with which Team Trump couldn't be bothered.

This is a basic bulwark, in other words, against conflicts of interest. But no more, apparently.

I get that Senate Republicans want to move Trump's nominees through expeditiously so he can have his team in place on day one. That's a laudable goal – but one which requires those same team members to do their part and, you know, actually fill out the damned forms.

It doesn't seem especially onerous to hold nominees and the Senate majority to a standard which includes the stipulation that "the Office of Government Ethics letter is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing." One would think that would be common sense to the point where it needn't even be said; nevertheless Republican leader Mitch McConnell listed it as one of eight "best practices" whose "fair and consistent application" he and his GOP colleagues would "insist" upon. But hey, that was 2009 and Democrats ran the show. That's the same Mitch McConnell who's now scheduling hearings without the ethics office certifications. Last decade's "best practices" are today's lost practices, apparently. (Schumer, in a masterful bit of trolling, tweeted Monday that he was sending McConnell's letter back to him with only names and dates changed.)

And there's a reason why then-McConnell described these things as best practices: Confirmation hearings are not simply shows but actually serve a substantive purpose – they're the fora in which senators do their constitutional advice-and-consent work and where the public learns about the incoming government. And the fact that due diligence investigations are incomplete puts the GOP's insistence on holding a hearing-palooza Wednesday into a different context.

The schedule was deliberately set up to minimize the news which could come from any one hearing by flooding the proverbial zone. (In addition to the hearings, there will be Obamacare repeal votes and Trump is supposed to have his first post-election press conference.) But the revelation that Senate Republicans don't care about basic ethics rules moves the hearing-fest from polarized gamesmanship to derogation of constitutional duty. And it raises the question of what McConnell and his colleagues think the nominees have to hide.

Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who has worked for GOP presidential candidates and Cabinet nominees, told The Washington Post that the push to hold hearings before the background checks are done is "unprecedented." He added: "This suggests that there has been a real breakdown between the transition and the Office of Government Ethics."

A breakdown is right. In November, Shaub was emailing Trump aides that "we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election." We know this thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request from MSNBC and the Madison Project. Shaub warned that nominees who don't get the standard help from his office might without even knowing it violate conflict-of-interest laws. "If we don't get involved early to prevent problems," he wrote, "we won't be able to help them after the fact."

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Of course, none of this should come as any surprise. Trump refused to release his tax returns during the campaign, breaking with decades of tradition. And since being elected he's given every indication that he has no interest in meaningfully divesting himself of his business while in office, perhaps because he confuses the fact that conflict-of-interest laws don't apply to the president with the idea that presidents cannot have conflicts of interest. Now he seems poised to test federal anti-nepotism laws by appointing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who brings his own set of conflict-of-interest problems, to a White House staff role. (Trump is reportedly contemplating hiring his daughter Ivanka as well.)

And if the top man is above ethics standards, why should they apply to anyone else? Most charitably, the animating impulse of Trump's Washington, as Jonathan Chait has pointed out, seems best summed up by conservative economist Lawrence Kudlow's breezy assertion that, "Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption." This may technically be true – they may not need to, but real life tells us they do anyway; and the chances of our becoming reacquainted with that lesson are only increased by the Senate's rush to confirm.

House Republicans, who were poised to loosen their own ethical strictures last week before public outcry shamed them into backing off, must be watching the Trump transition with jealous wonder. And the episode bodes poorly for anyone who hoped that a Congress anxious to reassert itself might serve as some sort of check on Trump. I never had high hopes in that regard and no one expects the GOP Congress to start picking fights, but to see them bending over backward to accommodate President Second-place is dismaying if not surprising. As Brian Beutler points at at The New Republic, the Senate's Cabinet jam tactics "carry real downside risks for Republicans, who will likely end up rubber-stamping cabinet officials who turn out to be corrupt or incompetent or both, and ultimately damage the administration and the party."