Even before the new Congress was sworn in on Tuesday, House Republicans made it clear that they had no real intention of draining the Washington swamp. They voted in secret on Monday to gut the one quasi-independent office that investigates House ethics. President-elect Donald Trump, who ran on a promise to drain the swamp, didn’t demand that they stop — he merely asked them to wait awhile. And that they did.

Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia emerged as an architect of the G.O.P. miasmic agenda with his attack on the Office of Congressional Ethics. A rules change would have prevented the office, known as the O.C.E., from investigating potentially criminal allegations, allowed lawmakers on the House Ethics Committee to shut down any O.C.E. investigation and, for good measure, gagged the office’s staff members in their dealings with the news media. When the public learned about this plan, outraged constituents deluged House members with phone calls.

Mr. Trump’s response was something altogether different. He didn’t condemn these Republicans for defying and undermining his drain-the-swamp pledge. He asked them to address more urgent business first, like destroying health care reform and passing tax cuts for the rich. Indeed, while he was tweeting on Tuesday morning, Kellyanne Conway, the incoming counselor to the president, had already been on television supporting Mr. Goodlatte and his gang, saying House Republicans had a “mandate” to curb “overzealousness” over ethics.

For Paul Ryan, the attack on the ethics office was certainly a milestone: He hadn’t even been re-elected House speaker when he was rolled by his caucus. Afterward, his statement suggested he was more worried about how bad this fracas looks for him than about his members’ effort to undermine congressional accountability. The claim by Mr. Ryan and Mr. Goodlatte (who, hilariously, leads the House Judiciary Committee) that gutting the office would improve “due process” for accused lawmakers is a marvel of Orwellian newspeak. So is Mr. Goodlatte’s insistence that dismantling the O.C.E. “builds upon and strengthens” it.